Road Trip to Innovation

// ROAD TRIP TO

INNO VATION

HOW I CAME TO UNDERSTAND FUTURE THINKING

Delia Dumitrescu POWERED BY TRENDONE

Road Trip to Innovation – How I came to understand Future Thinking is an investigative tale about a friendly and curious mind that sets-off on a road trip to find out what innovation is truly made of. Highlighting expert interviews and companies that are heralded for their know-how in the fields of future studies, innovation and trend research, the book offers an introduction to the theory and methodology behind these complicated notions in easy and refreshing language.

What is innovation?

ALL ON BOARD?

The future thinking mindset Trends The Diffusion Theory

08 the basics

Weak Signals

WHERE DO IDEAS COME FROM?

Microtrends Macrotrends Megatrends Consumer Insights Trend Consulting

GOT THE TRENDS. WHAT NOW?

Future Illustration The Innovation Cockpit Scenarios & Wild Cards Design Thinking

HOW TO BUILD STRATEGIC FUTURES?

Stepping into strategic stuff Forecasting Strategic Foresight Strategic Planning

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ideation

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transformation A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF INNOVATION? Watch Think Interpret Act LaFutura The Innovation Alliance A new nature of innovation

ROAD TRIP PROPS

The Trend and Future Dictionary Acknowledgements Sources Index About the author & TrendONE

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the f u t u r e n av i g at o r

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// WHAT CAN THIS BOOK DO? Road Trip to Innovation – How I came to understand Future Thinking is a book about understanding ways of approaching and building innovation. The road trip itself is part of the narrative of the book as I travel from city to city, interviewing people in order to find out, together with you dear reader, the following: what does innovation encompass, how to spot trends, how to use trends for creating innovative products, services and strategies, how companies approach innovation in terms of method (e.g.: design thinking, trend consulting) and how are trends transformed in a strategic asset inside companies (e.g.: strategic foresight, strategic planning, forecasting).

The book will offer an introduction into the field of future studies and targets to raise awareness of the innovation and trend research industry. It will explain complicated notions in easy language and with a friendly approach. Road Trip to Innovation – How I came to understand Future Thinking also has educational purposes for students and trainees; it offers a holistic view on methods and tools for building innovation to young managers setting up innovation strategy in their companies and furthermore, it is a good introduction to the trends and innovations industry for anybody who is interested in the topic.

My findings are based on literature review and data drawn from interviews and case studies of companies in Europe and the United States. The interviews were conducted with companies that encompass a broad spectrum of approaches and with people of varied backgrounds, as I believe in the power of poly-social groups.

Why all these companies and why these people? There is no financial reason.

They were either found by natural research (a.k.a. appeared first in the Google search engine) or recommended by Nils MĂźller, as he is the engine behind this book, mentoring me and connecting me with people from the industry. There is no advertising reason; they are just some examples out of several interesting companies that are out there.

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No.01

creative idea The Future Navigator that stands for all the contents of this book with methods, tools and applications of the innovation process was created and inserted in this book at the end. It started as a plain piece of paper with two arrows that cross each other. It was gradually filled with the approaches presented in this book in order to start a conversation regarding their meaning and purpose. It can be looked at as a chess table. Anybody who has additional information and strong motivations can modify it.

Road Trip to Innovation – How I came to understand Future Thinking is the fruit of my thinking on all the aforementioned subjects: It is based on the literature that I’ve read and the fascinating and intelligent people that I’ve spoken with. As we are all different, special and unique persons, anyone could write this book in their own way and interpret things according to their own dimensions. This is a first published wave from the sea of opinions.

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innovation

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roadtrip to innovation

all on board?

The Basics What is innovation? 12 The future thinking mindset 16 Trends 22 The Diffusion Theory 29

Tensta Konsthall by frontdesign.se

the basics

// WHAT IS INNOVATION? [ĭn’ -vā’sh n] 1 the introduction of something new; 2 a n e w i d e a , m e t h o d , o r d e v i c e : n ov e lt y. e

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Innovation is a change; it is “new stuff that is made useful” as Max McKeon writes in his book The Truth About Innovation. Therefore, the innovation process, in this book, refers to the journey one has to make in order to obtain a new, cool, innovative idea and how to manage it. In a nutshell, it is about how to get the idea and what you can do with it to make it valuable.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report on the New Nature of Innovation states that a new nature of innovation is emerging. How? “Innovation is no longer mainly about science and technology. Firms can innovate in other ways. Co-creation, user involvement, environmental and societal challenges increasingly drive innovation today.

