Not all great concepts can be consumed in small sound bites.
The drive to innovate—to be innovative—sometimes feels like peer pressure. Organizations like Apple and Bell Labs are held up as paragons of the Innovation Age, something like the preppy clique with their fancy patents and deep pockets. Over decades of research and development, these companies have created and then dominated markets. Similarly, tech startups fueled by nothing more than caffeine, caviar wishes, and sturdy bootstraps are lauded for their nimble moves and experimentation. In recent years, many such companies have changed the way we play, communicate, and do business seemingly overnight. They’re like a mixture of the rebels and the valedictorians, the role models kids choose combined with the role models their parents wish they would choose. The cool kids are driving innovation, and the media and boards of directors never hesitate to belabor the point while they cry, “Innovate or die!”
That leaves the rest of the class: the accountants who want to make a decent living, retire comfortably, and help their clients do the same; the lawyers who want to keep their friends and clients out of trouble; and the graphic designers who want to make the world a little more beautiful one pixel at a time. These professionals do their jobs well, please their clients, and support their families. Is innovation really important for them? How much time and money would it take, and are their businesses even structured for it? Perhaps most importantly, what is it?
What Is Innovation?
Like a movie starlet hounded by paparazzi and plastered across the tabloids, innovation has lost its identity to its own fame and oversaturation. It’s used interchangeably to mean everything from developing new processes to producing disruptive technology, from creating new packaging to creating new markets. Acting on such a vague concept is a sure path to wasted productivity for most small business owners.
Louis Foreman
Chief Executive,
Edison Nation
Louis Foreman started his first business while still in college at the University of Illinois and went on to create nine successful start-ups. He is also the inventor on ten registered US patents, and his companies have developed and filed more than 500 US patents. He founded Enventys in 2001 to help other inventors and entrepreneurs navigate the process of product development. From Enventys, a family of companies was born.
Louis Foreman, chief executive of Edison Nation and one of Charlotte’s go-to speakers on the topic of innovation, isn’t pleased with the oversaturation of the word. “Everyone is using the word innovation, but the real meaning when you look at it is so different from how people use it,” Foreman said in a recent telephone interview. He went on to note the rising popularity of innovation as an advertising concept, even for products such as tequila, as though a company’s ability to innovate is a key selling point.
Edison Nation helps inventors and people with great ideas take their concepts to market. And that’s where Foreman says the true meaning of innovation lies. “Invention is coming up with a novel idea. Innovation is putting that novel idea to practice. So the way I define innovation is a great idea plus execution. A great idea by itself is just that—it’s a great idea. But innovation occurs when you take that great idea and you execute on it.”
Carlos Salum of Salum International Resources takes his definition a step further by emphasizing value: “Creative thinking needs to produce something new. It’s a human skill that needs to be developed just like learning a language. Creative thinking is essential. And in a way, it is a human right. Innovation is very symptomatic of creative thinking, but it has to deliver value.”
Innovation Delivers Value
Now we’re on to something. Delivering value is something most business owners can understand. The next natural question is how much change is necessary for the resulting value to count as innovation. Here’s where the issue gets tricky again. Incremental improvements to a widget still leave you with a widget, not a groundbreaking new product. But what if those small improvements lead to significant cost savings or become the tipping point that makes the product or service the hottest on the market? What if, for example, those small improvements transform a spoon into a spork, reducing by half the amount of material necessary to create your dining utensils? That small improvement nets big results.
How to measure innovation varies just as widely as the definition. As Suzanne Fetscher, creator of the Innovation Institute at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, puts it, “In every way that an organization can embrace or implement innovation, there are different ways to measure it.” Fetscher also believes measuring innovation will become a growing field as innovation becomes more mainstream.
