InnovateWithKraft, as they are now taking ideas from anyone who’s got one to send in

Kraft is accepting ideas under this policy for new products, packaging, and business processes/systems only. We are most interested in ideas that are more than a concept, in particular new products & packages that are ready to be brought to market (or can be brought to market quickly).
Although we very much appreciate: recipes, entertainment ideas, ideas for line extensions for existing Kraft products or packages, ideas for advertising/promotions and the like, such ideas fall outside the scope of this policy–and thus will not be reviewed by our Innovations Team or considered for compensation.

There is more information about how it works (IP and compensation) in their PDF submission packet. You’ll notice the contact info for the SVP of Open Innovation. I’d link to Friday’s WSJ article that brought this initiative to my attention, but of course the WSJ online content is mostly pay-only, so I can’t link to it. Instead, you may want to read this anlysis

of Kraft’s efforts by Frank Piller, presumably a specialist in Open Innovation (admittedly a new term to me – can’t we just call it Innovation 2.0?).

Although I often take the role of curmudgeon, it was a pleasant surprise at Overlap

to see others taking that role. That said, I sometimes can be negative about those who are cheerleaders. One notable exception is when they are cheering for me, as in this post from Business Week’s Bruce Nussbaum, who calls me a “a really smart innovation consultant” while talking up the imminent Design 2.0 event where I’ll be speaking.

The word innovation continues to be devalued by overusage. Last night I saw two consecutive TV ads for ordinary consumer products using the buzzword right in their advertising: spray paint and kitty litter. We could debate whether these products are or aren’t innovative (and of course that requires the elusive definition of innovation) but my point is more that the word itself is seemingly being used without much discrimination, and of course, is rapidly losing value, being presented now as a commodity.

Krylon has even claimed the word for their corporate slogan. I thought 3M had that one already.

From Innovation Weblog (via The Business Innovation Insider)

Simply put, ethnography – as it applies to innovation – is the process of doing observational research, going into the field to watch how customers utilize your products. Often used in consumer new product research, ethnography is an excellent way to uncover new opportunities for product improvement.

For example, speaker Pam Rogers, who is corporate director of global customer excellence and innovation, explained how the inspiration for a pedestal/storage unit for its Duet front-loading washers and dryers came from observing a woman who had placed her Whirlpool dryer upon cinderblocks, to make it easier to load and unload it without having to bend over.

Okay, yes, I guess, but really, no. It’s not simply about observation. That seems to be the easy part to explain and so that’s the part that gets spoken about. I’ve written a bit about ethnography here

So often, companies go to the trouble of studying customers, only to address the opportunities revealed by usage. For example, an award-winning snow shovel was redesigned when the design team went out to watch how their product was being used, found that women instead of men were shoveling, and so they made the handle smaller.

But there’s much more that can be revealed. What is the shoveling occasion (or, if you will, ritual) really about? What meanings does it hold? Does it hearken back to childhood? Or does it represent female independence? Or the nurturing of motherhood? Or the abandonment by men? Probably it’s none of those, but the point is that within the ordinary activity of shoveling we can find deep meanings that can provide enormous opportunities for innovation as we question the basic assumptions about what the product could possibly be.

I’ve found the word ethnography to be a troubling one, frankly. It’s a mouthful, it reeks of academic snootery and hand-waving inconclusiveness. It’s gets confused with anthropology and various parties have tried to claim the pure methodology only for those with the right doctorate. And I’ve been an advocate for stepping aside from the word and pointing to the key elements (getting out of your own context, observing and interviewing, and synthesizing something new). But that is troubling for some.

Grant McCracken has written a strongly-worded piece about the coming-of-age of ethnography in business in 2006, and there’s a spirited discussion in the comments below his piece, including several entries from me, including one where I advocate ignoring the word and just getting to the root of it (as I said above). Grant doesn’t take too well to that.

It’s a very troubling issue that is perhaps eating away at the development of an excellent practice and community of practice around that excellence. But I do think the terminology wars and the discipline battles are painful, frustrating, and perhaps fruitless. I look at the “interface” community which has split into many different professional networks based on what term they agree with (IxD, UxD, UX, UD, IX, ID, etc.) or what end of the egg they prefer to break open.

Yesterday I was in a conference call with a prospective client. We were proposing some work and hadn’t used the word ethnography at all. An internal person from another part of the organization was very interested in displaying her own mastery of the research process, and made numerous references to some ongoing work as “my ethnography.” Only she couldn’t even comfortably pronounce ethnography. And she wasn’t doing it; she was sending it out to the “only” provider that did this, apparently (?). And what were they doing? Inviting cool kids to an art gallery in Miami. [Okay, I don’t get this at all].

At a conference the other week I participated in a side conversation that included this snippet “Oh that’s not ethnography, that’s just depth-interviewing.”

I may be coming around to Grant’s way of looking at this. We have a problem. I’ve got my explanation, sure, but so does everyone else, whether they have more experience than I do, or worse pronunciation than I do. We’ve got experts like the Innovation Weblog getting it badly wrong, Pam Rogers perhaps missing some of the point, my recent encounters (presumed experts in their own peer group?) with their own versions of what we’re doing, and on and on.

