Effective Innovation Tools

23 Oct 06

If you had a substantial sum of money, say a million dollars, to invest in improving your company’s innovation performance, where would that money go?

Based on some of the early results from our Babson POINTT Survey, I’d put it into improving a company’s ability to develop early product and service prototypes, such as storyboards of customer experiences. 

Stanford’s iMenu storyboard prototype, 2004

This approach turned out to be in widespread use -- 62 percent of the organizations surveyed reported some experience with it, and 20 percent reported extensive use.    

Early prototyping tools also had a very high “enthusiasm ratio” – the ratio of exceeded expectations to disappointments.  The results of using these approaches exceeded expectations in about 15 percent of all organizations, while disappointing only about 4 percent of the organizations that tried it – an “enthusiasm ratio” of about 3.4.

This is the kind of new information that’s coming from some of the work we’ve been doing recently at the ICE Center.  Over the last month, Jim Wilson, a senior researcher at the ICE center, has been running a survey that we call the Preview of Innovation Tools and Trends, or POINTT. Over 400 people, principally Babson Alumni, have patiently answered our questions about their familiarity with a set of 16 new tools and 14 trends which may have an impact on corporate innovation performance.   Over the course of the next several months, I’ll occasionally be discussing what we’re learning in these Updates.

Not all of the 16 tools were received enthusiastically.  For example, employee suggestion programs got many negative reviews.   Fifty percent of our survey reported having used employee suggestion programs for innovation, but there were more people who had had a bad experience with them (about 6 percent) than there were those where results had exceeded expectations (about 4 percent).  Overall, the “enthusiasm ratio” was about  0.71. 

This gives us a better understanding of a comment made by a recent executive program participant.  He wrote in one of the feedback forms:

“Why are you talking about employee suggestion programs?  These are outdated and often counterproductive.”

Aerospace Industry Executive, 2005

In fact, the seven most-frequently used tools had wide variations in their reported success rates. 

Usage and Enthusiasm don’t move together

The chart above lists the seven most used innovation tools, ranked by the extensiveness of use.  The red line tracks the “enthusiasm ratio” for each of these tools. 

For both employee suggestion programs and internet discussion groups, detractors exceeded enthusiastic supporters.   For University Alliances, the ratio was about 1.0 – an equal number of enthusiasts and detractors.  

For tools like early prototyping or licensing across companies, on the other hand, there were almost four times as many enthusiastic supporters as there were detractors.  If you want to improve innovation performance, these two seem like good bets.

Of course, as folks who have worked in a number of different kinds of organizations will tell you, what works well in one place may be a failure in another.   We might be able to refine some of these broad conclusions to see whether the “enthusiasm ratio” differs between high growth and low growth companies, for example.  

Stay tuned for some early answers to these questions … and thanks to the people who participated in the POINTT survey for giving us new insights into innovation effectiveness.

More Information

1. Drop me a note if you’re interested in looking at the spreadsheets which I use to come to some of these conclusions, and I’ll send them along.

2. The Stanford iMenu project has a number of storyboard prototype examples.

3. There are some new approaches to employee suggestion programs that are generating enthusiasm from their users.  Check out BrainBank, for example, a Canadian company that has a web-based approach to employee suggestions.

4. We’ll be discussing the findings of our POINTT Survey in more detail at our upcoming Idea-to-Profit Summit at Babson on November 9^th and 10^th.  For more information, drop Evelyn Lager a note by clicking here, or go to registration at our website: http://www3.babson.edu/Bee/research/ice/ideatoprofit.cfm.