Post By: Rick Ducey
Chief Strategy Officer, BIA

At a recent “boot camp for entrepreneurs” in Northern Virginia, Hewlett Packard’s strategy guy, Phil McKinney (VP/CTO, Personal Systems Group) offered up his interesting viewpoints on creativity and innovation. His presentation is available on his site at http://www.philmckinney.com/blog.html. He has a podcast on “killer innovations” which is awesome and highly recommended listening.

Here are some high points from Phil’s presentation on methods of creativity and sources of innovation:

· FIRE + PO as Innovation Engine

o Focus, Ideation, Ranking, Execution + Perspective, Observation refers to a method Phil recommends using to brainstorm, evaluate and act on innovative ideas.

o Focus – when you settle down to do brainstorming, pick topics that matter and leave irrelevant stuff for another day or someone else’s watch. For example, focus on generating ideas that:

§ Are likely to change the customer experience or expectations in some fundamental way.

§ Will reposition the competitive landscape or change barriers to entry.

§ Change the fundamental economics of the industry.

o Ideation – once you’ve set your focus, take to the white boards and flip charts and let the creative juices flow.

o Ranking – go back and consider . . .

§ What can you or your company do…what’s your unique contribution. Be honest, but be creative, you may surprise yourself.

§ Will your idea(s) generate sufficient margin (or market share or mind share or top line revenues…depending on your business objectives).

§ Rank your ideas on some scale and group them into ideas for action now or not.

o Execution – what will you do about your ideas? Phil recommends action, “Ideas without execution are a hobby.”

o Perspective – work on freeing yourself from making too many assumptions, allow yourself to be open to new perspectives. Baby boomers have a totally different notion of “privacy” than do Generation M kids who post, network and share online nearly all of what boomers would consider intimate life details.

o Observation – Put yourself in the shoes of your customers, be an observer of how they behave and interact. Since Phil’s in charge of HP’s consumer electronics and personal systems, he finds it very enriching to hang out at Best Buy or Circuit City and just watch his (hopefully!) customers go about their routines. Indeed, some market researchers are moving beyond surveys and interviews into the realm of participant-observer anthropology and actually move-in to live with consumers for several days…now that’s observation!

· Where does creativity and innovation come from? My company’s not big enough!

o Not so fast! According to Phil, small companies generate 14 times more patents per employee than big companies like Hewlett Packard.

o It’s true, even for the engineering-driven culture at HP, Phil says fully 40% of their innovation pipeline comes from outside HP. Phil’s goal is to take this to 50%.

Not only are small and medium sized companies more likely to come up with patented ideas, small companies come up with the high value patents. The top 1% of patents cited (e.g., as prior art) are twice as likely to come from small firms as from larger firms.

Technorati Profile

Tags: BIA Financial Network, FIRE, Personal Systems Group, Phil McKinney, PO, Rick Ducey

No Comment