Most existing measurement methods plot variables on a matrix to determine various levels of innovation. Then each MBA with a book deal assigns a clever name to those levels, and the MBA with the highest book sales that year wins the name game, for that year anyway. It looks something like the charts shown here. “Unicorns” is a particularly descriptive label Tim Kastelle (an Australian blogger and lecturer) applied to companies that don’t try hard to innovate but somehow manage to churn out innovations despite themselves; in other words, those companies are mythical beasts. This variety tells us that measuring innovation is subjective and depends on a company’s industry, business model, goals, and other unique factors. So like many business processes, intentionality, information, and respect for the process are key factors.
Carlos Salum
Founder, Salum International Resources, Inc.
Carlos Salum calls himself a performance architect, breakthrough catalyst, and value designer. His business focuses on helping executives and leaders to overcome risk and to develop and adopt plans that achieve exponentially positive results. An avid tennis player, Salum’s most famous client may be Gabriela Sabatini, the 1990 US Open champion. He designs and manages corporate events and hosts a series of educational and networking workshops and events.
Innovation Starts with People
David Phillips, interim director of the Innovation Institute and innovation provocatuer at Faster Glass Consulting, says that “innovation efforts should, in most cases, focus on what people (internal or external) need or want, not what the company needs or wants.” He teaches his clients people-centered design principles with wide applications to problem-solving and creativity.
Inspiration can come from anyone inside your company. In fact, great solutions frequently come from people who aren’t as close to problems as those typically tasked with solving the problems. Early in his career, artist and inventor David Martin tackled a project that involved inventing new materials and methods to cast metals for an art installation. Everyone at the studios and foundries approached for the project said it was impossible, so Martin hired a staff with zero foundry experience, people who had no idea what was or was not possible. Through trial and error, Martin and his team figured it out and made something beautiful. “It was an art project but had nothing to do with art. It was my first research and development project,” says Martin.
He took that experience and, without a formal degree in science, went on to become a Disney imagineer and a research scientist in Lockheed Martin’s remarkable Skunk Works division. His work led to the first articulated aircraft seat made entirely of composite materials, which reduced aircraft weight, and the embedded fiber optic sensors that monitor the structural integrity of composites, making these materials safer for a wider variety of uses. He also founded Charlotte-based ScentAir, a scent marketing company.
Martin believes that some of the best ideas—those that seem to drop fully formed from the sky—really do come from a higher power to those who are receptive. What if the most receptive person in a company is the receptionist or the accountant or the slightly awkward intern? When a company needs to generate ideas that bring value to its customers or to design new methods, inviting a variety of perspectives to the discussion enhances creativity and exploration.
Respect the Process
Now you have a better idea what innovation is and who does it. How to do it is the next big bite. In his workshops, forums, and roundtables, Salum offers a systematic approach to the kind of creative
thinking that leads to value, to innovation. Salum studied under Dr. Edward De Bono, the psychologist and medical research scientist who coined the term “lateral thinking,” the scientific term for thinking outside the box. Salum focuses on three key steps: “Analyze what is. Envision what can be. Design what shall be.”
Suzanne Fetscher
President and CEO
McColl Center for Art + Innovation
Suzanne Fetscher was appointed founding president of McColl Center for Art + Innovation in April 1998. In 2005, she created the Innovation Institute at McColl Center for Visual Art, a program led by artists and designed to help senior-level executives understand where creative capacity lies and how to nurture it, create a culture that supports it, and harness it for organizational or business advancement. She holds a bachelor’s and a master’s in fine arts.
So it begins with analysis. “I think it’s by identifying where there’s a pain and coming up with a remedy,” says Foreman of the beginning of the innovation process. “And I know that sounds so simple, but the fact is that today all of our basic needs are already being met. Figure out what customers want, not necessarily what customers need.”
Marketing communications consultant Juan Garzón puts it another way and says innovation begins in the same place as effective communications: “It starts with empathy and is as simple as knowing your customer.” It can be as quick and low-tech as an empathy map, an exercise where you imagine your customer and go through the process of understanding what they do, how they feel, where they go, and why. Or it can be a more advanced process of observing your customers with the help of audio and video equipment, website data, and other research tools. Whichever way you put it, collecting and understanding information is a good starting point for many business goals.
