The Canadian Innovation Void - Is It Holding back The Economy?

A Nova Scotia Chronicle-Herald article starts off with a thought that is of concern to many of we Canadians in marketing.

THE BIG QUESTION in Canada is, why are businesses performing so poorly as innovators when compared to their American and many other foreign competitors?

They are? Well yes.

In the early 1990s, output per hour of working in the Canadian business sector was close to 85 per cent of the U.S. level.

It is now down to about 75 per cent of the U.S. level, reflecting differences in innovation, which comes from bringing on new products or services or finding better ways to do things.

The article goes on to say that much of the difference in innovation comes down to management. Canadian companies are less enterprising than their counterparts in the U.S. and in many companies in Europe. While the government is often blamed, it is rather that Canadian companies are more focused on cost cutting to improve profitability than on inventing new products and services to grow their businesses.

While cost cutting, American style tends toward restructuring resulting in a leaner, more agile and risk taking environment, in Canada, lean manufacturing is not on the radar for over 1/3^rd of all companies (as compared to only 18% of companies in the U.S. and Europe.)

So why is this? In my opinion, Canadian companies are very reliant on the Natural Resource Sector - the drill it, mine it, chop it mentality. This could be holding them back from innovating. To fully embrace a culture of innovation Canadian companies need to learn from their counterparts to the South and take more chances.

We need to take greater risks in manufacturing, in exporting, in business development. We need to restructure organizations and cut out the fat. While the United States model of wholesale elimination of levels of management may be too drastic for Canadians to consider, European models, particularly those in Germany and Scandinavia may have ideas that can be implemented effectively.

As we struggle with the concepts of lean manufacturing, risk taking and innovation, we fall behind countries who have adapted these concepts to their own particular culture and political environment. As we fall behind we become not only less competitive but also risk continuing to grow our economy.

Finding the right answer is vital to our future because without more innovation, and the higher productivity it brings, we will have a tough time sustaining a prosperous economy and a high quality of life.

Amen.

Innovation Inspired By Other Industries - When Existing Ideas Are New

Building an organization focused on innovation often requires realignment of priorities and focus on a new approach to doing business. Unfortunately in the quest to do something new and different, innovators often forgo looking at what's already out there for inspiration.

Innovation doesn't necessarily happen in a darkened room. Often it occurs when an old or existing idea in a different environment takes on new life.

A video that recently appeared in Martin Lindstrom's column in Ad Age online, Where to Find Inspiration for New Marketing Concepts- Watch Industries Other Than Your Own, discusses one way effective innovators find new ideas.

Pointing to an unusual exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art that electronically maps New York City's global telecommunications traffic, he notes that one of the best sources of new marketing ideas is in industries outside of your own.

Lindstrom goes on to discuss how the map of incoming and outgoing calls in NYC gives us a snapshot of where business activity is happening around the globe. This is, of course, of interest to other industries beyond telecommunications - such as the airline industry. An increasing number of calls to a locale means increased business there which requires more flights. By viewing the work of the telecommunications industry, airlines have a head start on developing new routes.

While the example Lindstrom gives borrows the marketing research conducted by one industry and applies it to another, there are countless ways to benefit from the successes and failures of other industries.

As I mentioned in a post Innovation: Old Often Becomes New, that appeared in Fast Company: originality is overrated. As successful marketers and innovators we know that the path from inspiration to effective execution contains many pitfalls, mistakes and miscalculations. That's why, in many cases, the most effective way to innovate is to recast an old idea in a new way.

By looking beyond your own industry, with which you surely are familiar, you bring added brain power to the search for inspiration. The quest for ideas for new products and services happens in all industries. Both success and failures in an industry not your own can provide inspiration for ideas that can work or work better in your industry.

One approach that I like to take is to look at an industry that is more progressive than your own. This may be one that is more consumer focused or more fashion forward or simply more consumer driven or less.

Retailers, often frustrated with inappropriate packaging or displays often guide potential vendors to manufacturers from another industry for ideas. This shortcut saves time and energy that industry-centric companies often waste trying to reinvent the wheel and frequently enables the innovative company to gain entry into new channels smoothly and quickly.

Technology companies, especially in the consumer hardware space, frequently hire designers and marketing folks from other industries to help them understand the needs of their target market. While early adopters are drawn to the technology, later on in the product adoption curve, consumers look more to fashion and "coolness", hence the need to "borrow" ideas from fashion industries.

Manufacturers selling to many small resellers and service providers do well to look at companies with similar channels of distribution both inside and outside the industry served. Often a change in the distribution landscape in one industry is the harbinger of a change in another.

Being truly innovative doesn't mean just coming up with new ideas. It means using all of the tools at one's disposal to come up with new, effective and executable ideas. Sometimes that means just looking at what already exists.

User-Generated Innovation - Nokia does it You Can Too!

Many people think of innovation as occurring when one genius, alone with his or her thoughts, suddenly leaps into the air with an, "A Ha!" and heads down the path to success. Most of those of us involved with innovation know that this is rarely the case.

In truth, innovation, as we mention in our book, happens in lots of different ways. Though coming up with a unique idea in that "light bulb" moment is the romanticized idea held of innovation, in fact, most good ideas and many of the great ones, result from obtaining input from a variety of different sources, including consumers.

Soliciting and then acting upon user input can not only produce new ideas it can make good ideas great ones. At Nokia, an experiment with opening up a new application, Sports Tracker, for user input turned into a whole new way of streamlining the product development process for the Finnish cell phone maker.

Sports Tracker, designed to benefit runners and cyclist, allowing them to use Nokia phones' GPS capability to capture workout data was downloaded by over one million users when a beta version was posted on Nokia's web site. What surprised Nokia and led to a new way of thinking about the innovation process was the sheer variety of people who downloaded the software - from paragliders to balloonists - and how they used it. Users, it turned out found hundreds of different uses for the software, uses well beyond those the developers had considered.

As a result, Nokia developers are realizing that aiming the application at amateur athletes was too narrow. They are thinking of rebranding the application as a kind of life-tracker.

Since Nokia launched their Beta Labs site, where Sports Tracker was featured as the first application, Tom Vilkarmo, manager of Nokia Beta Labs has a happy problem - managing all of the feedback generated by the over 1 million page views the site garners each month.

But, to Vlkarmo, his managing all of that feedback adds one more step to the process of getting consumer feedback to the software developers. Though he currently blogs about Nokia's new products,

Vilkamo's plan is to turn blogging responsibility over to software developers, so they have direct contact with customers. "Before, there were too many middlemen between developers and users," he says.

This is just one example of a company harnessing the power of the internet to create community, drive innovation and provide direct support to those responsible for innovation. While it's not uncommon for software companies to solicit key users or developers for beta testing, Nokia's strategy of encouraging anyone with an interest in the product, which, incidentally tends to be heavy users, led to more creative thinking, created a community of users and is currently breeding even more new product ideas.

An inventor sitting alone in a room or even discussing new ideas with like-minded colleagues is at a disadvantage when a whole world of ideas is just a mouse click away. Rather than worrying about theft of a good idea, true innovators should worry more about missing the great idea that soliciting user input can reveal.