Archive for category: Blog

The 4 Properties of Effective Business Experiments

Experiments Aren’t Just for Scientists, Use This Proven Tool to Improve Your Offerings

By Dr. Evans Baiya

Any business that is looking to launch new offerings, improve processes and solutions, or simply grow should be running experiments. There is an effective way to conduct experiments, and there are many not-so-effective ways. Throughout my career, I have been on both sides of that fence—once running hundreds of experiments in an attempt to prove that the product my team had created was right when other experiments were telling us it was not.

When you run experiments based on solutions, you have a tendency to think that if the experiment doesn’t produce the results you were hoping for, it’s a failure. That is a fallacy. There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only failed outcomes or failed hypotheses. Experiments cannot fail; they only teach you what to do the next time. Every experiment is an opportunity to learn and to design better experiments.

Experiments are a chance for incremental—or sometimes acute—learning. They give you the insight to make your product or service better. However, the truth that an experiment reveals can often be hard to swallow if ego is tied to the results. This, I’m convinced, is why more companies don’t adopt a culture of experimentation and learning.

With every new experiment you run, you get closer to a better offering, whether you are improving one that is already existing or developing a minimum viable business opportunity. The more experiments you do, the more you will develop increased knowledge, experience, and validation. Experiments are a chance to learn more about the feasibility of your solution and adjust it according to the results. The experiment itself is not your solution. It is what you learn through the experiment that leads you closer to your final solution.

There’s no way around it: if you want to develop an offering that is sustainable, you must run experiments. Chances are you have already run experiments by default to get where you are today. I say “by default” because much of what you do in business, including interactions with your customers, are essentially experiments. But when experiments are run without parameters, they take longer than they should, become costly and complicated, and don’t yield results. You may even miss the lessons that are offered if you’re not looking for them, and be doomed to repeat the default experiment until you do.

The trick is learning to run many experiments quickly. You can run a two-day experiment, a week-long experiment, a month-long experiment. It depends on the data you need to gather. But always run experiments with a clear purpose.

Don’t confuse a clear purpose with a perfect experiment. I’ve seen clients stall on running experiments because they want to design the perfect experiment. They want the experiment to answer all of their questions at once, so they begin to design it with many bells and whistles. One of the factors that discourages running experiments is making them too complex. Effective experiments can actually be quite simple. In fact, the combination of simple and fast often results in the best experiments. A sense of urgency is important when you are trying to accelerate the learning process. Remember that experimentation is not a one-time process. You are not trying to find your final solution the first time out. You are instead trying to learn as much as you can as you work toward the right solution.

An effective experiment includes these four elements:

Clear Purpose. An experiment without a clear purpose can easily lose direction. Simply completing the statement: I want to learn XXX so I can XXX helps you determine the intent of your experiment.

Clear Measurements. Determine what you will measure beforehand, keeping in mind that measurements may be quantitative or qualitative.

Clear Decision Criteria. After you outline the measurements you will collect, give yourself parameters. Determine the next decision you will make if your measurements are within a certain range. This allows you to have confidence in taking the next step—and knowing what that step will be.

Actionable Plan. Every experiment should have a plan that includes who will be involved, when it will start and end, where it will be conducted, and who will review the data collected. Without an actionable plan, it is easy to miss something or avoid taking action altogether.

To begin to conceptualize experiments, take a project and break it down to simple aspects you want to learn, to both reduce risk and improve your offering.  Another easy way to design an experiment is to identify 3-5 major questions you want to be answered and convert those questions into experiments. Start small, and start with practicality. Consider an experiment you could run this week. That is how you begin to build your experimenting muscle.

As you begin to design and execute experiments, you will find that you become much more experiment-minded and experiment-driven throughout the business. You will understand that you don’t have to go to market to prove solution viability. You can start engaging with your customers right now through small experiments before you launch your solution widely.

Dr. Evans Baiya is an internationally recognized and trusted guide to business leaders and innovators. Using his 6-stage process, he helps companies identify, define, develop, verify, commercialize, and scale their ideas. He is the co-author of the award-winning book, The Innovator’s Advantage and co-creator of The Innovator’s Advantage Academy, a detailed step-by-step innovation training. To connect with him, visit www.theinnovatorsadvantage.com.

Navigate the Storm Using Innovation and the Talents of Your Team

By Tanja Yardley

I have a bias to confess to.  The phrase “we are in this boat together” sparks an almost irrational irritability. While we are in this pandemic storm together, we are most certainly not in the same boat.   As leaders, we know instinctively that some of our team members are flailing around in a dinghy with multiple holes, barely holding themselves above the water line and bailing continuously.  Others are zooming around in a motorboat, enjoying the sea breeze and checking on all the other boats. Some are lucky enough to be cruising in a well-appointed yacht, enjoying umbrella drinks with loved ones and hoping that this quality time doesn’t end too quickly.  Times like these expose the gaps, the rocks, and the choppy seas, as well as the skill and resiliency of the sailors.  