Unfortunately, I have no solutions. And I don’t see a culture that is ready to reach a solution, establish a common language, speak in one voice (not millions), establish standards, or even work together on this.

The Scott Cook (Intuit) CHI2006 plenary has been blogged

How one creates a culture of innovation.
GO out to your customers first and design from that.

This plenary is the story of why customer connectivity is hugely important – Cook insists this means not doing surveys which can reinforce the company’s existing mindset, but to get out into the customer’s actual space – to get out the old ideas and let new ideas come in

‘before you can walk a mile in someone else’s shoes you must first remove your own’

This way, claims Cook, lies innovation.

Conference blogging is the shit these days, especially liveblogging. This seems like it may have been an inspirational talk, but it’s a lot of work to plow through the (typical for this sort of thing) sloppy notes. Does this format/behavior add value? Is it buzz-generating (don’t you wish you were here?) or is it content sharing?

Update: An amazingly well-written essay based on this talk has been posted by Antonella Pavese.

AutoWeek takes a look at corporate culture, management structures, and the resulting impact on getting good stuff made and into customer’s hands. They focus on Honda’s flat organization and support for product development initiatives that come from staffers.

No big committees. No bureaucracies. No layers of decision makers reviewing the decisions of the previous layer of decision makers, who in turn, reviewed the decisions handed up from the previous layer.

“We empower people to make good decisions,” says Flint, who was chief engineer on the Ridgeline pickup. “If you can build the business case for something, you can pretty much run with it here.”

Fit Technologies designed a clothing sizing system that radically reduces complexity and confusion and helps guide shoppers to a product that will really fit their body type. But a better solution for consumers isn’t necessarily a better solution for retailers or manufacturers, and even though they are giving it a shot, it seems likely to fail.

Retailers that commit to it must find space for more merchandise, train workers to understand the new sizes and explain the new system to customers – a struggle for stores that already have few employees on the sales floor.

Then there is the reality, however counter-intuitive it may be, that retailers and clothing makers thrive off sizing confusion. Consumers who find a brand that fits are likely to stick with it and a standard sizing system would encourage them to visit other stores.

Just announced! I will be one of the panelists at Design2.0 – San Francisco.

The theme of the event is Products and their Ecosystems: Understanding the power of context in product innovation

Moderated by Jesse Scanlon of BusinessWeek
and in addition to myself, the speakers are:
Diego Rodriguez – IDEO, MetaCool
Peter Rojas – Engadget
Robyn Waters – RW Trend

I’m really looking forward to the event.

When I spoke at Easy6 earlier this year, some of the speakers reminded their audience that companies were doing business in India becaus of the innovation spirit, not because it was cheaper. There is some evidence that it’s actually cheaper elsewhere, even. I wondered at the time how much of that was just blowing smoke; a big lie that people have bought into so they can have pride and work hard and not be seen as America’s Call Center, etc. So it was cool to see an American perspective supporting that supposition in the New York Times.

Read-Ink, one of the self-financed operations, is developing an advanced handwriting recognition software that can read scanned forms, claim forms, medical records and even digital tablets.

Its founders, Thomas O. Binford, a retired computer science professor from Stanford University, and his wife, Ione, a former manager at Hewlett-Packard, arrived here four years ago with five suitcases. They say they are now close to signing up their first business customer.

The signs of this shift toward high-value work are becoming more visible. Executives at Silicon Valley Bank, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., and provides consulting services to technology and venture capital firms, said they were seeing twice as many Indian start-ups looking for capital investment than even a few months ago.

Great Wired piece

about involving ardent fans/customers in developing future products. Clearly, having the right attitude about your customers, and a whole lot of letting go is essential to innovation (okay almost a bad pun there, sorry).

The one key difference between the four panelists and actual Lego staffers: a paycheck. For their participation, Hassenplug and his cohorts received a few Lego crane sets and Mindstorms NXT prototypes. They even paid their own airfares to Denmark. That was fine by Hassenplug. “Pretty much the comment from all four of us was ‘They’re going to talk to us about Legos, and they’re going to pay us with Legos?'” Hassenplug says. “‘They actually want our opinion?’ It doesn’t get much better than that.”

and

Some Lego executives worried that the hackers might cannibalize the market for future Mindstorms accessories or confuse potential customers looking for authorized Lego products.

After a few months of wait-and-see, Lego concluded that limiting creativity was contrary to its mission of encouraging exploration and ingenuity. Besides, the hackers were providing a valuable service. “We came to understand that this is a great way to make the product more exciting,” Nipper says. “It’s a totally different business paradigm – although they don’t get paid for it, they enhance the experience you can have with the basic Mindstorms set.” Rather than send out cease and desist letters, Lego decided to let the modders flourish; it even wrote a “right to hack” into the Mindstorms software license, giving hobbyists explicit permission to let their imaginations run wild.

Soon, dozens of Web sites were hosting third-party programs that helped Mindstorms users build robots that Lego had never dreamed of: soda machines, blackjack dealers, even toilet scrubbers. Hardware mavens designed sensors that were far more sophisticated than the touch and light sensors included in the factory kit. More than 40 Mindstorms guidebooks provided step-by-step strategies for tweaking performance out of the kit’s 727 parts.

Lego’s decision to tap this culture of innovation was a natural extension of its efforts over the past few years to connect customers to the company.