Collaborative, global networking and new public private partnerships are becoming crucial elements in companies’ innovation process.”

In the early 1990s innovation equaled product development; this approach was actually much too narrow. But the modern approach is also problematic because the plasticity of this term turned the meaning of innovation into a catch phrase.

Nowadays, everything that is providing value for a company is being referred to as an innovation. For some companies it may be as simple as gathering around for a pizza on a Friday night at the office in order to create a better organizational climate thus internally providing a better basis for innovation and creativity. As for others, it cannot be called innovation until the brilliant idea that provides value is marketed – like creating an app that tells you the ingredients of the pizza just by scanning the barcode of the box.

So, it all depends on how deep you go into the term of innovation, if just about anything can be interpreted as an innovation. But it shouldn’t be this way. In my opinion, the prior example dilutes its powers.

the basics

THE FIRST AIRPLANE These days it seems that innovation as a noun has been thrown into so many contexts that it has become hype. This makes it difficult for its meaning to be securely locked in a box. For this reason, it becomes subjective and highly interpretative. The good thing is the popularity of the word can only do well to the world. Innovation turns out to be the source and, in the same time, the target for more and more strategies. Martin Kruse, futurist at the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies (CIFS), states that “research into innovation offers insights that can benefit everyone working with organizational development, management, finance or product development.”

Defining what innovation means was giving me a hard time. Every answer I got was competing in being more poetic than the one before. Here is one particularly poetic definition coming from the Future Driven Innovation paper from CIFS: “Shakespeare calls Man the ‘paragon of animals’, the greatest work in the history of evolution. This is because we have a brain with 100 billion cells and so the ability to change the world around us to give ourselves a better chance of survival. We develop ourselves through creative production, a process that, since the dawn of financial markets, has been known as innovation.”

From the same source, here comes the practical definition: “Innovation has historically been regarded as inventing a new product, producing it and putting it on the market. It is the result of a creative process with emphasis on value creation.

Today, innovation can happen anywhere in the company. The value created can be internal, as is the case with human resources, or directed out to the customer as a product on the shelf. The point is that value is created and reaches the customer in some way.”

What is important to understand from the start is that there is a difference between innovation and having a creative idea. Both processes can be innovative in their own way but we shouldn’t confuse them. Kruse told me a little story that helps to keep in mind the difference between the two processes.

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the basics

The first airplane was actually visualized by Leonardo da Vinci in the 1480s.

That was just a creative idea. The idea became an invention when the Wright brothers made a plane out of it, which lifted from the ground in 1903. But the airplane, at that point, was still not an innovation because it was not yet marketed.

Twenty-one years later, Continental Dusters (which subsequently became part of Delta Airlines) gave the airplane its first commercial use, dusting crops. This is the point in history when the airplane became an innovation.

Similar points of view to Kruse’s are those of Richard Florida and Martin Kenney, in their book from 1990, The Breakthrough Illusion: Corporate America’s failure to move from innovation to mass production, consider invention as a breakthrough and innovation as an actualization.

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the basics

// THE DIFFUSION THEORY

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Diffusion is very well linked with the tipping point theory. You’ll see why.

Academics call the process by which new ideas or products are accepted by groups of people, The Diffusion of Innovation. The term is coined in 1962

by Everett Rogers, professor at University of Mexico. He set up five steps of the diffusion process and he also tried to build some criteria by which innovations spread out faster. He explores how the social environment influences the way a new innovation spreads. This is what it looks like:

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early followers

early majority

late majority laggards

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WEAK SIGNALS

Elina Hiltunen

Weak Signals are signals of emerging issues.

HOW TO BOIL A FROG If you drop a frog into a kettle of boiling water it will definitely try to escape.

The reason being the temperature difference is too extreme (20°-100°). However, if you put a frog in a kettle of water at room temperature and then start to slowly warm the water, the frog will hardly even notice when the water starts to boil.

The moral of this story: we easily adapt to changes; we may not even notice them if they happen gradually. With this funny and insightful tale I began my morning discussion with Elina Hiltunen in Helsinki.

Elina Hiltunen, founder of What’s Next Consulting, carried out her doctoral thesis about using weak signals in organisational environment and has been interested in this subject since 1998. She is now Finland’s leading expert on weak signals and focuses on issues like anticipating and innovating future changes by utilising them. Through weak signals (the first bubbles in the water as it heats) one can foresee changes.