Leading is difficult at the best of times, but now, more than ever, emotional intelligence and creativity will guide successful decision-making. As forward-thinking companies regroup and rechart their course post-pandemic, innovation creates opportunities to pivot in response to the headwind and gain momentum. According to Evans Baiya, co-author of The Innovator’s Advantage, innovation is an opportunity to create new value.   It’s a team effort that embraces a broad and diverse range of skillsets. It’s an opportunity to draw your team together in a meaningful way, bolstering the full range of vessels in the face of the stormy sea.  Innovation can be the lifeboat that brings your company safely to shore. 

Whether you are innovating in a time of crisis or a time of calm, the same principles apply:

 

1. Understand the skills, strengths and situational context of your team members.

 

 

Each of the six stages of successful innovation laid out in The Innovator’s Advantage framework requires a unique skillset.  

 

The Identify stage requires the sky watchers perched in the crow’s nest of the ship—team members with great futuristic and creative thinking skills, adept at looking at problems and identifying patterns while generating and gathering ideas.   

 

The Define stage is ideal for the navigator—a team member who excels at gathering data about the scope and scale of the problem to be solved or opportunity to be captured, while qualifying and ranking potential solutions against the criteria that will define success. The Define stage clarifies the problem to be solved and the solution to be tested, and culminates in a map of the journey for the team that will get the job done.

 

The Develop stage demands seasoned sailors—resilient self-starters, skilled at managing the projects, processes and people who will deliver the big-picture results; undaunted by the obstacles that present along the way. 

 

The Verify stage often falls to the ship’s engineer. It’s all about experimenting with your proposed solution(s), testing, tweaking systems, gathering feedback, failing forward and adjusting course where needed.

 

The Deploy stage is where the captain’s skill and strength at navigating the waters of implementation and change management will really shine.  Strong communication, team-building and emotional intelligence ensure that the oars are aligned in the water for maximum thrust.

 

The Scale stage often attracts the swashbuckling-explorer type.  Charismatic, confident, optimistic team members who engage others with their stories of storms surmounted and treasures found.  These individuals bring insights and opportunities to scale innovation beyond its original intent, finding new markets and options to diversify.

 

Innovation projects engage the full range of diverse skills and strengths of your team members around a meaningful common goal.  Managing this amongst a distributed team, many of whom will be working from home, may require a higher level of creativity and communication, but it’s worth it. Ensuring that each person is positioned in alignment with their skillset and unique vantage point will restore confidence and drive cadence. It’s a crucial step in helping people shift out of situational crisis thinking and into a more future-focused mindset. As Peter Drucker once said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”   

 

 

2. Decide TOGETHER what problem to solve  

 

 

Solving problems together generates momentum and a meaningful sense of purpose.  Skilled leaders can leverage this insight to bring teams together and stimulate deep, generative conversations about problems that need to be solved with and for your clients.  In a crisis situation, problems abound and are compounded by the fact that your customers’ needs are changing minute-by-minute.   What seemed important pre-pandemic may be completely off the table once the storm settles. This is where diversity can help you create a more robust and nuanced approach.  

 

Start by asking the right questions.

 

1. What are the jobs that our customers need to get done? What obstacles are getting in their way? What new value can we create in the process of helping them? 
2. Who is affected by these problems and what is the impact?
3. What capabilities do we have, or will we have to create, to address these challenges and solve these problems?
4. Is this a meaningful problem to solve, now and in the future? Why?

 

Ensure you are asking the right people. 

 

1. Brainstorming with your team is a great preliminary step, but it is important to reality-check your proposed solutions with your current and prospective customers early on to ensure that you are on the right track.
2. Where possible, embrace the option to co-create a solution with your customers that engages them in the process and allows them to experience the rewards of a problem well-solved. Not only does this ensure that the solution meets their needs, it also contributes powerfully to a sense of alliance and loyalty.  

 

Once you are clear on the problem you want to solve and the constituency of the Innovation Team, the structure of the innovation process lends itself well to collaboration at each stage. Customers can have an advisory role in identifying the scope of opportunity and the key features of the solution in the Identify-Define stages.  They can be invaluable in beta-testing and tweaking the design during the Develop-Verify experimentation phases.  If the solution lands well in the Deploy stage, they might take an active role in the Scale stage, bringing it to new customers or re-imagining how it can solve new problems.  

The old adage applies here: a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor. The beauty of a well-executed innovation project is in its ability to unite, bolster and strengthen your team while simultaneously differentiating and deepening relationships with key customers.    

Tanja Yardley is founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Wellspring, where she works across multiple industries with leaders, inventors and learning institutions to create innovation-focused, cross-functional leadership teams that thrive as a result of diversity and cross-pollination. She spent over a decade as a VP and National Healthcare Innovation Lead for Canada’s largest private healthcare company.  

 

During Crisis, Don’t Neglect Your Company’s Most Critical Asset: Ideas

By Dr. Evans Baiya

It has been said, the best way to find your way around a new location quickly is to ask for ideas. As many of us are working from “new locations,” ideas are more important than ever. What is the best way to manage those ideas? How do you continue to engage your employees so they give you the best ideas?

