How market researchers can aid corporate innovation

How market researchers can aid corporate innovation

Editor’s note: Gregg Fraley is an innovation consultant based in Three Oaks, Mich.

Innovation is a hot topic. Has it ever been more clear that it’s necessary to have a deliberate and company-wide approach? The demise of the Big Three auto makers and the financial market crisis are both examples of the impact that innovation, or the lack of it, can have on everything. We need innovation, but it’s not that simple, is it? Organizations with massive resources and talent fail, while start-ups with nothing but dreams and ideals somehow become market giants in just a few years.

So the quest to discover how to innovate is ongoing. New books pop up on the shelves all the time, and consultants proclaim to have The Answer to how it could, or should, be done. Most of the books or articles about the topic, with a couple of notable exceptions, tend to focus on one of two things: 1) a particular tool, technique or method, or 2) a dynamic leader who made it all happen. I call this innovation via the “silver bullet,” and I think these books are interesting because they have good ideas. What they lack, for me, is a sense of the big picture. In this article I’m going to present a model for a holistic approach to the complex challenge of organizational innovation.

There is nothing at all wrong with tools or visionary leaders. They are both important. My contribution to the debate is simply this: innovation is not one thing, it’s everything. It’s not doing an activity; it’s living, breathing, eating and waking up in the morning in innovative mode.

An organization needs a deliberate, formal and holistic system to enable consistent innovation. Adopting a particular tool, technique or hiring a dynamic and charismatic leader isn’t going to get it done for you in the long run. What will get it done is a holistic approach that blends many complex elements into a gestalt that is greater than the sum of its parts. And there are many parts, with complex relationships.

Market researchers are intimately involved in innovation, of course. I’ll suggest here there are opportunities for them to have more extensive and holistic involvement.

Somewhat telling

Business leaders often express their advocacy for innovation. I find it somewhat telling that you rarely hear a leader mention creativity. Yet that’s where it all begins. Innovation is generally understood to mean the successful introduction of a new thing, method, product, process or service. It is distinguished from creativity in that it requires implementation. Theresa Amabile of Harvard Business School puts it well when she says, “All innovation begins with creative ideas … we define innovation as the successful implementation of creative ideas within an organization. In this view, creativity by individuals and teams is a starting point for innovation; the first is necessary but not sufficient condition for the second.”

Creativity then, is a necessary prerequisite for innovation. So, if you’re seeking more consistent innovation, wouldn’t it make sense to return to the fundamental thinking that gets you there?

Not so helpful

Creativity is hard to define. A simple definition is “novelty that’s useful.” For the purposes of looking at innovation, however, that definition is not so helpful. It doesn’t give us much sense of how creativity might happen, or not happen, in an organization. Mel Rhodes’ early research on creativity (he wrote his seminal paper, “An Analysis of Creativity,” in 1961) provides a useful way of looking at organizational creativity. He breaks it down into four factors - the “four Ps” of creativity. Visionary leaders would do well to get a sense of how their organization supports creativity and ultimately innovation by looking at the four Ps: people, product, process, press (environment/culture).

I would suggest that unless each P supports ongoing innovation you are going to have problems because creativity will be suppressed. Addressing one P might only exacerbate a challenge existing in the others.

Let’s examine each P and look at its impact on innovation, and see where market research might do more to assist.

People

There’s nothing more basic to innovation than having the right people. The people on the top of the organization chart are critical because they set the table, or empower, the talent below. Steve Jobs at Apple provides vision and focus. He in turn empowers excellent employees like designer Jonathan Ive, who essentially designed the iPod and iPhone himself. Ironically, Ive also worked for the previous Apple CEO, John Sculley, and the result was Apple’s most well-known failure: the Newton. The point is, even excellent people can fail when disempowered or pushed into a faulty vision.

It begins with empowerment but it doesn’t end there. The right mix of people is another key to organizational innovation. Thinking is at the heart of creative and innovative efforts. We need to understand how the people of an organization think, and we need to make sure there is a diversity of thinking styles, in order to better facilitate innovation. More diverse teams are more likely to come up with breakthrough ideas.

Often overlooked is the research of Michael Kirton, who has proven the effectiveness of innovation teams with diverse thinking styles. According to Kirton, you need a balanced mix of people who think “different” and who think “better.” Awareness of creative style and thinking diversity is a big step toward more highly functional innovation teams. Diverse teams, however, have a downside: more conflict.

Creative process training and practice also matter when it comes to innovation effectiveness. The studies of Firestien et al, show that those trained in creative practice are more fluid ideators (see, “A Review of the Effectiveness of CPS Training: A Focus on Workplace Issues,” by Gerard Puccio, Roger Firestien, Christina Coyle and Cristina Masucci).

