Makinginnovationmore

I'm pissed off today.  I'm pissed off because our elected officials continue to denigrate entrepreneurs and business people.  Yesterday Nancy Pelosi, the democratic demogoge of Hollywood, lectured people about the iPhone.  Steve Jobs and Apple, she claimed, did not create the iPhone.  If this is true you must be wondering, well, how did they get all that revenue and profit then?  Pelosi went on to say that everything in the iPhone, all the technology, design, software integration, and all the rest, was a result of investments by the government.

I pause for a minute to relate a joke that will have some meaning at this point.  Bill Gates used to crack jokes about the automotive industry, saying that if GM and others had kept up with technology we'd be driving cars that get 100 miles per gallon and cost $1000.  GM responded that if Microsoft built cars then they would all crash twice a day for no reason whatsoever.

Perhaps we'll all stick to what we are good at and let others do what they do well - you know, Ricardo's Comparative Advantage?

At any rate, Pelosi, like a broken clock, is occasionally and partially correct.  The federal government, through a number of different research grants and, of course, a huge military budget that she abhors, drives a lot of primary research.  Some of that research led to things like software and hardware, although much of the semiconductor research that she claims for the government was done by Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby, working for private companies whose customers were primary the military.

So, as anyone who relies on the internet or semiconductors should readily admit, federal government investments in science and research are vital to driving new discoveries, and we rely far too heavily on investments made in the past and are shortchanging those research dollars now.  If Pelosi is so concerned about claiming the rights to new technologies and products perhaps she'll work more assiduously to fund more research dollars.

But I display my spleen and miss the larger point:  so what?  The Soviet Government paralleled the US Government during the space race.  It had thousands of its own scientists creating fascinating new research, as well as a number of German scientists it kidnapped (we did the same) after World War II.  The Soviets got to space first, which pushed the US into greater research.  If governments are responsible for innovation, we would all have thrived in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, right?  Hmm.  History doesn't seem to reflect that.

The point is that good research and even basic discoveries, while valuable, are inert without individuals and companies to convert them into valuable products.  Discovery of the transistor and semi-conducting materials isn't valuable unless someone takes a risk and creates new products or services based on those discoveries.  This is the difference between research, invention and innovation.

Pelosi and others may grind their teeth when Jobs claims to have invented the iPhone.  Well, as far as I can tell, he and others did, by combining a number of basic elements of science and integrating them into a package of solutions that people desired.  While Jobs may or may not have been particularly nice, he did create a product people wanted and were willing to spend money on.  Instead of denigrating him, she and others should celebrate the success and seek thousands of other innovators to translate raw science and research into new products and services.

What people like Pelosi don't understand is the distance from raw research to a product that people can use or purchase.  The government funded some research into semi-conducting materials, but private companies created the first transistors.  From there, other research indicated how to put more transistors on a chip, allowing engineers to shrink the package so we can actually carry equipment around with millions of transistors on it.  Of course there was also research into screen technology, battery technology, cooling technology and many other technologies.  None of this research is valuable until someone combines it into a product or service that people can use or benefit from.


And doing all that combining and integrating, as well as offering a product to the market, requires funding and risk.  Just ask Nokia, which had a perfectly good little near monopoly on cell phone handsets until Apple came along.  Apple took a big risk, bringing a product to market that competed with the largest firm in the sector at the time.  Like Jobs, hate him or be neutral about him, he saw an opportunity and created a product that stole share and claimed outsized revenues against an embedded competitor.

There are a few relatively hide-bound industries in the US that have to date been somewhat impervious to real innovation.  If you've followed this blog you know that I believe traditional retail banking is one of those industries.  Retail banking is already dead, it just doesn't know it yet.

Another industry ripe for innovation is the book publishing industry.  Sure, self-publishing is on the rise, and I published my last book (shameless plug alert!) OutManeuver with Xlibris, after finding out that the traditional book publishers would take nearly twice as long, and provide about the same amount of marketing support:  zero.  And before you accuse me of not fully understanding the traditional book publishing genre, let me also note that I had the good fortune to work with McGraw-Hill on a book (another shameless plug) entitled Relentless Innovation.  If you've ever tried to read a quarterly financial reconciliation from a book publisher, you'll know the definition of obfuscation.

