Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

The Only Way to Renew Your Organization

H. James Harrington

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138353695
• eBook ISBN: 9780429756962
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

People with ideas are dreamers. People who get things done are doers. One doer is worth eight dreamers. There are three kinds of people who make up an innovator. There are inventors (people who have new and unique ideas), problem solvers (people who have ideas about how to correct a previous error) and entrepreneurs (people who transform ideas into realities). Put them altogether they spell "innovator."

Most innovative books today focus on ways to create new and unique ideas; some of them also address problem-solving, but this is less than 10% of the methodologies that the innovator needs to master. The approaches used in this book transform an idea into reality, or to put it another way, deliver innovative products to make a profit for the organization and instill pride in its employees. This means that every step in the process needs to have innovation applied to it in order to meet the expectations and demands of today's sophisticated customer. This book is designed to help the reader and their organization complete the complex process of bringing a new product to market by presenting what is expected at each step in the cycle and providing step-by-step instructions on what to do at each specific step.

In large to mid-sized organizations this book is designed to help each individual understand how they fit into the innovative cycle and explains why they should be more creative related to the work they do and more conscious of the contributions they can make. It emphasizes the importance of every individual contributing to the organization's innovative process.

The book is designed to help the organization understand its Innovation Systems Cycle. In the early part of the cycle it focuses on weeding out projects that do not have the potential to produce value-added results to the stakeholders. By using the guidelines outlined in this book, an organization can reduce its new project failure rate by as much as 50% which should result in almost doubling the organization's new product output thereby increasing profits by as much as 15%.

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Phase I. Creation—Process Grouping 1: Opportunity Identification

INTRODUCTION TO OPPORTUNITY IDENTIFICATION

The Innovation System Cycle (ISC) starts with identifying a problem or an improvement opportunity. Sometimes the opportunities are defined for you or assigned to you to take the proper action. An innovative individual never waits for someone else to identify an improvement opportunity. He or she takes pride in discovering opportunities which others are blind to or too lazy to take advantage of. It is much more challenging and enjoyable to identify and select the improvement opportunities you would like to work on. An improvement opportunity seeker is the individual who believes he or she can make things better rather than complain about how bad things are (example of the “dictated by management” improvement opportunity: your manager tells you to reduce the process cycle time).

Many of the improvement opportunities that the innovator identifies are beyond his or her scope to change. There’s no use talking about these opportunities unless you find someone who has the responsibility to make the required changes. Talking about them is just a waste of time and you get a reputation as a complainer rather than a doer (for example, you identify that it would be an improvement to have four cup holders in the front seat rather than two and you get the four cup holder design approved and installed in the next year’s cars).

Some improvement opportunities have a negative impact on one stakeholder and a positive impact on another stakeholder. An improvement opportunity is when the combined impact on all stakeholders is in the positive direction (for example, combining three activities together will increase productivity by 30 percent; this increase will allow the organization to get rid of one employee).

Some improvement opportunities relate to your personal lives and others relate to the organization you work for. Usually innovation refers to things that impact the organization you work for (a business example: automating the welding operation.) Some improvement opportunities may conflict with your values or the organization’s values. In this case the individual’s values hopefully will drive the final decision (for example, the woman next door is younger and prettier than your wife; should you pursue the woman next door?). Answer no; it’s a lost opportunity.

INNOVATION BY THE NUMBERS

The 11 Opportunity Sources

You can identify improvement opportunities from many different sources. Most of them are defined by the 11 opportunity sources in the following list. Can you define one more making it an even dozen?

1. Customers

2. Friends

3. Surroundings

4. Experiences

5. Observations

6. Work

7. Play

8. Children

9. Research

10. Family

11. Mistakes

The 12 Wow Questions

How do you know if something is an opportunity source? If you answer “yes” to any one of the following 11 plus Wow questions, it is an opportunity candidate for innovation.