Salum’s second step is an opportunity to “play with the concept related to the value you want to create.” He recommends a wide range of questions to look at the concept from different angles. What could be changed? What could be exaggerated? What could be taken away? What could be added?
His final step, putting the new concept in motion and taking it to market, is where many companies fall short. “It’s a scary notion, and not all the people and companies that claim to be innovative truly are. They pull back from the change and completing the process,” said Salum. Whether it’s the financial investment, restructuring, or cultural changes that frequently come with the process, innovation holds inherent risk. And while entrepreneurs typically have high risk-tolerance, not all small business owners are entrepreneurs. Calculated risks, however, can lead to great things. Venture and gain!
Creativity in Action
Story and example make all things clearer. Here are a few examples of regional companies getting great ideas (some simple and some grand) and putting them into practice.
David Phillips
Innovation Provocateur
Faster Glass Consulting LLC
After thirteen years working for large corporations and consulting firms, David launched Faster Glass Consulting in 2010 “to help people grow their businesses and to help businesses grow their people” through innovation and people-centered design. His company offers solution design workshops, innovation training, ethnographic research, and visual storytelling. In addition to running his business, he is also the Innovation Institute’s interim director.
The Nose Remembers—For years, Disney struggled with ways to add scents to the overall sensual experience of park shows. In their experiments, the scent molecules settled on upholstery, carpets, and walls blending into an unpleasant mix. Normally, scent molecules are activated with heat; when they cool off, they settle. Using patents he was able to retain from his days at Lockheed (inventors typically give up patent rights to their employers), company founder David Martin developed a way to activate the scent molecules at room temperature, which kept them airborne and manageable. Then he launched ScentAir and marketed the system to Disney and other entertainment companies. His wife, who was also his salesperson, helped him realize the market potential in custom scents for all types of businesses.
Today, the diversity of ScentAir’s client base is one key to its success, from the refreshing white tea aroma found in Westin Hotels & Resorts worldwide to the disturbing battlefield scent used in training simulations by the United States military. When ScentAir consolidated its California and Florida offices and moved its headquarters to Charlotte in 2004, it had five employees. The company now has approximately 250 full-time employees worldwide with about one hundred of those in Charlotte and others spread through the United States and Canada and a smattering in France and Hong Kong. Its customers are spread throughout 109 countries.
“Charlotte has been a great business climate for us,” says ScentAir spokeperson Ed Burke. “We try to operate like a start-up generating great ideas and moving quickly.”
Juan Garzón
Marketing Strategist
The Garzón Company
After spearheading a successful, global rebranding effort for health care market research firm WorldOne, Juan Garzón hung out his shingle to offer brand strategy and marketing consulting to small businesses. It’s not this young entrepreneur’s first time in business for himself though. While in college at Johnson & Wales University (for the business program, not cooking), Garzón developed an online platform to serve the niche market for manufactured home mortgages, an underserved sector.
Another key to ScentAir’s success, of course, is the subconscious emotional connection people have to smells and the potential for that connection to influence behaviors and decisions. Martin says the effect is instantaneous and transformative, noting that the memories brought on by scents can often feel less like memory and more like something that is happening in the present, a powerful tool companies can use in their branding and marketing.
Now a minority shareholder in the company, Martin lives in California where he’s channeling his endless curiosity and entrepreneurship in Aqueous Gold, a technology company pioneering a new cold distillation process.
Clean and Compact—Ginny Porowski, a nurse from Raleigh, noticed that disposable isolation gowns and gloves used in hospitals were creating potential for secondary infection with their bulk and method of disposal. She invented the GoGown™, a gown with an attached pouch into which the gown and gloves can be folded as they are removed. The resulting package is compact and leaves no contaminated surfaces exposed. With the help of Edison Nation Medical, GoGown has been licensed through Medline Industries, Inc. and is now on the market.