But we've been down this road before.  Self-publishing was going to revolutionize the industry.  In reality it made it easier for more people to publish books, but does not increase substantially the amount of books bought or read, or reviewed for that matter, since EVERYBODY knows that only books that progress through the traditional publishing process deserve to be recognized and reviewed.  Fully tongue in cheek territory here.

Further, ebooks, e-readers and other technology were going to innovate and disrupt the industry.  The e-readers have had an impact on how and where people read, but I'm not sure they've really had an impact on the industry, other than to introduce new pricing and new distribution.

So if how books are published and how books are consumed haven't had an real impact, what other methods of attack will innovators create?  James Patterson, the prolific author of the Alex Cross series and many other books, has a potential answer:  shorter books.  Patterson is working with his "traditional" publisher on a new type of book, 150 pages or less, with the same plots and action.  Patterson believes that people want to read, just don't have the time for long books.  He calls these shorter books "bookshots" and several are ready to be published.  Now, this sounds good and I'd be happy to read some shorter books that get to the point quickly, because the industry has always said, especially for non-fiction business books, that they HAVE to be at least 200 pages, but as you and I can both attest most Malcolm Gladwell books were good for the first 40-50 pages and then were merely filler after that.  In fact many business books could be much shorter and to the point, but publishers have resisted this idea.

But this still raises the question:  is readership declining because books are too long, or for other reasons?  Will shorter books attract more readers?  I think the bookshot ideas toys at the margins, rather than attacks the real problem.  This is a case of inside-out innovation, where the traditional provider (Patterson and his publisher) spot a problem (declining book readership) and attempt to solve a symptom of the problem (no time or attention span).  They miss what I believe is the real problem:  interactivity. Through social media, especially Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other platforms, people are used to reading, but expect to drill deeply into links and hope to co-create on the fly.  To my way of thinking, traditional reading is simply too stodgy for many people who were raised on the screen and expect a level of interactivity that simply isn't possible on the printed page.


You may rebut this by pointing at the e-readers, but the level of connectivity and interactivity is limited and the traditional publishers shy away from co-creation, like links, comments and feedback.  When book publishing becomes a bit more like a Facebook page, with far more interactivity, co-creation, links to relevant information and other factors, that might force an entire rethink of book publishing.  I'm not sold on Patterson's shorter books philosophy, but hand it to the man, he's experimenting, and that's what a lot of these stodgy industries need - someone to force them to experiment.

I'm a sports guy.  I like all kinds of sports.  Grew up playing baseball, football and running track.  When my kids came along naturally they adopted other sports than the ones I was familiar with so I've learned to "love" swimming and soccer.  If you know swim meets you'll appreciate the joke we pass around our family:  I hope my last day on earth is at a swim meet, because they never end.

I grew up in an era where boxing was first a BIG DEAL, full of outsized characters, but eventually became a pariah, because boxing can be so brutal and bloody.  No boxer (at least not one played by Sylvester Stallone) commanded more attention, and moved people more than Muhammad Ali.  But, we come to praise Ali and not to bury him, as we remember his contributions to sport and to the way we live.  Today I'll argue that Ali embodies innovation, and his life is symbolic and perhaps an analogy for what innovators live and do.  Consider:

• Ali was born an African American in Kentucky during segregation, and was a boxer by the time he was 12.
• He refused entry to the draft during Viet Nam, ensuring the rage of many of his fans
• He converted to Islam under the instruction of Malcolm X, becoming Muhammad Ali
• He could "float like a butterfly" at a time when heavy weight fights were toe to toe slugfests
• While he had a powerful punch he could take punches as well, creating the rope-a-dope fighting style to wear out opponents
• At a time when most heavy weight fighters were stoic men of few words, Ali was his own publicist.  He held his own with Howard Cosell, something few men could do.
• After a lifetime of fighting, he became a figure beloved by many for his actions to help his fellow man.

