Cinéma Vérité

According to Parlez-vous.com, Realism is the artistic attempt to recreate life as it is in the context of an artistic medium.

Cinéma Vérité, literally film truth, was a style of film making developed by French film directors in the 1960’s. Filming was done with unobtrusive cameras so the subjects of the film would forget the presence of the camera and just be themselves. The filmmakers goal was to show life as it really is using the film as his or her artistic medium (see Parlez-vous.com.

What do Realism and Cinéma Vérité have to do with innovation? Well, they should be considered when it comes to observing people and interactions between them and people, things and environments. If people know they are being observed then their behaviour is affected. Practitioners of Cinéma Vérité sometimes resorted to using empty cameras for weeks in advance of the commencement of shooting in order for the people being documented to forget about their presence. No matter how long such an effort may have lasted, the presence of the camera can never be forgotten completely nor can the behaviour of the observed be completely trusted as natural.
Having said that, it is still one of the best methods of understanding people in the daily lives. It just can't be taken as absolute truth.

Many of us have seen or heard the results of focus groups used to determine consumer needs and solicit input/feedback. Some have resorted to in-home user parties to mitigate the clinical feel of focus groups. Others have shifted to observations of people in the environment where the behaviour to be observed naturally occurs. To extend that effort, the observations are tied to impressions given from those same people. This helps to link the explicit with the implicit.

No matter the method of observation, we can't forget if people know they are being observed then their natural tendencies will be affected to some degree.

Internal or External Innovative Forces

I remember having coffee with a telecom executive and posing the question of how they innovate within his organization. His first response was to say "That's a difficult question."

I then brought up the article OFFICE SPACE: ARMCHAIR M.B.A.; Tension Headaches In The Corner Office which discusses the same issue and how McKinsey & Company consults with companies struggling with the corporate equivalent of writer's block.

Like so many other executives, he faced the same issues of garnering internal alignment while quashing competing internal mandates. However, he held the power to endorse the initiative whether it be internal or via an external consultant. Without that critical executive sponsorship, the competing mandates will win and alignment will never materialize.

This is not a new idea but one worth reiterating. What was also interesting from the article was the idea that companies are facing unexpected external competitors as in the case where telecom and media companies are fighting off competitors that are blurring the lines between the two sectors.

Cannibalization

I happened to be sitting in a marketing training session last fall along with marketing people from a variety of consumer groups. Several people talked about "soft launching" some new offerings.

What was interesting was the number of people who defended this approach as a means to avoid cannibalizing their existing customer base. I can appreciate their concern to avoid erosion of their customer base but if they are not pushing new, forward-looking services then their competitors will be more than happy to do so.

Yes, the risk of short-term losses exists but isn't taking revenue from one pocket and putting it into another within the same company better than losing revenue to a competitor altogether? If the corporate structure endorses competition among its divisions then this problem could be exacerbated and the risk of being blindsided by competitors will become all the more likely.

This is exactly the kind of "either-or" situation Roger Martin, Dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, discusses in his Harvard Business Review article, How Successful Leaders Think. In the article, Martin suggests that leaders who apply integrative thinking devise an entirely new solution or third option rather than choosing between two competing ideas when trying to resolve question of strategy.

The iPhone Up Close

As a Canadian, I am going to have to wait for the iPhone to come to Canada before I can consider purchasing one. However, I didn't have to wait to admire one up close.

I was recently travelling in the US and met a women who had waited four hours at an obscure AT & T store to get one of the thirty phones they had in stock. Most of everything I have read or seen led me to believe that the iPhone would be truly remarkable. Having had the opportunity to play with one and navigate through the various screens and applications, I have to say that it is more than remarkable-IT IS SPECTACULAR!

I am a reformed Crackberry addict and if the iPhone can cross the chasm between consumer toy to enterprise device then RIM should be very worried. Motorola has already been left in Apple's wake as a computer company showed a mobile phone company what a truly cool phone could be. Motorola relied on the Razr for much too long and was caught with little, if anything, in their innovation funnel.

NASA Gets Help From Amateurs

In 2004, NASA started the Centennial Challenges to solicit ideas from the public in a variety of categories.

The Amateur Future of Space Travel in the New York Times Sunday Magazine was a fascinating account of how Peter K. Homer, an out-of-work director of a local community center in Maine, came up with the winning solution to NASA's space glove problem. Reading about Homer's "aha moment" in the middle of the night will make believers of all of us that solutions can come from anywhere at anytime. It was Homer's past experience sewing sails that provided the necessary insight to overcome the problem of providing strength while maintaining dexterity.

Innocentive is another example of companies looking beyond their corporate walls for solutions to their innovation problems by applying an open source or open collaboration strategy. Casting their lines out to a population of solvers has led to solutions to numerous problems and financial rewards for the solvers.

Designing Interactions

Bill Moggridge, one of the founders of IDEO and designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981) spoke as part of the Design Thinking Series at the Rotman School of Management.

Moggridge presented from Designing Interactionsand discussed some of the projects IDEO has worked on and the need for interdiscplinary teams as you move up the hierarchy of complexity but he also strongly urged people to "forget [their] discipline when [they] are in the project room." This serves to free people from relying solely on their usual way of thinking and enables a more open compilation of ideas among collaborators.

For more about the book and to see some of the supporting interviews, please see the Designing Interactions Site.

Else/Where Mapping and New Opportunity Development

Recently at the Rotman School of Management, I had the opportunity to hear Janet Abrams of the University of Minnesota Design Institute discuss Using Maps to Make Arguments and Processes Visible. She presented ideas from Else/Where: Mapping: New Cartographies of Networks and Territoriesor see Else/Where: Mapping

One of the notable maps was from They Rule which discusses a small group of powerful Americans in business referred to as the Magnificent Seven because of the number of network linkages they possess via board seats and other business ties.

Abrams also said something that really resonated with me which was "Innovation [should come] from the spaces between disciplines." This certainly provides further validation of the need to draw on different perspectives in order to innovate and change strategy.

Another of the Rotman Design Thinking Presentations was by Dev Patnaik from Jump Associates of San Mateo, California. His presentation was entitles New Opportunity Development - Emerge, Reframe, Connect.

Dev talked about Jump and their staff of "peripheral visionaries" and corporate misfits. It's always good to hear about cultures that endorse people who think differently.

Although I agree with much of what he presented, I feel especially strong about "reframe" as a concept. Many companies are stuck or complacent and they need to reframe their situation and formulate a new perspective on one or more of the following; themselves, their business, the competition and, in a broader sense, their marketplace in order to become unstuck when it comes to innovation.