3rd Strategic Innovation Forum, 21st & 22nd March 2007, Barcelona

Amongst the salubrious surroundings of the Hotel Majestic in Barcelona, the GBG Strategic Innovation Forum proved to be a useful insight into the increasingly important and valued area of Business Innovation.

Now in its 3rd year, the forum brought together experts in the areas of Innovation, R&D and Strategy, to discuss how to turn creative ideas into products and/or value for different organisations. There is a growing belief that, in terms of business emphasis, what quality was to the 1950s, and safety was to the 1980s, innovation will be for the 2000s.

Hotel Majestic, Barcelona

Innovation used to be a closed shop, indigenous to individual companies and protected jealously. But the benefits of opening up the processes and ideas and sharing them across industries have been highlighted in recent times, and there is a new mindset of ‘open innovation’, of which this forum was a part.

As a result, the conference was well attended, with barely a spare seat in the auditorium. Representatives from companies as diverse as Shell, Telefonica and Airbus enjoyed presentations by speakers from such well-known organisations as Intel, Proctor & Gamble, SonyEricsson, Nestle and GE.

Many of the presentations gave an insight into how individual organisations approach Innovation, in terms of its application, but also its alignment to the core business goals. Some examples of successful innovation strategies and/or products were given, showing the process that was followed and the obstacles that were overcome. But throughout the two days of the forum there were several themes that recurred and seemed universal.

Management buy-in, also a critical success factor for Six Sigma deployments, is certainly one of those; not just to companies, but also to any kind of business improvement methodology. Justifying costs to be spent on something as intangible and difficult to quantify as Innovation can prove difficult, and this issue was discussed by several speakers, who gave some suggestions on how best to do this, including utilising open innovation for quick results, and ensuring that innovation is turned into visible and profitable patents. The need for effectively gauging the viability of an idea as early in its development as possible, so as to avoid unnecessary costs, is also vital. Once it is obtained, the commitment from top-level Management should be clearly defined and, if possible, measured.

The different kinds of innovation and how and when to best use them was also discussed. Radical Innovation creates a new product or fundamentally re-designs an existing one, and is usually instigated by an exceptional individual. Incremental Innovation, on the other hand, is a more evolutionary process and much more team-based. A good example of these is the genesis of the camera: going from the film-based SLR to the modern digital camera was a radical innovation. Subesequent improvements to the quality of the digital camera in terms of size and picture quality (megapixels) is an incremental innovation. Both kinds of innovation should be sought and employed within any successful innovative culture, though it is understandably difficult to build-in Radical Innovation to the Innovation process.

The new mindset of open innovation, as mentioned earlier, is perfectly demonstrated within the telecoms industry, which was well-represented at the forum. For telecoms, Innovation must be a melting pot between the various organisations within the industry, as one of them alone does not have the means to bring a major new innovation to the table; it must be a collaboration. But this approach has proved beneficial for all concerned in terms of both innovation and profits. And not just in technical collaboration like digital cities and peer-to-peer innovation: personal collaboration, for instance networking and benchmarking, is vital in terms of innovation and quality.

Changing mindsets is a vital part of creating a thriving culture for innovation to be accepted and to grow. It is difficult to change the accepted – though not frequently discussed - mindset that it is better for individuals within organisations to under-promise in order to over-succeed, in relative terms, so as not to risk being potentially perceived as failure. This attitude, however, is the antithesis of innovation. To be truly innovative, the freedom to fail and move forward by learning from that failure should be given.

Finally, great emphasis was placed on focusing on people. It is the people of the organisation who enable innovation, and the people who buy the products who determine whether it is a success or failure. There are many examples of products that were, in the scientific or business sense of the word, truly innovative, but were spectacularly unsuccessful because they were not wanted by the consumer. Successful, innovative companies should focus on the people – outside and inside their organisation – in order to gain a greater insight into the consumer experience and leverage innovation as a result.

Like the Six Sigma Forum in Amsterdam, this event was well organised and facilitated by GBG. Overall this nformative and interesting conference provided value to all who attended.