I'm not Ali's biographer, but it seems to me that Ali chose a different path in every opportunity, choosing to break with convention and to reinvent himself, his sport and if it's not too much to say so the American experience. Ali invented or perfected a lot of new boxing techniques but also was a master of people outside the ring as well.  Yet every break with convention led to difficulties.

His choice of a new religion, especially under Malcolm X, was problematic for many.  His rejection of the draft was respected by younger people but rejected by many older people and many of his fans.  His brashness and outspoken behavior went against the mores of the time when there was still a lot of oppression of the African American community. In all of this Ali demonstrates the traits and potential outcomes of an innovator.

He created his own path, often to his own betterment and eventually the betterment of others.  His decisions we often misconstrued or unpopular, going against convention.  He had confidence in himself when others doubted his purpose.  He suffered for his decisions - losing several years of boxing during his prime because of his decision about Viet Nam.  Hundreds of boxers, other sports men and women and entertainers in general owe a debt to him that cannot be repaid, because he created a completely new way to interact with the public.  A man who had a lot of promise and who was constantly counseled to stay on the straight and narrow often took his own path, often bearing the burden of creating something new, seeing things that perhaps others could not see and maintaining confidence in himself.


A man who was often despised for his decisions in the moment, who stayed true to himself and his beliefs and who became beloved for his life and his actions.  If this isn't the experience of many innovators I'm not sure what is.  Bill Gates and the guys from Google may have had a shorter run to fame and riches, but they experienced the same ups and downs along the way, working under cover in a technology lab.  Ali did all that they did in a dangerous sport, in the public eye.  He's proof that innovation isn't just about new products, but about creating new experiences and new ways of thinking about life.

As a marketer who was first an engineer, I am often guilty of larding up my marketing content with facts about features.  As we used to say at Texas Instruments, I can quote "feeds and speeds" all day long.  We can talk about faster processors or larger memories, more sophisticated storage devices and the ability to stream video at close to the speed of light.  And so on.  Marketers should get pilloried for this nonsense, because we are selling the steak and not the sizzle.  Marketers who talk about product features forget that people buy products to solve problems or to achieve some stature.  They buy the benefits, in other words.  I've often said that in the end few people care HOW something gets done as long as it gets done effectively.

This marketing problem has now fully transitioned into an innovation problem.  The reason this is an analogous problem is because executives are moving through their organizations and talking to their boards about innovation, as if innovation is a deliverable, an outcome or a benefit.  It is, in fact, none of those things.  Innovation at its best is a continuous process, at worst an occasional activity, but in either sense it is the HOW of something, not the WHAT.  Innovation is a feature, what it creates should deliver benefits to someone.  Yet how quickly we forget.

To many organizations, the idea of innovation is enticing.  They look at other companies that are "innovative" and gaze admiringly on all the new products and services that drive more revenue and profit.   It seems that all one must do is claim to be innovative and more profits and revenue will accrue.  When that fails, the nascent innovator then decides to actually become more innovative, trying to generate new ideas and move them into product or service development.  This is when they discover that innovation is not a deliverable, and during the implementation of an innovation capability or culture it certainly isn't a benefit, because attempting to "bolt on" an innovation process to a competent efficient culture is like dropping a modern 8 cylinder engine into a Model T.  In theory it should work, but the results often aren't all that appealing.  And in case you were wondering about the analogy, the modern 8 cylinder refers to the existing corporate processes and practices, which operate on "all cylinders" efficiently.  The Model T is the structure you try to build to use the existing processes in a new way, to innovate, and it typically ends badly.

Innovation is a feature of an organization or a culture.  It is not a benefit to customers.  In fact to many customers new innovative products aren't benefits, because these new capabilities require existing customers to change.  Some will change gladly, some will change if forced and some will never change.  So innovation may require that you piss off a portion of your existing customers and acquire a bunch of customers who have been ignored or overlooked, or who never considered your solutions before.  You get these customers because the innovations you create have benefits that they want or need.  And, it's also necessarily true that more innovation does not lead to more benefits.  Incremental innovation extends existing benefits to some degree, so lots of incremental innovation does not guarantee a lot of new benefits.  This is why so many corporations consider innovation a failure - there's a lot of activity but not much motion, because all of the effort is constrained to such a small space.