1. Wow! Can you make it go faster?

2. Wow! Can you build it faster?

3. Wow! Can you make it do what I want?

4. Wow! Can you reduce the cost?

5. Wow! Can you fix it so it won’t break?

6. Wow! Can you make it do more?

7. Wow! Can you make it with fewer parts?

8. Wow! Can you make more customer friendly?

9. Wow! Can you make it work better?

10. Wow! Can you do it easier?

11. Wow! Can you reduce its weight?

12. Wow! Can you make it smaller?

13. Wow!?????????????

14. Wow!?????????????

15. Wow!?????????????

The preceding list gives 12 good examples of what you might thinking when you recognize a potential opportunity. Can you think of three more examples making it an even 15? Look around where you are right now. Can you see anything that you could improve? The typical answer to this question is, “Yes, I see a number of things that I could improve.” Let me give you a personal example of some of the things that are opportunities within 5 feet of where I’m sitting.

• My wastebasket has a contract in it. I threw it away because I signed it in the wrong place. Wouldn’t it be nice if I had erasable ink?

• My desk is cluttered with paper, books, telephones, pen holders, paperclips, a television, incoming and outgoing mail, my glasses and their holders, a cup of coffee, the picture of my wife, several reports that I must read and sign before they can go out, etc. Wow! It would be so much better if I just had the work on my desk that I am using now!

• My office is too small to keep a copy of all the books that I have written. In addition, I need books that I use for reference that someone else wrote. My reference library has over 300 books in it and I have written over 50 books. Wow! It would be nice if I could automatically go to the pages in these books that I want to work with without getting up from my desk or going to the library downstairs. Every time I get up from my desk and go down to the library I seem to find reasons to stop in the kitchen to get something to drink or eat, to stop by the bathroom for a quick break, or to stop and gossip with Candy, my office manager, for a little while. The trip that should have taken 15 minutes often takes up 1 to 1.5 hours of my workday. Wow! Wouldn’t it be great if I could store all that information automatically in my knowledge management system?

• I just broke my fingernail trying to open a 3-ring binder so I could put something in it. Wow! It would be nice if I could open the binder by touching a button on it rather than by the clumsy way they open today. For that matter why is poking holes in a piece of paper the best way to keep the information together?

• Hay! Why do I have to process all this paper? What happened to the paperless office?

• Wow! Why can’t I scan and file a 50-page report without taking my time or my associate’s time?

• Wow! Why isn’t the paper size the same for European and American business?

• I have mountains of paper work, reports, manuscripts, and forms to read and make decisions related to them. After 2 or 3 hours just studying the papers that come into my office, my eyes are so tired that I am not able to finish the task. Wow! Why do I have to use my eyes to transform the information from the paper to my mind?

• I see a glass of Diet Coke sitting here in my desk and it reminded me that it stains my teeth. I am now trying to cut back on it. Wow! If you want to make $1 billion quickly, just find a way to create a soft drink that whitens your teeth rather than staining them.

I could go on and on for these are just a couple of the opportunities all within my personal view from my desk. I identified them purely by observation using the 12+ Wow approach.

The 8 T’s for Prioritization

By now you should have identified several opportunities available to you. Your next assignment is to prioritize the opportunities. To accomplish this, first drop from your list all the opportunities that are obviously wrong for you to work on. The remainder of opportunities should be evaluated each using the “8 T’s.” For each of the opportunities, rate it for each of the eight statements using a scale of 1 to 10 (Note: a rating of 1 is given if the statement is totally false and a rating of 10 indicates the statement is absolutely true).

1. Taking advantage of this opportunity will have a major positive impact upon the customer and consumer.

2. Taking advantage of this opportunity will have a significant impact upon reducing output productions costs.

3. Taking advantage of this opportunity will have a significant impact upon reducing cycle time and stock.

4. Taking advantage of this opportunity will provide a competitive advantage.

5. Taking advantage of this opportunity is in line with the organization’s culture.

6. Taking advantage of this opportunity will improve morale.

7. Taking advantage of this opportunity will require few resources.

8. Taking advantage of this opportunity will create more jobs for our employees.

Sum up the rating for each of the 8 T’s (minimum rating of 0, maximum rating of 80). Let the total sum’s value be an indicator but not as the final selection process. This number needs to be considered along with experienced management judgment. I recommend that you include between 3 and 10 improvement opportunities in this evaluation. Of course, if there is one opportunity that stands out above all the others, this evaluation is not necessary. You should make the final selection based upon engineering and management knowledge and priorities.