People and market research

Market researchers could play several new roles in the people P. They might combine traditional research skills such as interviewing with newly developed skills such as facilitation and thinking-style assessments to help innovation managers screen employees to find those that best match organizational needs. The goal would be to flesh out an innovation team’s thinking diversity profile. This would require innovative new designs for employee interviewing. In essence, market research could help innovate employee recruitment; call it internal research. A challenge in doing this would be breaking into the unfamiliar world of human resources. However, this can be done, as HR departments often outsource aspects of their mandate.

Another opportunity for market researchers that leverages their existing “soft skills” is getting into innovation team development. Innovation teams (sometimes they are not really teams at all but simply work groups) are often geographically dispersed and only come together infrequently for ideation or meetings. Market researchers with an understanding of how to leverage those rare in-person meetings by helping build team cohesion with their facilitation skills could become more integrated with that team and in the innovation process. Again, new skills would need to be developed by market researchers to offer team-building exercises that are meaningful and customized to the organizational context.

Product

It’s important to remember that a product must be novel and useful for the consumer. Design should be an integral part of the innovation process, not an afterthought. Much has been written about product excellence. I’m a believer in two concepts: 1) it has to be a “wow” to consumers, a la Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, and 2) it has to be a complete solution to some consumer problem, a la Geoffrey A. Moore’s theory of “crossing the chasm” of early adopters to broader markets. Market researchers are already intimately involved with product development but there are other areas where their skills could be further leveraged.

Product and market research

Market researchers can play a bigger role in the future by going beyond identifying insights and testing product concepts. First, they need to do more in the area of idea development. Some researchers do ideation and others leave that to specialists. Usually, it’s a one- or two-day intensive session to generate ideas and develop concepts. The problem is intensive ideation sessions typically lack enough time for incubation, where better ideas emerge. Further, a lot of good ideas drop through the cracks because if they don’t make the “top three” at the end of the day, they are ignored and forgotten. This suggests opportunities to do more Web-based projects, which would save money and keep people thinking all the time. Exploring the use of social media tools to both monitor the marketplace and get quick feedback from consumers is another way to help organizations refine product concepts.

Disruptive innovation is another place where market researchers can provide new services around products. Market researchers often have excellent industry-wide and cross-industry perspectives - why not suggest “adjacency” business ideas for clients to consider? Perhaps as an ongoing service. Disruptive innovation is where the largest growth occurs. If you alert a client to a brand-new business opportunity you are well positioned to be doing a lot of research.

In general, market researchers should broaden their notion of what business they are in to include being in the idea business.

Process

Innovation process has typically been handled in an informal way in organizations. Even in organizations with dedicated R&D units, new-product development tends to be a sporadic and/or cloistered effort. Innovation process today is somewhat analogous to what manufacturing process was in the 1980s, prior to the widespread adoption of MRP (material requirements planning) and ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems. The formalization of manufacturing process over the last 25 years has provided huge leaps in productivity and has seen less-sophisticated players failing. The trend in industry is now toward a more formal innovation process - for the simple reason of survival. But how to be more formal? As noted earlier there are lots of silver bullets but few holistic process answers.

Again, innovation is a complex challenge comprised of many factors. The four Ps give us a handle on what factors to examine, but not on process. I propose that the best type of process for deliberate, formal innovation would be a model for complex problem-solving. A holistic approach is required to deal with the complexity of innovation and the best formal process would ideally include all four Ps. Thankfully, a useful model of this kind exists. It’s called the Osborn-Parnes model of creative problem solving or CPS (see sidebar for more detail). If used systemically it could provide a comprehensive foundation for a holistic innovation process.

CPS has been in continuous evolution since the late 1940s when its basic principles were articulated by Alex Osborn (BBDO founder) in his book Applied Imagination. It was further defined and refined by Sid Parnes, who took Osborn’s brainstorming tools and fashioned them into a holistic problem-solving system. More recently, academicians Gerard Puccio, Mary Murdock and Marie Mance reconfigured CPS in the book Creative Leadership: Skills That Drive Change. As I see it, their essential contribution is to present CPS as a flexible and not a linear process. Their organic approach makes a lot of sense from a real-world perspective. I presented a version of the model with more everyday language in Jack’s Notebook, a business novel of creative problem-solving. Practitioners and facilitators around the world have also contributed to a growing body of tools and techniques.

Corporate leaders, managers and market researchers searching for a formal or deliberate innovation process model would do well to adopt CPS as an organizational standard. It would provide a common language and a flexible framework within which to apply a limitless variety of tools and techniques. One of CPS’s key strengths is that it involves all four Ps and provides a holistic perspective and an actionable approach.