Like any compelling phenomenon innovation has reached and passed its apex of awareness and promise and to some extent collapsed into the trough of disillusionment.  Now, new carnival barkers are promising better rewards through hyphenated innovation:  agile innovation, rapid innovation, design thinking innovation and so on.  Clearly, simple, general innovation is a significant disappointment, so we are working to re-categorize it rather than look at the misplaced expectations and lack of commitment.  Instead, simply strip it back to its base elements.  Ask:  what is innovation for?  What are we trying to deliver to customers?  What do they want or need?  Can we create that within our business, or must we rethink or re-imagine what our business is?  How disruptive must our thinking become?  What benefits does the customer need?  What problem must they solve?  What unmet needs could be addressed?  If you'll revert back to a simple question driven methodology, always keeping in mind that innovation is an activity or a feature, and not a deliverable or benefit, then innovation will take the place it rightfully occupies.

One of my recent pet peeves is the proliferation of education options for innovation.  One of my alma maters offers a "certificate" for innovation management.  While I cannot comment on the course, it is taught by two professors with little private sector experience who haven't created a product. One of them is a psychology major, which I guess makes sense because innovation is often the product of new or unusual insights or perspectives.

You'll forgive me for a startling lack of enthusiasm about many of these "educational" offerings.  There are several reasons for my skepticism:

1. Innovation is strange, unusual work, very different from what most people do day to day
2. It doesn't require great insight or difficult tools, but does require working against considerable resistance in existing cultures and customer expectations
3. You don't educate someone in "innovation", you educate them in a set of tools, expectations, perceptions and beliefs.  The combination of these factors enables innovation to occur.
4. No matter how much you train people, they can only implement the tools and techniques if they are allowed to
5. There is no commonly agreed innovation standard.  Perhaps the closest anyone has come is in Creative Problem Solving, which I would think is probably the best answer to innovation training.

We are what we do repeatedly

It is in our nature as corporate employees and those that serve them to follow well-trodden pathways.  One of these well-trodden and expected pathways is to "train" people on new tools and methods when introducing a new project or capability.  Most people in organizations are paid handsomely for their deep experience, and that's what they deliver every day.  When forced to confront new thinking and new tools, most will demand training to assist them to provide more expertise.  However, since most innovation is "one and done", the vast majority of people don't regularly exercise their innovation skills and experiences.  Thus, training is often ineffective because the tools that are learned aren't regularly engaged in consistent, repeated innovation activities.

The complete lack of standards

Imagine a world where every automobile had a different type of engine.  Your one goal in life is to become the best auto mechanic, yet every car that drives into your shop has a different engine. Some are four cylinder gasoline engines.  Some are eight cylinder diesel engines.  Some are hybrids, some are electric, some are powered by natural gas.  In this world you'd respond by becoming a virtuoso in one type of engine, say compressed natural gas engines, or you'd hire a plethora of people who could reasonably address a wide array of engine options.  Such is the nature of innovation activity today.

Without an agreed standard, and considering the wide array of potential outcomes for innovation (incremental to disruptive, products, services, business models, experiences and channels to name only a few), there is no one way to do innovation, and so many variations as to make training impossible, except in very narrow capabilities or tools.  I suspect it's probably possible to become an expert in Voice of the Customer techniques, but this is simply one of several ways to get customer insight, which is just one of several phases of a complete innovation activity.

