by Ronald Brown

Companies Change With the Right Focus on Innovation

January 27, 2012 in Culture, Innovation, Team Improvement by Ronald Brown

Procter & Gamble might not be the first name that comes to mind when thinking about a list of the Masters of Innovation. The company, more than 100 years old, makes products that most of us grew up with, and many of our parents grew up with. And many of those products hardly seem game-changing. Take Pampers for example. Or Crest. How about Tide? Good product, but hardly the iPhone.

With this in mind, when A.G. Lafley took over the helm as CEO in 2000, he saw that the way out of the struggles the company had at the time was through the portal of innovation. The process he took to do that is well documented in the book, The Game Changer, which was written with Ram Charan. A review of the book can be found in the April 14, 2008 issue of Businessweek, p. 73, “How P&G Pampers New Thinking.

As the article highlights, the distinctive feature of this book is the way in which it provides granular look at P&G’s process, elevating it above the typical philosophizing on the subject of innovation so popular in the press today.

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by Ronald Brown

The Master of Innovation Speaks: Apple on Apple

January 24, 2012 in Critical Success Factors, Customer Behavior, Ideas, Product/Market Fit by Ronald Brown

The June 9, 2007 issue of the Economist ran an article titled “How does Apple do it?” After many had left it for dead a decade ago, this is the company that sets the pace in the consumer electronics industry. The article highlighted two main development strategies: First, Apple looks both within and outside its walls for new product ideas, an approach referred to as “network innovation.” The iPod, a notable example, was the brainchild of a consultant that Apple hired to run a project; not an employee. Second, Apple is obsessed about looking at new concepts through the eyes of its customers. Everybody gives testament to the importance of this commitment, but few live it. “If we build it they will come” is a sure path to failure.

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by Ronald Brown

Anticipation is Making Me Wait

January 20, 2012 in Culture, Processes by Ronald Brown

Modern organizations wrestle with a troubling internal conundrum. On the one hand they must innovate to survive. On the other, innovation cannot be made to happen in the same way that say, making a candle can be made to happen. Innovation and the creativity that drives it, rails mightily against the mechanistic models our companies operate within.

That stipulated, there are things that companies can do. They can learn to think a couple of moves ahead where it concerns consumer wants and needs. The most powerful new concept in product development is “anticipate.” And there is immediate sense to this. Companies must be able to look forward and anticipate demand; they must know their consumers well enough to think ahead on their behalf.

However, by its nature, anticipation requires waiting; which is a pretty passive posture for an organization that must produce positive results every three months of the year, or suffer the consequences. So there is this place where the tenants of great product development hit up against the practicalities of running a modern public business. (Or even a private business; success cannot be deferred indefinitely, even if you don’t have deliver quarterly results).

So companies must learn to develop the process and systems that not only allow them to anticipate consumer demands, but also anticipate how they will account for that process to shareholders and stakeholders.

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