CPS has three phases: problem exploration, ideation and getting into action. In using CPS one must diverge and converge within each of these phases. This involves a great deal of effort to capture, organize and manage data, especially when you consider the number of significant challenges an organization is processing in parallel. Until recently, this would have had to be handled manually and might have meant that CPS as an enterprise model for innovation was quite impractical. Fortunately, a technology has emerged that makes this data collection, sorting, storage and manipulation easier and more formal and measurable. The term for it is innovation management system (or sometimes idea pipeline management [IPM]). Adoption of these systems, such as Brightidea.com’s product set, enables the kind of measurement heretofore unavailable for innovation leaders. While IPM isn’t a be-all/end-all solution for innovation process data collection, it’s certainly an excellent start. IPM systems have proven valuable in saving money, facilitating ideation measurement and in inviting broader participation in innovation initiatives. In a sense they function as the data “glue” between the theoretical CPS model and the four Ps.

Process and market research

Market researchers could easily use IPM systems to record and archive the data collected over the course of their work. They could also suggest the usage of such products for the inevitable ideation that comes before or comes after their traditional insight work. An opportunity exists for market researchers to get more involved in the ideation process and add value to their service offerings by introducing IPM systems to their customers. This extends their role beyond market research into facilitation, and from determining “what is” into “what could be.” Again, this argues for facilitation training.

Press

Rhodes must have thought long and hard to come up with the word “press” to describe the overall environment or culture in which creativity and innovation live. My way of remembering this P is not to think “press,” which conjures up images of a fedora-wearing reporter, but instead the word pressure. Because within any organization there are many pressures at work which define the atmosphere, the temperature and the conditions for innovation. Rhodes says that press is the most important of the Ps - the umbrella P if you will - as the other three either work well or don’t work at all depending on the quality of the environment.

What is the ideal environment for innovation? Hard to say. It’s complex and contextual, and again, an ideal candidate for viewing through the lens of CPS, but here’s what I have seen over the course of my career:

•   Those who see innovation as integral to all they do, like Apple, or P&G in the A.G. Lafley era, seem to be better off than those who segregate the activity.

•   The feeling among the people in an organization that what they are doing is worthwhile, and that their ideas and contributions are valued and used, seems to be a key indicator of innovation effectiveness.

•   Intrinsic motivation is what inspires creative thought and subsequent innovation. Rewards are meaningful but not everything; many organizations poor in resources have done quite well because of the dedication and motivation of their people.

•   Diversity of thinking matters, and respect for different thinking matters. When an organization hires for thinking diversity and trains/acculturates open-mindedness it gets to innovation faster.

•   If it ain’t fun you probably ain’t doing it right. When people have fun at work they tend to perform better. For more on this concept I refer you to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow.

Press and market research

Market researchers can play a new role in assessing innovation culture. The skills of qualitative researchers in particular could be highly useful. Essentially, they would do a qualitative study within an organization to assess the innovation culture. Interviews would be designed around understanding how team members feel and what they think about where their organization stands with regard to the four Ps. Researchers could turn their skills toward internal insights. A well-designed interview process could be extremely helpful to organizations, and, a new business opportunity for researchers. Call it an innovation audit.

Look for opportunities

Market researchers with vision will look for opportunities to assist organizations in making innovation more formal by adopting structured processes and models like CPS and encouraging formal idea information systems like IPM. They can also play larger or new roles in innovation recruiting, team-building and cultural assessment. Growing and enhancing one’s facilitation skills in the many aspects of innovation process is essential to taking advantage of these emerging opportunities.

A look at CPS

The Osborn-Parnes model of creative problem solving is a holistic process for deliberate innovation. It consists of an assessment and then a series of six steps which are organized into three phases. In fact, the steps don’t need to be completed in any rigid sequence nor are all required in any particular instance.

The executive or assessment step of challenge triage will direct organizational thinking toward one of the steps of CPS.

Each step has a convergence part and a divergence part. Divergence is when issues, wishes, ideas or actions are elicited. Convergence is when they are winnowed down to one or a few for further exploration.

Phase one is problem exploration and consists of these three steps:

1. Identify the challenge: Here a vision is imagined in divergent mode, then identified in convergent mode.

2. Facts and feelings exploration: This is the classic research step. A divergent list of facts, feelings and relevant data is made. In convergent mode salient data points are identified.

3. Problem framing and reframing: The original vision is reexamined in light of the salient data and alternate problem frames are generated in divergent mode. One challenge statement is selected in convergence - and transformed into a question that inspires answers to solve the problem.

Phase two of the process is idea generation. It has one step:

4. Idea generation: As many ideas as possible are generated to answer the question converged upon in problem framing. The goal is a breakthrough option or idea. In convergence the ideas are clustered, combined and ultimately one or a small subset is selected.

The last phase, phase three, is getting into action. It has two steps:

5. Solution development: The idea(s) selected in step four are examined and improved using criteria developed/diverged upon for the challenge. Ideas are enhanced by building them up to better match key criteria using additional ideation.

6. Action planning: In this final step a process for implementing the idea is developed and mapped out. Divergent thinking takes place around assistors, resistors and ways to make the plan exciting, and convergence creates a standard action/work plan.