A completely new way of thinking

Innovators argue about the metaphor of "inside the box" thinking.  Some believe that using the concept of "inside the box" is helpful because innovation is always bounded by constraints.  Others believe that the concept of a "box" is difficult, getting outside the box helps expand possibilities and introduce adjacencies.  Innovation is enabled by specific tools (trend identification and analysis, scenario planning, customer insight generation, open innovation, idea generation, prototyping, etc) but give me a person with an open, curious and inquisitive mind and I can move the innovation world, even without any of the other tools.  A careful, cautious plodder who is deeply immersed in all of the innovation tools, who has every "certificate" known to man but cannot release the thinking bonds that constrain them is worthless on a true innovation exercise.  They are people who know everything and can apply nothing because their horizons are too small.  Good innovation requires the courage to conduct new thinking, explore new opportunities, question the status quo.  In fact that's what innovation really is, questioning why we do things the way we do, and seeking opportunities to radically reshape how and what we do, to the benefit of customers and ourselves.  If you can't think differently, all the training in the world is useless.

Born, or Made?

Now, if you are still with me, you might be thinking that I am going to make the argument that innovators are born, not made.  You'd be wrong on that point.  There is no innate innovation gene, although clearly some people have more interest in exploration and discovery.  Some people are more creative than others.  Some people are really good at dreaming up new stuff.  That's all true as far as it goes, but neglects the fact that creativity and exploration must be linked to rationalization and implementation of the good ideas in order to solve a problem for a customer and to make money.  Innovators aren't born but they are shaped, more by experience than by training.  Of course we can provide some training in any tool or technique, and try to enlarge the way people think when they encounter an innovation exercise.  But the best way to make an innovator is to give them an intractable problem and remove the constraining barriers.  Encourage them to think differently and come up with novel ideas.  And, once they've done that, do it again.  We can make innovators, but not just by training, but also through engagement.  Innovators are workers who get their hands dirty.  Does your certificate come with some washing up powder and examples of the innovations you created?  If not, you are an observer of other people's innovation, and need to do some work of your own.

Can you teach people to innovate?

The answer to this question is:  no.  You cannot teach people to innovate.  You can teach them tools and techniques like TRIZ or trend spotting.  You can teach them process methodologies that lead them from customer needs to ideas to prototypes to customer validation tests.  You can teach them to think about innovation outcomes that are more disruptive or radical than incremental change.  You can show them Doblin's Ten Types model to help them think through the potential outcomes of an innovation activity.  But until they understand that innovation is a holistic implementation of all of these factors, and requires them to release their fear, uncertainty and doubt, you are hammering jello to a wall.  It will not stick.  The wall must be removed as the knowledge is applied.


People can innovate.  What we can do is accelerate, simplify and make their innovation activities more productive and efficient through tools and techniques.  But what we cannot do is remove fear, uncertainty, corporate constraints and a lack of executive commitment.  We cannot force organizations to sustain innovation activities so the work is repeated until it becomes familiar and eventually second nature.  So the real question is: can we teach organizations and corporate cultures to innovate?  We know the answer to this is yes, but few companies have the time and patience to make the change that's necessary.

I've been puzzling this over the last few weeks, trying to wrap my head around the importance of innovation generally and the lack of real innovation delivery specifically.  What I mean is that everyone knows that innovation is vital to growth and future success, but very few new innovations are created. The vast majority of innovation effort and outcome is expended on me-too, so what incremental innovations that don't really change the user or the market.

I think the main problem with innovation - real innovation, that is, the kind that creates disruptive new products or introduces new channels or business models - is that it requires change.  And there's little that corporate structures, cultures and executives fear more than change.  They don't like change that's thrust upon them, and they certainly don't like change that is created internally without an exceptionally good reason.  In fact one could argue that in many ways midsized and larger companies are completely conservative - using the definition that conservatives seek to conserve frameworks and ideas that currently exist and those from the past.  Depending on the type, scale and proposed innovation outcome, innovation can create a small amount of change or a significant amount of change, and we know how difficult change is, even in organizations that are ready to change.

Change introduces another dimension to this discussion:  the concept of reactive or proactive change.  Most organizations change in a reactive fashion, because they are forced to change because of external factors or competitive threats.  The best kind of change is proactive change, which can be carefully planned and implemented through a change management process.  This description should ring true for innovators as well.  In a nice bit of parallelism, innovation can be reactive or proactive.  When innovation is reactive, a company is playing "catch up" and has no choice but to innovate, working against its own cultural fears of change.  When innovation is proactive, the change that will spill over out of the innovation activities can be planned for and managed accordingly.