Ideas are critical for survival, especially during crisis. The goal is to survive smartly and position yourself for growth. One of the most important actions a company can take during times like this is to ask for ideas from all stakeholders, in order to make timely and impactful decisions.

How do you take advantage of idea generation in a remote environment? When people are thrown out of their normal routines, working remotely, and encountering business challenges, they typically come up with more ideas than usual. You need a way to tap into this resource.

Crisis represents a great opportunity for leaders to maximize their stakeholders’ ideation abilities. Yet many leaders do an insufficient job of asking for ideas during a crisis. Those who tap into their organization’s idea factories—a system that allows for the constant generation of ideas—do better surviving crisis than those who do not.

Are you losing ideas?

I hear from frustrated leaders all the time, who tell me that they and their teams seem to come up with plenty of ideas during meetings and discussions, but they seem to lose most of them. You can’t take advantage of ideas if you don’t have them.

One of the main challenges of idea management is meaningfully capturing ideas. It sounds strange, but to test the theory, where are the ideas you generated from your last Zoom or teleconference?

We lose ideas in a variety of places, but even more so when working remotely. They are lost in digital meetings, post-it notes, emails, chatrooms, chatboxes, personal notebooks, online surveys, SMS messages, social media, web forums, musings and more.

So where are your team’s lost ideas? Here are three proven ways to collect and manage ideas:

Create an idea bank. Ideas are like money. You need to know where and how much you have at all times. You must allow your employees to access the bank, to deposit or to remove ideas. It must be easy for them to not only give you ideas, but also to see how their ideas are used.

Share intentionally. When you share ideas, use a system so you can track them and follow up. Make sure everyone is familiar with the system and can use it to share their thoughts, both individually and corporately. The more the avenues for sharing ideas, the higher the likelihood that they become lost, so sticking to a single method is best.

Encourage follow up. Most people do not ask for or receive follow up on their ideas. They give an idea to a leader, but never know how the idea was put to use, if at all. How did the idea get improved? How did it inspire other ideas? Or why wasn’t it chosen? Without this feedback, you lose out on opportunities for employees to help you come up with another idea that is better. You also lose out on employee engagement and additional ideas. If they feel that nothing was done with their original idea, they won’t be inspired to give another.

 

Dr. Evans Baiya is an internationally recognized and trusted guide to business leaders and innovators. Using his six-stage process, he helps the businesses identify, define, develop, verify, commercialize, and scale ideas. He is the co-author of the award-winning book, The Innovator’s Advantage and co-creator of The Innovator’s Advantage Academy, a detailed step-by-step innovation training for innovators and business leaders. Learn more at www.theinnovatorsadvantage.com.

Finding Opportunity in Times of Worry

By Dr. Evans Baiya

We can all agree that we are facing challenging times. COVID-19 and public precautions to slow the spread of it have left businesses in a space full of unknowns. And for many people, unknowns equal worry. It is natural for leaders (all people in fact) to feel overwhelmed during moments of crisis, especially crisis that is unpredictable and with many factors they cannot control.

Yet there is possibility, even in times of uncertainty. In times like these, we encourage leaders to work through a very simple model that helps to identify priorities and define proper resolutions within those priorities, which ultimately leads to successful outcomes. It is the Worry-Opportunity-Barrier Model. 

Effective leaders embrace the mindset that crises are guaranteed, but how you deal with a crisis is an integral part of leadership. Ultimately, great leaders learn through crisis. The situation either gets better or it gets worse, based on how you handle the most stressful moments. Every crisis brings with it some stressors. It is common for leaders, especially those who feel the added weight of responsibility on their shoulders, to worry. But you cannot worry yourself out of a crisis!

A clear head and an engaged heart are necessary to develop crisis-negotiating ideas, so you must identify your concerns to clear your thoughts. It’s not always about wisdom. Instead, the solution begins with emotional intelligence (EQ). During challenging times, EQ is much greater than IQ.

The bottom line is, never waste a crisis. Each crisis brings an opportunity for something or someone. If you can prepare yourself, embrace the situation, and understand the worry. Here are the steps of the Model: 

Step 1: Identify Your Worries

What are you worried about as a leader? Make a list of all your worries, no matter how great or small. Without filtering yourself, write everything down and be honest. Without doing this, you will not be able to get your head clear. Worry can be a cause or a symptom of a problem. Take a few moments to diagnose each worry, but this is not the time to overcomplicate. Deciding if the worry is a cause of a symptom does not need to be complex; it just needs to be clear.

Who should be involved in this process? As a business leader, it starts with you, but always seek assistance and collaboration with trusted team members to make sure you have chosen the right opportunity. Ideally you have structured your business in such a way that the people around you understand the challenges you might be facing and can offer sage advice. 

Step 2: Flip the Switch

Now that you have identified your worries and the underlying problems, flip the switch: Ask yourself, what opportunity does this worry bring? For every worry there is an opportunity if you just view it differently. Of each worry, ask yourself, “What if we did this?” Crate a list of potential resolutions and rank them based on their ability to address the issue at hand.

