True Innovation for Business Success

At the heart of most strategic efforts in business, lies the desire to innovate on some level. This article explores the real meaning of innovation, why we do it and how it is achieved.

Innovation Misunderstood
Innovation is an elusive topic to some people. From time to time I see very smart stakeholders influencing decisions that support a misconstrued perception of innovation, most often to the detriment of the initiative at hand. A narrow view of innovation places too much weight on being different and “not boring”, without considering whether the idea is also creating value. In the interactive marketing industry, one common pitfall includes the creation of experimental website navigation systems at the expense of usability. We see it too often. Teams trying alternative ways of laying out controls, arrangement of zone patterns, designing interactions, and labeling of elements–all in an effort to introduce something fresh and not appear like the competitors’ websites. Unfortunately these experiments usually produce esoteric, difficult to understand solutions that put extra burden on the user to learn and decipher. There is a point when familiarity is a good thing and a point when it can get you lost in the crowd. The trick is to know how to tell the difference and where exactly to focus your efforts to innovate. For functional interfaces, whether it be a website, a microwave oven, the driving controls for a car, or what have you, it’s best to capitalize on established protocols, and only consider changes where it increases value to the user and the business. Imagine having to completely relearn the controls to operate a car every time you rented one. It wouldn’t only be annoying, it would be dangerous!

Another misguided effort to innovate that we see among our peers in business/marketing consulting is when professional services firms attempt to package their process as unique and proprietary, then invent tricky language to describe their services, so much so that it utterly confounds the meaning of what they do and how they do it. One of my favorite portrayals of this phenomenon was highlighted several years back in a WIRED magazine article recounting a 60 Minutes interview with the founders of Razorfish. The Razorfish guys were sharp but they had a tendency to get a little too clever in the way they communicated their offering. They got away with it for a while when the mystique around the dot com boom created a perceived chasm between “those who got it” and “those who didn’t”, but ultimately when 60 Minutes challenged the founders to tell it straight, they struggled a bit which left many viewers to wonder if they were nothing more than digital hucksters.

Authentic Innovation
The true meaning of innovation is to deliver on a real need in a new and relevant way. Genuinely innovative solutions aren’t always as slick and shiny as the latest Apple product. Depending on what it is, what industry it serves, etc., to many people a certain innovative solution may seem boring, like no big deal. But to the user it is intended for, and the business that created it, true innovation is always a very big deal. Why? Because it solves a real problem for the user, presumably increasing their quality of life somehow, and it creates competitive advantage for the business. It’s no wonder why innovation is a priority for many successful businesses, but achieving it can be complicated. Teams must often navigate stormy seas of politics, engineering, art, people, business and technology and come out on the other end with great ideas that no one else has done before, that help grow the business, that provide value to the user and that are practical to implement. It’s really a lot. So how to do it?

Tips for Innovation
To come up with truly innovative solutions, it helps for the team to share certain fundamental principles, embrace a proven, structured process and employ research methods that expose opportunities for true innovation.

Strategy First
Don’t shoot from the hip. Have a plan, know what your goals are and know how you’re going to measure your success.

Consider the Business and the User
The most innovative solutions gracefully bridge business goals and user needs. If they lean too far to one or the other side, they are most often self indulgent, designed to privilege a special interest group. Examples would be a client stakeholder pushing his own narrow agenda to make points with his boss, a designer interested only in satisfying his own artistic idea or a creative director in pursuit of an advertising award for “creativity” with no regard for efficacy.

Do No Harm
Do not innovate merely for the sake of it. As mentioned above, it’s not enough just to be new and different. Truly innovative solutions need to be relevant - to the business and the user. As the old adage goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Strive for the Simplest, Most Complete Solution
This is a tough one. It conjures the famous Mark Twain quote; “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” It’s not easy to strip away the fat and refine a solution to its simplest, most elegant state, without sacrificing form, meaning or behavior. But when this is achieved, invariably it’s easier to build and maintain, it’s more understandable to use, its perceived value increases and the business benefits.

Follow a User-Centered Process
Putting the user at the center of the process helps keep the team focused on what’s most important and combat the urge for any stakeholder’s personal preference, which may not best represent the interests of the targeted user, to unduly influence decisions.

Perform Empathetic Research and Analysis
Modern R&D teams practice a host of empathetic working methods that help expose opportunities for innovation. They strive to immerse themselves in the lives of the users that the solution is targeting, to walk in their shoes and to understand the world through their eyes. Through sophisticated ethnographic research practices and other methods such as process mapping and customer journey mapping, unmet needs are uncovered. Once exposed, those unmet needs provide a structured platform and focused scope for the best free-form ideation–the kind that produces brilliant ideas. Creative brainstorming is the fun part but it can be frustrating if the problem-space hasn’t been well-defined in advance. Modern research and analysis methods provide the necessary context for great ideas to erupt.

For example, while working with one client to improve their email marketing efforts, the team at Rhythm Interactive went through a comprehensive discovery process to understand the unique aspects of their business, the various stakeholders in the process and the end users. Our research consisted of in-depth personal interviews, observing users in context, and mapping key events and interactions throughout the customer life-cycle with particular emphasis on how email could provide more value to the business and all the people involved. The discovery exercises produced ideas for custom solutions that didn’t exist previously in their industry, that made things much easier for the administrators sending the emails and delivered much more relevant content to the recipients, boosting brand perception and conversion rates.

Go Forth and Prosper
Innovation is almost always required to stay ahead and sustain competitive advantage. To be a leader in your category, strive to place a high value on innovation in every area of your business from your essential model, to your products, to your marketing communications, to the systems, resources and tools you provide to your people, and beyond. Allow innovation to live upstairs at your organization and avoid inclinations to be self-serving in your pursuit of it. Make sure to align your team on effective principles, processes, tools and methods that reveal opportunities for true innovation by exposing unmet needs. And with that, here’s a list to inspire you:

Fortune 2008: Top Ten Companies Most Admired for Innovation

1. Apple
2. Nike
3. Medco Health Solutions
4. Proctor & Gamble
5. Herman Miller
6. Disney
7. Fortune Brands
8. Burlington No. Santa Fe
9. McDonald’s
10. ProLogis