Note then that any innovation activity, no matter how small or large, has secondary and tertiary effects beyond simply creating a new product, service or business model.  Innovation creates change, which ripples throughout the organization, far beyond the intended customer targets.  The more the ripple effect, the more people are impacted, the greater the resistance, especially if the team is not prepared for the change.

Knowing all this innately if not expressly, most managers and executives wish for the impossible: innovation without change.  Most executives are expressly conservative (using the definition above), good at conserving the status quo and tinkering mostly at the edges.  Most innovation, however, is innately radical or disruptive, changing not simply the end product or service, but often having a much larger impact, causing teams to question the targeted segments, product portfolios and even business models.  No wonder most innovation comes from outside the conventional players in an industry.  Entrants have little regard for existing conventions or norms, and are interested in disrupting those norms for their own benefit, while incumbents seek to protect the industry and at best want to manage change slowly.

Here's the final analysis:  if your organization fears change, resist change or is slow to embrace change, anything other than incremental innovation will be difficult if not impossible.  This truism should cause most executives to lose a lot of sleep, because the future of business is far more dynamic and unpredictable than the recent past, and the pace of change is only accelerating.  The companies that will innovate the best are those that are open and willing to change.  Those that are focused on preserving the past had better have a very defensible position, or be in niche markets, because change is inevitable, and innovation will often be its ignition.


You may have some change without innovation.  You will have very little innovation without change.  Those that can change can innovate, but will still need skills, creativity, time and patience.  Those that cannot or will not change should not bother to innovate.

I find that I've become increasingly irritated with all of the narrow interpretations and self-serving definitions of what is, or isn't, innovation.  I'm happy to climb up on a soapbox again to talk about one of the most common scapegoats for innovation, the act of brainstorming.  No other activity is more miscast, more often blamed for failure, or more often denigrated.  Strange that the activity that should be the easiest, most natural activity in an innovation process is singled out as the most complex, difficult and dangerous.  But fact alone highlights how poorly understood the entire innovation process is.  So I rise today to neither praise nor bury brainstorming, but to place it in its proper context.

The Purpose of Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a technique that allows individuals or small groups to generate ideas.  Brainstorming resides in an activity or phase that we call Idea Generation, which in turn sits in the larger context of innovation.  In an appropriately defined and designed innovation journey, idea generation is preceded by activities like trend spotting and scenario planning, to understand the unfolding future and emerging opportunities, and by customer insight generation, to gain new understanding about what customers want, need and are willing to pay for.  Conducting idea generation without these leading activities is like assembling an IKEA desk without the instructions or those crazy little Allen wrenches.  You can do it, it just won't be done well.

Brainstorming is a group technique to generate, socialize and evaluate ideas. It is not the only idea generation technique.  Any interested person can find other approaches to generate ideas.  Further, brainstorming is not absolutely required for an innovation activity.  You can easily and safely complete an innovation activity without ever conducting brainstorming.  In those cases you may find other means to generate ideas, or you may be using "open innovation" to undercover ideas, products or technologies that already exist.

So, why beat up so much on one tiny step in an innovation activity, that as you can see is not necessarily required, and where substitutes or alternatives exist?  Why so much hate for brainstorming?

Love it or Hate it

Brainstorming is universally mocked because most organizations don't plan for it effectively, don't conduct it honestly, and most attendees don't treat it as important.  Once everyone has agreed to avoid any investment in brainstorming, what else can it be than a failure?  Brainstorming, or any group idea generation technique, is only as viable and useful as the planning and commitment that go into it.  If we committed the same time and energy to designing a building that we do to planning a brainstorm, you'd never safely set foot in another building.

A brainstorming activity is simply a meeting with a specific purpose - to generate ideas. Everyone knows this.  But what they don't often know is:  what kinds of ideas will be acceptable?  How disruptive or incremental should the ideas be?  What research or background has been developed?  Are we repeating old ideas or trying to discover new ones?  Can we generate ideas that are really divergent, or represent other outcomes like business models?  Without preparation, everyone assumes that the least common denominator rules apply, and all ideas are incremental and boring.

