Creativity Exercising

This week I spent a lot of time with creativity exercises.  They were not only fun; they also helped me realized that ideas are not hard to generate given the right environment and stimulation.  For example, in Dr. K's class, each group of 6 was given 15 minutes to come up with ideas to help the Kelley school using post-it notes.  My group wrote down a dozen of them, ranging from post-it art murals to color-coded mood indicators that you would post at the front of the room before class and after class.  Ideas truly are a dime a dozen as the saying goes… or are they?

            

Recently I have been immersed in watching Bones, a crime drama on TV.  Earlier this week, while reading the textbook for the class, I decided to do one of the creative exercises from the book (“Entrepreneurship: Theory/Process/Practice”, written by Dr. K).  The exercise calls for writing down all of the functions you can think of for a given list of items.  For each of the physical objects on the list (“A large pebble”, “an old hubcap”, “an old coat hanger”), I found myself thinking “murder weapon” as the first function that came to mind.  And for each of the people on the list (“An egotistical staff member”, “The office tightwad”), I found myself first thinking “potential suspect.”

Why did I first jump to crime-related functions for those objects and people?  I suspect the reason has to do with Phase 1 of the Creative Process: Background or Knowledge Accumulation. (The four/six phases of the creative process are documented throughout innovation research, but I won't delve into them here.)  Since I have been “educated” about crimes through watching Bones, I am likely to think of solutions to problems in the crime space.  However, what I believe is the most critical part of Background or Knowledge Accumulation is recency.  The more recent an experience has been had, the more likely it is to be the subject of ideas in creative exercises.  Put another way, the ideas generated in a creative exercise are most likely to come from recent knowledge-gathering activities or recent experiences.

This has important ramifications for innovation, particularly in a corporate situation.  Consider a team that has recently completed a big, important project, and now it is asked to have an “ideation” session where it is to brainstorm for 30 minutes on ideas for new products or product features for the company.  I’m willing to bet that most of the ideas would be small features to be added to the project that was recently completed.  In other words, you would get ideas for incremental innovations.  But what if you really need radical innovations?

In order to get ideas for radical innovations, you need to introduce variety and take advantage of the effect of recency.  Shortly before asking your employees to brainstorm, have them do things outside of activities related to the recent project.  Have them visit customers, read international news, go to the beach - anything that will help them get a different perspective than what they would have being heads-down on a project.  Social events are not just good at keeping employees happy on the job; they can also jumpstart creativity and, by extension, innovation.

This line of thinking has encouraged me to try to move Napkin Club to varying locations and varying days.  “Same time, same place” may make it easy to remember, but it can hurt creativity.

Baby Steps

Last week I started in on the academic portion of my Kelley education on corporate innovation and entrepreneurship.  The class is called Entrepreneurship: Leadership and Practice, taught by an enthusiastic pioneer of the field, Dr. Donald Kuratko (known to students as Dr. K).  On Tuesday, Dr. K introduced the principles of "corporate entrepreneurship," otherwise known as "corporate innovation" or "intrapreneurship."

One topic in particular really got me thinking on Tuesday: Dr. K noted that companies are more successful with their innovation programs if they start with incremental innovations as opposed to radical innovations.  He rationalized the data by saying that if senior management came in and announced that the company was looking for breakthroughs, middle management would get turned off because they didn't see themselves or their employees as "breakthrough"-type people.  In other words, a company just beginning its transition to an entrepreneurial culture needs to take "baby steps" to start its journey.  While Dr. K’s explanation of the point made rational sense, my immediate reaction was, What about the employees who have really good radically innovative ideas already?

That brought me back to May 2008, soon after I started working as a software engineer at Intuit.  One business unit (the one responsible for TurboTax) held their first-ever “Idea Jam,” a competition where teams could pitch their innovative ideas to senior executives.  The CEO personally flew down for the event and prefaced it by challenging employees to “discover the next growth engine for the company.”  A few colleagues and I entered the competition with an idea for a social network aggregator, and others pitched (and some demonstrated) truly amazing ideas, such as a smartpen mashup that translated writing and drawings from paper to computer screen instantly.  However, none of the ideas that blew me away were mentioned when the awards were given out.  No, the top prize went to TaxCaster, a web application that forecasts your tax refund from a limited set of data you input.  Senior management invested in TaxCaster and it launched a few months later (http://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/calculators/taxcaster/).  While TaxCaster was a great idea and has since certainly increased sales of TurboTax, it wasn’t anything close to the next growth engine for the company.  It was an incremental innovation.

The experience of seeing a set of amazing (and radical) innovations get passed by in favor of a small one caused many of my colleagues to become bitter about the company’s innovation efforts.  It took some of them two years before they participated in any events like Idea Jam again; they were unenthusiastic about pitching ideas to managers who were only interested in add-ons to TurboTax.