Have Lounge, Will Travel—The widespread use of intermodal steel containers revolutionized global trade in the 1950s by packing cargo into large, durable containers that could go from boat to train to truck without disturbing the cargo. The problem is that the U.S. imports more of these containers than it exports. Once all the cargo reaches its destination, we are left with literally miles of empty steel containers. Shipping them back to their countries of origin is not cost-efficient, and melting them down to recycle the metal requires massive amounts of energy. Some time in the 1970s, someone (or several people around the globe) got the idea to transform these containers into building blocks for homes, shopping centers, and schools, and the shipping container architecture industry was born. The first United States patent for how to transform containers into building material was filed in 1987.
David Campbell
CEO
Boxman Studios
A stock broker by trade, David Campbell moved to Charlotte in 1995 to seek new opportunities. He became interested in architecture and construction and started his first business, Acer Development, in 2004 with a focus on infill commercial real estate development. The shipping container architecture industry caught his interest in 2008. He saw an opportunity to create a unique user experience and founded Boxman Studios in 2009.
In 2009, David Campbell created a new niche in the shipping container architecture business when he founded Boxman Studios. His company purchases decommissioned shipping containers and turns them into mobile, customizable, even rentable real estate. Want to have an eye-catching presence for your business at the next tailgate, festival, or trade show? Rent a mobile hospitality suite complete with a wide-screen TV and couches. Going on a nationwide marketing tour? Purchase or rent a pop-up showroom. The options are truly only limited by your imagination. And if your imagination is, well, stuck in the box, don’t worry—the fine folk at Boxman Studios have ideas aplenty and know how to make them happen.
Book ’Em—Fabi Preslar launched SPARK Enterprises from her house in 1998 as a traditional graphic design firm providing brand identity packages (logos, business cards, and letterhead), brochures, signage, advertising layouts, and the like. The firm carved a niche in magazine design and production and became SPARK Publications in 2002. The earliest magazine clients, Pride and Loss Prevention, are still two of the firm’s key clients. As the recession dragged on, Preslar needed a new revenue stream to offset losses. Preslar had helped organizations produce books and decided to build on that strength. She began proactively marketing custom publishing to entrepreneurs and aspiring authors. The effort was successful, and the additional revenue helped SPARK Publications thrive through the recession. The firm is now celebrating sixteen years in business.
What You Can Do
Innovation has become a buzzword. Its widespread use is an attempt to reduce a complicated concept and process into sound bites. Clear directives better serve small businesses. If “innovate or die” feels too threatening and too much like pointless peer pressure, focus instead on these simple actions that can help you solve problems and create opportunities.
Put people first, what they need and more importantly what they want. Business-to-business company owners especially must remember that human interaction drives their businesses.
Constantly question how to transform core skills and services into new offerings, just as the companies above did. And don’t focus solely on improving your core products or services. Your business model, processes, customer experience, delivery methods—opportunities for improvement—exist in every aspect of your business.
Allow yourself to be vulnerable. Release some control and let others take some ownership of the process.
Build a culture that supports creativity, experimentation, and learning through failure. Such a culture demands trust and practice. “Creativity is a muscle that must be exercised and flexed,” says Fetscher. “It is only then that people will gain confidence in applying their inherent creativity to produce innovations for an organization. Over time, they will get better at applying creativity to better and more adventurous recommendations.”
Teach and empower employees to notice and record what’s working, what isn’t working, and what isn’t even being addressed.
Ask questions, listen hard, and try on different roles to build empathic abilities.
Determine your unique metrics for tracking progress and record those metrics consistently.
And here’s the killer for lots of small business owners: if you can’t make it happen by yourself, ask for help. This article has mentioned just a few of the people who are ready and able to help you. Don’t let a great idea languish in your head for lack of time, personnel, or money. If it’s truly a great idea, the resources to make it real are out there.
Melisa Graham is the communications director at SPARK Publications, editor of b2bTRIBE magazine, author of Used Cow for Sale (a collection of poetry, mom, and wife.
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