Plus, many brainstorms aren't meant to generate ideas, they are meant to give cover to a direction or solution that was already decided.  The brainstorming activity is simply a thin veneer to provide some validation on a course of action that was previously decided.

Without preparation, without defining the potentially viable outcomes, without providing the research or background, and without demonstrating that there is no ulterior motive, how could any meeting succeed?

Individuals are better than groups

Now, someone reading this diatribe is going to say "what about all the research that shows that people are better individually than in groups at idea generation".  And yes, there is research to show that people are sometimes better at generating ideas individually than in groups.  All that says is 1) brainstorming can be an individual tool rather than a group tool and 2) in some instances groups are less functional than individuals.  Have you seen the 2016 presidential race?  Groups are often poor decision makers where information is less than perfect.

But here's the rub:  in large organizations it's almost impossible for one person with a good idea to get anything done.  Large organizations require the ability to create and disseminate ideas, and get people to back the idea.  Thus, all innovation is a group dynamic in a large organization, and group brainstorms serve other purposes besides generating ideas.  They also serve to socialize ideas, validate and vet ideas and even evaluate ideas in a group setting, where more people mean more perspectives - assuming of course that you've got a heterogeneous team, where different perspectives are valued.  This is of course another problem with innovation generally, and brainstorming or group activities specifically:  most teams are far too homogeneous in their formation, thinking and perspectives.

Fit for purpose

Ideally, the best situation you can find yourself in is when the tools you use are fit for the purpose you have.  For example, a pocket knife can help you chop down a small tree, but how much better is an axe, or even a chain saw to do the same job?  Likewise, if we think carefully about what our actual goals are, brainstorming and other idea generation techniques are actually very well fit for larger purposes.

If your purpose is simply to generate a lot of ideas, use a random number generator.  If your goal is to socialize needs, generate solutions, socialize and build on those solution, validate and evaluate those solutions and leave a meeting with more buy-in than was possible beforehand, brainstorming might be the best fit for purpose.

What many corporate types want out of a brainstorm is simply words on paper, to be interpreted in whatever way they eventually want to interpret the "ideas".  Participation is welcome but not necessarily encouraged, especially ideas or submissions that deviate from the expected path.   These meetings don't emphasize socialization or buy-in, because the sponsors aren't looking for your support.  They have an idea and intend to pursue it, regardless of the outcomes.  And most savvy corporate types can recognize when the fix is in and play along, hoping one day that the same people will show up to their idea generation activities and play the same roles.

What outcomes do you expect

A brainstorm, like any other tool, can be effectively used or used in a disastrous way.  Those who would blame the tool neglect the old aphorism that states that only a poor craftsman blames his or her tools for a poor outcome.  If you aren't getting the results you hoped for, check your assumptions.  Either you've defined the activity too narrowly (or not at all), you've failed to provide the research that will lead to understanding of the problem or challenge, your teams are too homogeneous or you are using brainstorming to validate an outcome you've already decided on, rather than discovering something new.

Done well, with good preparation, good advanced reading and scoping, the right people with the right commitments and attitudes and effective leadership, good brainstorming is dynamic and creates ideas that take the team to new places.  If you read the buildup of that sentence you'll realize that all the predicates (good prep, good pre-reads, the right people with the right commitment) are prerequisites for any new activity.  In other words there's an investment required to do brainstorming, and it should be placed in its proper context - just after all the discovery necessary to find emerging needs and validate that customers have those needs, and just before building out prototypes and testing them in the market.  Again, brainstorming is a connected activity, with predicates and follow on activities closely linked, not a discrete, one-time, stand alone activity.


So, the next time your "brainstorming" fails to deliver, or you are dissatisfied with the outcomes, instead of searching for validating reasons that describe why brainstorming is so inept, first consider the role brainstorming plays in your innovation activity, and whether or not it is fit for your purpose.