New Ideas and Concepts

The things that get done are the things that are easy to do and where the rewards are the highest.

H. J. Harrington

New ideas and concepts are the life blood of most organizations today. The value proposition approach primes the pumps that move the most important and relevant ideas and concepts through an organization’s business cycles. No matter how good the pump is, if you don’t have an abundance of subject matter, the system soon runs dry and the organization becomes obsolete. The challenge that many organizations face is how to turn all employees into entrepreneurs who are actively searching for ideas and concepts that will add value to the organization. In most organizations, employees are not challenged or motivated to challenge the status quo to find better ways of doing things. Literally billions of dollars are lost due to the lack of ability of those employees closest to the problems to adequately document the ideas they have. Even when these employees do have the ability, many are reluctant to take the time to document the problem and suggest improvements. In most cases, first-level employees face many improvement opportunities and problems every day that are not brought to anyone’s attention. As a result, the organization considers that many of troublesome processes are functioning effectively even though they really have the potential of functioning far more efficiently.

Suggestion Programs

With today’s national focus on increased innovation, organizations are searching for ways to help their employees become more creative and innovative. In the 20th century, suggestion programs were an extremely active approach to stimulate creativity within the workforce. However, today these programs have lost favor, not because of the programs themselves, but because of the way many organizations implemented them. Following are a few of the major problems:

1. The long cycle time between when an employee turned in a suggestion and when the organization completed the suggestion cycle.

2. Many professionals felt that line people who didn’t have the relevant professional education were telling them what to do. In addition, managers tended to ask the engineers why they didn’t think of this if an unskilled worker could figure it out.

3. In many cases it is difficult to determine if the idea was eligible as suggestion or if it was part of the employee’s job responsibilities. In the former case, employees get paid for the suggestion and in the latter case, they do not. I personally know of one case in which an engineer had one of the line workers turn in one of his ideas as a suggestion with the agreement that they would split the money awarded for the suggestion.

The suggestion program is an American institution started in 1896 by the National Cash Register Company. The suggestion program offers the opportunity to suggest improvements to the person closest to the work activity. This opportunity often results in more effective utilization of assets, increased productivity, waste reduction, product costs reduction, and improved quality. For the employee, the suggestion program offers an additional extra income, a means for self-expression, a path towards achievement, recognition, and a feeling of contribution. Paul Petermann, past Manager of Field Suggestions at IBM Corporation, stated, Ideas are the life blood of the company and the suggestion plan is a way to get these ideas marketed. Suggestion programs save organizations around the world billions of dollars each year and allow the organizations to share these savings with the employees.

Listen to your employees’ ideas and help them to imp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgment
• Author
• Chapter 1 Phase I. Creation—Process Grouping 1: Opportunity Identification
• Chapter 2 Process Grouping 2: Opportunity Development
• Chapter 3 Process Grouping 3: Value Proposition
• Chapter 4 Process Grouping 4: Concept Validation
• Chapter 5 Phase II. Preparation and Production. Process Grouping 5: Business Case Analysis
• Chapter 6 Process Grouping 6: Resource Management
• Chapter 7 Process Grouping 7: Documentation
• Chapter 8 Process Grouping 8: Production
• Chapter 9 Phase III. Delivery. Process Grouping 9: Marketing, Sales, and Delivery
• Chapter 10 Process Grouping 10: After-Sales Services
• Chapter 11 Process Grouping 11: Performance Analysis
• Chapter 12 Process Grouping 12: Transformation
• Appendix A: Glossary
• Appendix B: List of Most Used and/or Most Effective Innovative Tools and Methodologies in Alphabetical Order
• Index