For example, if you have identified layoffs as a worry, the layoffs are actually the decision. The real worry at the root is that you are running low on cash to make payroll.

So what are the opportunities that brings? As you look for opportunities to reduce payroll, maybe the solutions you brainstorm are temporary delays in payment of salary, employees working fewer hours, restructuring existing loans to cover payroll, getting assistance from the government or investors, and/or long–term restructuring of the business so you have more cash. This provides an opportunity to discuss these issues and to do something better in the long run.

In that space between worry and opportunity you have to make a decision. Think about a decision that you can execute in the next 60 days and focus on that.

Step 3: Identify the Barriers

Now that you have made a decision, you need to think through the barriers to success. What what will hinder you from getting the results you are looking for? Make a list of the barriers and identify simple tools that will help you achieve success. If you are not sure of the tool, identify a person who might have experience with this situation or might help you find a tool.

In the case of our example, you may choose to reduced the work week to 30 hours. The barriers may be that you don’t know exactly how to communicate this to employees, you may not have the systems in place to manage a 30-hour work week, you may need a new method for tracking time, you may need to adjust accounting, you may need to revise your workflow, etc. You will need a system to support the decision you have made. Keep in mind that it doesn’t need to be a perfect system, just a method you can begin to put in place now.

And remember: whatever comes out of this crisis will allow you to position your organization for long-term success.

If you would like to learn more about this model, and receive a copy of the Worry-Opportunity-Barrier canvas, contact evans@price-associates.com.

Focus on Value- Creating Investments

By Dr. Evans Baiya

One of the challenges for growing a company is knowing exactly where to focus your investment, time and resources. When you introduce a new value (innovation) to the market, there are many processes you must have in place such as sales, marketing, delivery, and of course financial processes. These all require investment in the form of money, people, effort and research.

One of the biggest mistakes that companies make is to try to invest in all of these processes right away. Remember, to invest in an operational system requires a lot of resources. It takes up the leader’s time. This is time you should be spending on delivering increased value to customers. It is impossible for an entrepreneur to do everything early on, so the tendency is to have a bulky budget and to hire people to help you do all these things. This leads to a variety of issues: getting into early debt, promising features to potential customers that you cannot deliver, even getting paid but losing money. This can be a fundamental problem.

Organizational bulkiness is a symptom of lack of clarity about what and when you need to deliver to your customer. It is not a value problem. Therefore, as an entrepreneur you must have clear priorities around value delivery, and invest only in those elements of the business that are absolute requirements to deliver that value at the right time to the right customers in a way that is repeatable.

After developing excellence, then you can come back and create the rest of the systems. You must generate agility in your organization early on with the right mindset. It is not just about being lean. Lean is over emphasized. It is about the economics of your attention and money.

The economics of attention are critical because the currency of leadership is attention. All implementation of systems and processes requires the leader’s time, efforts, leadership, attention and money. You alone cannot pay the required attention to all of these bulky systems in your organization. If you are doing it all, nothing will work out very well. You have to take your attention and economize it. There is often too much focus on processes and methodologies, and too little emphasis on managing the attention of entrepreneurs and leaders.

All of this leads to competing priorities. When you have too many competing priorities, one of the easiest priorities to neglect is value for the customer. If the leader does not pay enough attention to the whole ecosystem, then there is nothing to sell. You will kill the traction and growth of your business by losing focus on value delivery.

This is why I advise against venture capital and loans. A bulky company detracts from value. When you start, the focus should be on value delivery.

Let’s say you are going to deliver a new product; for example, a new type of yogurt. A temptation is to go buy expensive machines to make it, a large branded truck to deliver it, a sales team to sell it and even an accounting department to handle all of the money that is going to roll in. All of these are necessary, but if you took all of these and invested in them as a startup, you would need loans or investors. Instead, focus only on what is required to deliver and develop the right product. Identify a small population that wants your product every day, and develop a methodology for delivering it to them. You will be able to create revenue and ultimately validate your business model.

The next thing is to expand your niche market a little bit more, which means you can now hire a few employees to create the same amount of yogurt. You don’t need to develop a marketing strategy until you are ready to sell it in larger, unknown markets. As an entrepreneur, you need to learn that your business growth has a lifecycle. I encourage you to grow aggressively, but to grow with focus.

Here are three ways to focus on value-creating investments:

1. Identify where your business is at today and where you need to go next.

2. Identify the investments are you planning on that you could live without for some time.

3. Define which part of your business you can grow aggressively with your current resources to get more revenue.

Dr. Evans Baiya is an innovation, technology and business strategist. He is the co-author of The Innovator’s Advantage and creator of the Innovator’s Advantage Academy. To learn more about Value, send an email to info@theinnovatorsadvantage.com.

Are We Solving the Right Problem?

By David Quinlan

Imagine an iceberg floating in the middle of the sea. Above the surface sits the impressive tip and rugged edges. What you do not see is what rests below the surface – a massive glacier with peaks and valleys and mass that comprises 90 percent of the entire body.