While talking to Hiltunen, I started to understand what this weak signal thing is all about and how they are useful futures tools for companies. Elina offers companies methods, education and inspiring lectures about weak signals, which she briefly defines as signals of emerging issues. In practice, she explains, “they can be news stories or observations about technological and social innovations, posts in the social media, observations of novelty products in exhibitions, or simply a modest wall-sticker of an alternative movement”.

Igor Ansoff, a Russian American applied mathematician and business manager who is known as the father of strategic management, coined the term ‘weak signals’ in 1975 and, according to him, it is “the early detection of those signals that could lead to strategic surprises and to an event that has the potential to jeopardize an organization’s strategy”.

On a more proactive note, weak signals mean that today’s information can foretell the changes in the future. Nik Baerten, future explorer at Pantopicon, a studio of future explorers based in Belgium, expounds on the subject on their blog: “Change often starts with a ripple before it turns into

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the trend & future dictionary

THE TREND&FUTURE DICTIONARY A collection of definitions picked up from interviews, articles, books and blogs discovered and used during the road trip.

WEAK SIGNALS News stories or observations about technological and social innovations, posts in the social media, observations of novelty products, or simply a modest wallsticker of an alternative movement.

Weak signals are current oddities, strange issues that are thought to be in key position in anticipating future changes in organizational environments. / E. Hiltunen e.g. H&M starts selling vintage clothes.

MEGATRENDS Last decades, affect many different aspects of society, and involve a complex process that often includes politics, economy and technology. e.g. Sustainability

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TREND The general direction in which something tends to move.

MACROTRENDS Pattern-based understanding of past and present, help to determine the likelihood of future events. Their life span is five to ten years. e.g. Fair Trade

macrotrend

microtrend

MICROTRENDS Concrete examples of marketed inovations: technologies, products, start-ups etc.

Life span of 1-2 years until they develop into a stronger trend or disappear completely.

A microtrend is something new, intelligent, mass-market ready and structure changing. e.g. Ben&Jerry‘s fair tweets: Ben & Jerry‘s and Twitter use every unused character by automatically adding a message linked to the tweet. The aim is promoting fair trade.

the trend & future dictionary

CONSUMER INSIGHTS A fresh and not-yet obvious understanding of customer beliefs, values, habits, desires, motives, emotions or needs that can become the basis for a competitive advantage. / M. Sawhney.

Insight is about what’s happening in the space between the consumer and the product, his key motives, drivers and barriers.

Spotted through close observation, empirical research and direct content with the consumer. e.g. People startig to consume regional

USER DRIVEN INNOVATION Customers are observed to understand how they work with the product and what unrecognized needs they have. / Design Thinking is a broader approach and describes a whole process while User Driven Innovation just indicates that the user is integrated in your project development.

User-initiated innovation: the tion consumer creates or improves innova a product. Von Hippel called this ‘user innovation’.

products being away from their hometwon.

Insight: people are feeling home-sick.

DESIGN THINKING A human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success. / D. Brown.

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CREATIVE THINKING The term innovation is often used to refer to the entire process by which an organization generates creative new ideas and converts them into novel, useful and viable commercial products, services, and business practices, while the term creativity is reserved to apply specifically to the generation of novel ideas by individuals or groups, as a necessary step within the innovation process. / Wikipedia

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If there is one single book I recommend to get a joyful taste of what the work in the fields of innovation and trends is like, then it is this impressive work by Delia Dumitrescu. She tells the story of her mental and physical learning trip and easily manages to shed light on and give answers to most of the pivital questions an outsider would ask.

Dr. Pero Mićić, CEO FutureManagementGroup

‘Road Trip to Innovation’ is a fun to read, non-pretentious exploration into the world of innovation told through a refreshing and honest voice.

It’s not about making grandiose statements, it simply gathers and compiles information from the movers and shakers of innovation into one comprehensive look; and more often than not, that’s all you want and need – simple, honest, and comprehensive.

Susan M. Choi, Director of Strategy + Innovation, CScout Inc.

As a ‘Trend Passionionate’ person I love to work with insights and trends as inspiration for idea and concept development.

The term ‘trends’ covers a broad variety of definitions. This is both chance and confusion simultaneously.

For my daily innovation work I aspired a kind of navigation tool. ‘Road Trip to Innovation’ is the perfect synergy of this type of tool: educational and beneficial concerning the various perspectives of future research and it is fun to read – be inspired!

Jens Bode, International Foresight Manager at Henkel AG & Co. KGaA

ISBN 978-3-00-035736-7