Innovation - Robert B. Tucker. Istana Hotel, June 28, 2010

Over the weekend I visited iCity at Shah Alam with my family. My daughter asked me what is the ‘i’ in the iCity stand for? I started to play with the letter ‘i’ to get myself to decipher what word it represents. Of course it is ‘i’ for Innovation, Innovation city. Their intention is good but I am not sure the implementation is right. At first when I saw the light trees there I thought they were made out of LCD or LED lights. On closer look they were from different sizes of normal light bulbs. Well they were still creative but I am not sure I could say innovative as well.

Today I attended a ‘Guru Talk on Innovation’ and the Guru was Robert B. Tucker. Well, I reserved my comment of the guru thing.

According to the ‘Guru’

Lightning might strike but you need to work at being innovative and a certain framework and processes need to be in place for it to happen. You could guess that the Guru came with his trademarked framework. No, I have no complaint on that but if we were to be honest with ourselves it is quiet common and the bottomline is to do it. Lets walk the innovation talk.

According to materials provided the best practices for innovation

1. Making innovation a systematic process
2. Implementation idea management system
3. Collaboration with stakeholders
4. Creating metrics and measures
5. Involving everyone in the organization

In the business world there are three types of Innovation from the perspective of Products, Process, Strategy and they are;

• Breakthrough
• Substantial
• Incremental

One thing I like most about being innovative is the statement ‘Innovation is about collaborating and collaborating is additive’.

Robert shared with us what he thinks as the required innovation skills.

1. Embracing opportunities
2. Be a good collaborator, leaders in Collaboration
3. Assault your assumptions - Become aware of your own assumptions, Ask five ‘why’ questions, Ask for a 3rd option, Look for solutions outside your industry, Invite yourself to think bigger
4. Passion for the stakeholders
5. Think ahead of the curve and the tools are Technological, Demographic, Social, Economics, Environmental, Regulatory

Take Home Values

• Look for patterns of change
• Audit your information diet
• Do ‘ deep dives’ on emerging issues
• Improve your networking skills
• Host ‘all things considered’ meetings
• Fortify your idea factory
• Harvest for ideas
• Identify what gets your creative juices flowing

‘All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist when they grow up.’ - Pablo Picasso

On The Train, (Innovation), Oct. 5, 2006

I learned for Dave Snowden today that there are basically three things that can bring about innovation.

1. Starvation of familiar resource, forcing you to find new approaches, doing things in a different way. My example may not be appropriate but when I saw the word starvation instantaneously I remember the time when I was in school how creative we were when we were hungry. Interesting enough according to Dave creativity is not innovation but one of the processes that enables innovation. One of the things that I did was to go around every rooms to collect whatever loose change anybody could spare and at the end of the round I got enough for me to go out to town to watch movie and have a decent lunch :))
2. Pressure that forces you to engage in the problem. We work under pressure all the time and most of the time we delivered. My MDC days are good examples. When someone says that he or she works best under pressure this is what they mean. I can relate to that now. Again this may not be the best example to describe this but you know what I mean.
3. Perspective shift to allow different patterns and ideas to be brought into play. The need to think and do things differently when we have to look at things from different perspective.