Defining a problem is like an iceberg. Many organizations make the mistake of trying to fix what they can see above the surface and ignore the root of a problem that sits below the surface.

Just like an iceberg, the deeper we go into the world of innovation, the more we discover. And as leaders, it’s our job to find the truth and identify a problem for what it really is versus what we think it is.

Sounds deep, but this simple truth has become a guiding principle for the Innovators Academy cohort at Better Business Bureau Northwest + Pacific (BBB NW+P). Five months into the academy, our teams have generated more than 5,000 ideas and uncovered nearly $1 million in waste, inefficiencies and duplicated processes. Some ideas are above the surface and directly within eyeshot, and just like the iceberg suggests, much of it is not.

At this pivotal stage of innovation, we as a cohort now change our focus from identifying a problem to defining it.

Define, define, define
So how does Innovators Academy recommend you define a problem beyond just pointing out obvious symptoms?1) Continue to ask questions. 2. Look at problems differently. 3) Accept the fact that no single problem exists in isolation. Here’s how that looks for our cohort: During the define phase, our teams used a 7-step process to help generate, evaluate and prioritize a problem opportunity facing the organization. We then deployed our teams to go back out and talk with customers, employees and users to help us define the problem and ask whether it’s worth solving. How we answer that question will depend on what we uncover and whether the issue is simply at the tip of the iceberg or manifesting into something bigger below the surface.

Innovation is an economy
Innovation is an economy, and ideas are currency. As soon as you run out of currency, the economy fails. We talked about this in our last blog – on how we as an organization need to continue to ideate. The same holds true during the define stage of innovation. Utilizing different tools and data sets, the ideas we are now generating are hyper-focused on solving core problem opportunities.
This allows us to formulate a solution structure and ultimately a business case. Without nerding out too much, this process is lengthy and requires ideating, defining vision, creating a strategy and outlining detailed delivery methods. The goal? To still churn out ideas or currency, create value and come up with a solution to a high impact and larger problem.

Value creation starts with structure
For you project managers out there – where would we be without processes? As noted in the Innovators Advantage, there are several processes and tools to help us through this journey. Without them, innovation would not be sustainable.
Evans Baiya, author and business consultant who is leading the academy, describes the innovation journey as a science. On one hand, you have unpredictable and opportunistic ideas that may sound off the wall or even unrealistic. On the other hand, you need disciplined and effective processes to vet ideas and define problems. And while it sounds simple on paper, simple isn’t easy – nor is finding the sweet spot.
Evans explains that 35%-45% of businesses fail when it comes to innovation because it is unable to effectively transition between the different stages. Set processes and structure prevents that failure from happening.

Let’s recap
·BBBNW+P enters the second stage of innovation: Define.
·Treat problems like a symptom and work to find the real root cause.
·Problems exist in isolation.
·Value creation starts with structure.
·Innovation is science.

Remember, innovation is creating value. So, when we solve problems, ideate and build in structure, we are creating value.

BBB NW+P has a long way to go down the innovators’ journey. Today we are at a defining moment transitioning from one stage to the next and tackling real problems that ultimately could affect the entire organization.

When will we get there? Find out next time!

Why Changing the Culture Helps Businesses Innovate

By David Quinlan

If there is one takeaway from my journey into the world of innovation, it’s that truly successful innovation requires courage and the willingness to let go of uncertainty.

Welcome back to the Innovators Academy – a behind-the-scenes, unscripted backstory of what it means to be innovative and how an organization like Better Business Bureau can make it happen. For the past month our cohort had two jobs – ideate and identify waste.

And by waste, I mean duplicated processes, inefficiencies and bottlenecks – the processes that plague instead of propel good intentions. For our team of innovators, waste was surprisingly not hard to find, and the solutions on how to correct them came pouring in.

“We couldn’t write ideas down fast enough,” one innovator described.

Over the course of four full weeks, Better Business Bureau Northwest + Pacific collected more than 1,000 ideas and uncovered nearly a half-million dollars of waste; that’s more than an idea an hour and $10 for every minute that month.

Change the mind, change the game

I mean, don’t get me wrong – generating a thousand ideas and uncovering areas of waste is a huge feat, but taking it to the next level will be even more challenging.

It will require a change in mindset.

“If we’re not willing to make a change – then nothing will get done,” explained Ron Price, a business advisor and executive coach.

Let’s face it – ideas are personal and exploring them without judgment is crucial. We faced this issue when the cohort went back into the organization to collaborate and collect ideas. At first some people were reluctant to participate – questioning the purpose and fearing rejection.

But overtime people put aside the negativity and began to think creatively, understanding the fact that we can’t always solve problems with logic.

By the end there was a paradigm shift, and the mindset began to change. Most notably – some of the best collaboration came from an unlikely person eventually spurring creativity and value.

Who’s got an idea?

As noted in the Innovators Advantage, ideas are the cornerstone of innovation. The more ideas we generate, the more successful we will be. We fail when we run out of ideas.

Plastered on the walls across our multiple offices you’ll find giant strips of paper with people’s ideas and suggestions on how to make BBB better. Everyone is encouraged to write down their thoughts without judgment. Some groups in our cohort even held lunches and bribed people with free pizza to get them to participate and ideate.

I know, I know…. this all sounds a bit chaotic. Rapid-fire idea collecting that does not necessarily solve a specific problem or task. Well, that’s on purpose. During this stage of innovation, idea quantity matters just as much quality. It’s an important first step in changing the culture by letting everyone in the organization know that all ideas are welcome!

It’s the next step when we really start to narrow in.

Scamper anyone?

So here we are with all these ideas – including some really off the wall ones – wondering what in the world do we do now. Over the course of the next 30 days, our cohort is tasked to narrow down the idea pool of 1,000 and develop three challenge statements to bring back to the organization and our customers.

The goal is to start asking the “right” questions around each challenge statement to help us come up with alternative ideas. Basically – come up with more ideas around solving a specific problem. That’s where Scamper comes in.

And no, I’m not talking about adorable baby animals – instead I’m referencing a model developed in 1971 by a real smart guy named Bob Eberle. The SCAMPER Model is part of the design process that helps us ask different questions around the same problem.

I’ll let you know how that goes after the innovators meet in person later this month; in the meantime check out the SCAMPER Model to learn more.

Let’s Recap

In summary – innovation starts with a change of mindset. Collect as many ideas as you can, build trust within your organization and then narrow your focus.

– Ideas are personal; push judgment aside
– The more ideas generated, the more successful we will be as innovators
– To generate ideas we need to ask the right questions
– SCAMPER to your heart’s delight
– The innovation journey has only just begun for those of us at BBB. With the goal of creating new value for our organization and customers, our team of innovators is passionate to make it happen.

Where it takes us is anyone’s guess.

Until next time – keep innovating and keep disrupting.

Launching a Business? Start with Value

By Dr. Evans Baiya

The single most important mandate of innovation is to create new value. Similarly, one of the mandates of entrepreneurialism is to deliver value. Yet, innovation and entrepreneurialism are not necessarily the same.

As a matter of fact, they are two different subject areas that require distinctive mindsets, skills, passions and behaviors. One of the biggest limiting-beliefs is that if we have the idea (the innovation), we must also be entrepreneurs. This is incorrect value thinking. In fact, very few people play both roles well because they require different things. Therefore, you must separate the two, and evaluate your talents against those needed to be a successful innovator or a successful entrepreneur. After doing this, you can begin to identify and spend your time where you perform best.

The entrepreneur may see the problem, but he may not have identified the way to solve it: the innovation. Or he may see the problem and know how to solve it, but not how to deliver that solution. During delivery is where innovation comes into play. At the end of the day, how well you solve a problem and how well you deliver on the solution defines the value you will create.

Whether you are an innovator or an entrepreneur, you exist because there is a problem or opportunity that, if solved, produces satisfaction for a specific population. Your customers are the people who accept the solutions and are willing to pay for them. With that in mind, you cannot say you have customers if they do not accept (and adopt) the solution you have provided.

This is the fundamental problem for entrepreneurs: We have very creative innovators coming up with solutions every day, but those solutions are not serving potential populations and are not adopted. This is because we do a poor job of understanding the customers and the contexts of their decision-making everyday. You might create the solution, but at the end of the day the customer identifies and defines the value.

Value is demonstrated in five ways:

Value of Convenience
You create convenience when your solution makes your customers’ lives easier, whether it is opening a store close to their home, streamlining delivery service for items they want to send or receive, or combining one product with another.

Value of Function
You create functional value, for example, when you provide a solution that transforms a manual labor task into one that can be automated. The value occurs when a task that used to take five hours now takes a few minutes, or when a job that used to require full attention now requires only supervision.

Value of Form/Design
You create value in form or design when you take a complex problem and make it easy to understand and solve. For example, an architect takes your ideas and creates a blueprint, or a consultant creates a coaching program that is designed to achieve your goals.

Value of Economy
You create economic value when you are able to offer a better price or a superior value for goods or services that are already on the market. For example, distributing a product or service in a way that makes it available for retailers and other value chain players.

Value of Social
You create social value when your solution has impact on individual people or on society as a whole. This can take many forms, such as aiding underprivileged people, improving the environment, or even helping leaders amplify their positive influence and reach.

Creating sustainable organizations doesn’t start with financials and big economic goals. It doesn’t even start with operational plans. It starts with a clear definition and identification of the value you are going to provide. If your value equation is never designed, you are guaranteed to have problems developing the right customer base and likely never get returns.

Ask yourself this question: What value are you presenting? Based on that answer, determine what should you create and who should help you create it?

The temptation is to try to establish and sell all five values to your target population. You don’t need them all; you only need one. In fact, your company will not necessarily be stronger if you have all five. We advise all entrepreneurs to start with one because it takes a while to get scalable adoption of anything. It takes learning and investment to be successful in delivering more than one value. The truth is most of your customers do not care about multiple value dimensions if the main value you create is strong enough. Every customer cares about one value as primary and the rest as secondary. You should concentrate on what your target population values most.

If you are starting a new business, you should take the following three actions:
1. Identify yourself: Are you an innovator or an entrepreneur?
2. Identify a clear problem that your target customers have that, if solved, they are willing to pay for if resolved.
3. Identify the right message and positioning of the value you are providing so it is clear and your target customers can easily make a decision to adopt your solution.

Dr. Evans Baiya is an innovation, technology and business strategist. He is the co-author of The Innovator’s Advantage and creator of the Innovator’s Advantage Academy. To learn more about Value, send an email to info@theinnovatorsadvantage.com.

Creating A Culture of Innovation

By David Quinlan

A personal journey into the world of innovation and what it might mean for your business.

Few things can be scarier than challenging ourselves and our preconceived notions. Yet, fewer things can be more rewarding.

This is my behind the scenes, unscripted back story of how I challenged myself and staff. We tore down our preconceived notions and learned what it means to be innovative and how even a 107-year-old organization like BBB can make it happen.

Trust me, I get it. I’ve found myself in numerous situations where I felt like a fish out of water, grappling with an abstract idea or concept. It’s uncomfortable – especially if you’re a process freak like me!

So, when my organization, BBB Northwest + Pacific, moved forward with an outside the box approach to tackling innovation – I wasn’t convinced. Where’s the market research? Who’s going to be our PM? Where’s the Gannt Chart??

Calm down David! We’re not creating a Trello board – we’re innovating!

This is a blog post about my journey into the world of innovation and enrollment in the Innovators Academy (IA) led by a team of internationally recognized business advisers who specialize in a creative and systematic approach to business.

We are innovators
I assure you my cohort felt little out of place when we first met. Twenty people from our organization were selected to join this first team of the IA. The cohort included board members, managers, executives, new employees, and a mix of different teams across the organization inside BBB.

It is day one of a two-day session. The first of many in-person meetings that will stretch over the course of twelve months. Packed into a conference room at the Boise Hilton Garden Inn – everyone looked nervously around, curious as to what was about to happen. Dale Dixon, BBB’s Chief Innovation Officer, kicked things off by introducing Evans Baiya – a consultant, innovator, author, speaker and our boss for the duration of this journey.

“We are about to disrupt ourselves,” Evans told us. “We are going to create a culture of collaboration and all of you are going to play a big part in it.”

Okay, this sounds really intriguing. But disrupt us how? And what does he mean by innovation?

I’ll unpack the first question later – but the best way to describe innovation is this simple formula:

Innovation = Value Created
Innovation can take on many shapes and sizes, but if done correctly it can build organizations by creating revenue, growing its brand, attracting talent and most importantly providing value to the customer.

Think of Moore’s Law and how the world of computing changes every 18-months making what was once a new device obsolete. Organizations need to look at innovation the same way. If we don’t look ahead, we will not be able to adapt and change. If that happens, we don’t have a chance.

Creating value
The IA team is here to create value. That’s our one job over the next year and it’s up to this group of innovators to lead the way by training, practicing, and experimenting with innovation. It will be our job to identify, develop, and scale ideas that create value for our customers. We must have a customer voice in everything we do.

I think of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, when he holds his leadership meetings and always leaves one chair empty to represent the customer. I thought that was so powerful because how often do we as business leaders assume, we have all the answers? I remember a mentor of mine once asked me, “if your organization dies today – who’s going to miss you?” It better be your customers!

There are five types of value that we define at IA.
1.Convenience
2.Function
3.Form/Design
4.Economic
5.Social

Each one raises questions that organizations need to answer. For example: What do customers think of value? How does value help us get a job done? What are people willing to pay? How can we make money and are there any social gains? However, probably the most important type of value to include, is people. We cannot underestimate the value of people.

It’s a powerful statement, but it makes perfect sense. Valuing people means we know how to position them for success and aligning them with their strengths. That will lead to innovation. To get there, however, we are going to have to collaborate and disrupt. Challenge each other as a team. Collect data. Listen to feedback. Never assume. Solve problems together. After all, innovation always circles back to how well we collaborate – especially when you collaborate with an unlikely person.

Stages of innovation
Did you know that 83% of US companies under $300 M in revenue do not successfully innovate? That’s because they never had to innovate. When I heard that, I thought of Kodak and Sears. Two powerhouse brands that quickly fell behind.
So now that we’ve defined what it means to innovate and how collaboration plays an instrumental part- it’s time for us to understand the different stages of innovation. The Innovators Advantage breaks it up into two different buckets – front end innovation and back end innovation.

Front End Innovation
•Identify
•Define
•Develop

Back End Innovation
•Verify
•Deploy
•Scale

Each stage has different objectives, goals, and activities that allow us to come up with a solution, develop it into a product and eventually deploy to our customers. This is a critical process and powerful tool in how we identify an opportunity and execute on a goal. It’s at the core of IA – a continuum of selecting, refining, and creating outcomes.
(Read Innovator’s Advantage to see the full context: theinnovatorsadvantage.com)

Creative vs. innovative
Being creative is not the same thing as being innovative. Creativity is a driver for innovation. It helps get us there. Creativity is thinking up new things, while innovation is doing new things.

How many ideas can you come up with that have been super successful on their own? Most innovations are built off another idea, but with disruptive impact. This is easier said than done considering the number of barriers there are preventing individuals / organizations from reaching that point.

Four P’s of Innovation
The Innovator’s Advantage describes two categories of innovation: incremental and disruptive. I touched on both earlier, but incremental refers to building off something that already exists while disruptive is considered radical and a breakthrough innovation.

Taking innovation one step deeper – there are subcategories or types innovation, which impacts a specific part of the organization. Innovators Advantage identifies four.
1.Product Innovation
2.Process Innovation
3.Position Innovation
4.Paradigm Innovation

Being that the BBB is a multi-sided organization with different customer segments, defining the different types of innovations can be challenging. It will be up to this 20-person team to help lead that discussion across the organization and to our customers.

Okay, let’s recap

•Better Business Bureau Northwest + Pacific is trying to disrupt itself to create new value for its customers.
•A team of innovators has been selected to help collaborate and lead by undergoing a challenging, one-year innovation academy.
•Innovation equals value created.
•There are different types of innovations that impact all aspects of an organization.
•Never underestimate the people value! Positioning people to use their strengths will lead to greater success and innovation.

I really encourage you to check out the book The Innovators Advantage by Ron Price and Evans Baiya. It’s at the core of what we are trying to do as an organization. While we are only one-session in, our team of innovators has been challenged in creating new value for BBB that our current and future customers will need to help them be successful.

Let’s do this!
Be sure to subscribe to BBB Torch Talk for more content like this.

What Leaders Should Know About Innovation

By Ron Price

These days you hear and read a lot about innovation. It’s the common buzzword and there are constantly new articles and blogs written about it, but most of it is simply a rehashing of what has been written in the past. There’s very little new thought going into innovation, which is ironic if you think about it.

This is part of the reason Dr. Evans Baiya and I decided to write The Innovator’s Advantage. We wanted to share with leaders the link between innovation and people that we discovered through our work in innovation with our clients..

For effective leadership, innovation is not an option. Successful innovation requires leaders to have equal amounts of dedication to the process and new ways of thinking about people.

Innovate All the Time
Most leaders look at innovation as creating something new. This is not always the case. What is universal about innovation is that is about creating new value. And the “oxygen” of all innovation is ideas. For organizations to consistently innovate, they must learn how to manage these ideas. In our work, we have guided clients to manage ideas through three mechanisms: idea factories, idea banks, and idea portfolios.

In order for companies to truly benefit from innovation, it should be proactive. The principles of innovation are similar to those around change management and growth. When anticipated or triggered as the result of a considered choice, there is a much greater chance of success. I often think of the metaphor of riding the front of the wave instead of falling behind, then trying to catch up.

In our book, we outline a clear framework and the psychology for what makes innovation really work. There are distinct tasks needed for any successful innovation, and we group those tasks into the Six Stages of Innovation. It all begins with identifying new opportunities and problems that need to be solved.

It Starts with a Problem-Opportunity
There is a specific way to identify and clarify a problem-opportunity statement. It is often difficult to see what the real problem is because we get distracted by the symptoms instead of the core problem. It takes practice and critical thinking skills to bring clarity to a core problem-opportunity. This is one of the tools that The Innovator’s Advantage provides.

The Six Stages & Assessing Your Team
Identifying the problem-opportunity is only the first stage; each stage has a different set of outcomes, tools, methods, and skills that create success. This is why we say that innovation is really six jobs: Identify, Define, Develop, Verify, Deploy and Scale.

Too often, people only equate innovation with creativity, not realizing that there are many stages for any successful innovation. Because of these various stages, we need people with a wide variety of talents, skills, motivations and interests assigned where they can make a valuable contribution.

The emerging science around talent reveals that no one is going to be able to perform at a superior level in all six stages. One of the big ideas in our book is that you can assess your team members to find out where they best fit, where they will enjoy the work, and where their contributions will count most. Not only that, but with training, team members can enhance their abilities in the stages where they are the best fit.

Not a Quick-fix
Leaders must lead their people into innovation by making a commitment to the time and resources required to learn how to function at an entirely new level. Innovation is not a quick fix; it’s not a weekend retreat that suddenly turns you into an innovative organization. Innovation is a much more rigorous practice, as is anything that is worth achieving.

Innovation is for Everyone and Everyone Can be an Innovator
We routinely encounter leaders who say, “I can’t afford to innovate because I’m a small company.” But innovation doesn’t have to consume inordinate amounts of time and money, especially once you understand the process and how to engage people in the stages where they are most apt to excel.

Innovation is a commitment to understanding and implementing a set of disciplines, processes and a deep understanding of how and where each person on your team can contribute. It is something that anybody can execute. All leaders can be champions for innovation in their organizations.

Ron Price is the co-author of The Innovator’s Advantage. To talk with him about innovation at your organization, email ron@price-associates.com.