While I now understand the logic behind focusing on incremental innovations first, I wonder if that logic fails to account for those in the company who are already entrepreneurial and are ready for radical innovation.  Are baby steps worth the risk of losing the participation of the most entrepreneurial employees?  Or is there some other action that leadership could take to encourage radical innovators to stay engaged?

The Silicon Valley MBA

For the past three weeks I was on hiatus, as many b-school students were for the holidays.  Out of my desires to find a summer internship and to learn about innovation in the discipline's flagship metro area, I flew to the Bay Area to meet with companies, Kelley School alums, friends, and strangers.

Several of the company visits were arranged by my colleagues in the Kelley Marketing Club as a Bay Area trek.  One of the stops on the trek was Google, a world-renowned hotbed of entrepreneurial thinking.  My first sight upon entering the visitor's lobby in Building 43 was a bit unexpected: roughly one million b-school students in suits.  The dichotomy of suits shaking hands with Googlers in jeans was striking.  I mean, really, you thought it was a good idea to dress seventeen levels above the people you're meeting?  However, it turns out my shock at seeing a bunch of suits at Google was somewhat controversial, as I found out from a fellow Kelley student who was feeling self-conscious in her business-casual attire.

"What do you wear to an interview in Silicon Valley?" she asked me.

"I would say business casual at the most, since most people here go to work in jeans," I replied.

She gave me a look.  "But don't we have to wear suits to interviews?  I mean, we're MBAs."

No, that doesn't fly here.  During my three-month stint in San Francisco and my numerous visits to the Valley, I have found that the perceptions of the term "MBA" range from "respected business leader" to "former coder who couldn't make it" to "out of touch ivory tower dweller."  I recently had a conversation with the founder of a tech startup at a coffee shop in San Francisco.  After I told him that I was an MBA student, his first question to me was, "Do they make you do anything at your school?"

And this attitude isn't just limited to startups.  A former coworker of mine often lamented that product managers just shot down all the ideas of engineers, killing their entrepreneurial spirit.  True, business school is great at teaching students about the multitudes of things that don't work.  Admittedly, when I mull over Harvard Business Review cases, more often than not I am tempted to answer with "liquidate the business, this will just fail and waste money."  No wonder MBAs are not universally regarded highly, to put it mildly, in a Valley culture that rewards those who try, fail, and confidently pick themselves up to try again.  But it's hard to blame business leaders for adopting such a risk-aversion.  Engineers are told to fail fast, to learn from their mistakes, and that at some point along the line they will develop something that customers will be happy with; a great engineer understands the value of iteration and feedback.  By contrast, when a middle- or upper-level manager oversees a failed project, she is quite often the subject of a "with mixed emotions" email to the group.

What does this mean for promoting an innovative culture?  What can an MBA do to foster such a culture in such an environment as the Silicon Valley tech scene?  Well, it starts with accepting the "risk-aversion" learned in business school as "prudence."  It is prudent to not bet the farm on an idea or a product created in a vacuum, of course.  But as we can learn from Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, it is also prudent to put resources behind seemingly non-sensical product lines that have the potential to cannibalize sales from other product lines.  The keys in that situation are to develop the new products in autonomous (in a practical sense) organizations, and have them find or develop new markets for their new products, not attempt to satisfy the needs of the company's current customers.  Dismissing the development of such disruptive products is not only bad for creating an entrepreneurial culture, it can also be dangerous to the business itself by opening the door to disruption from startups, a malady seen time and time again in Christensen's study of the computer disk drive industry.

Put succinctly, an MBA can gain credibility by promoting innovation within an engineering-focused organization while at the same time remaining prudent, as she is taught to be in business school.  The key to Silicon Valley opening its arms to MBAs lies in that very concept.

Jump-starting Entrepreneurship

This morning, as I flipped open my daily TechCrunch, I found a fascinating story about Travis Kiefer.  (http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/03/for-27-this-kid-will-do-whatever-you-want-in-antartica-on-tuesday/)  Travis Kiefer is a Stanford student who founded Gumball Capital, a non-profit that gives college students $27, 27 gumballs, and one week to find a way to raise money (The Gumball Challenge).  Proceeds from the challenge go to micro-lending organizations to provide funding to entrepreneurs in the third world.  In essence, Kiefer is an entrepreneur who encourages entrepreneurship to fund entrepreneurs.  Say that ten times fast.  And how does he raise money for his non-profit?  Well, on Tuesday, he is running a marathon in Antarctica and will do whatever you want there if you donate $27.

The Gumball Challenge (and Kiefer himself) is pretty wacky, but it's a very creative solution to the problem of encouraging entrepreneurship.  That is the very problem I'll be seeking to address starting next month, as Vic's successor as President of the Graduate Entrepreneur Club.  Currently the GEC has several programs to address it, including Napkin Club, which encourages idea generation through camaraderie in a social setting.  What I'm hoping to do going forward is help move students in the direction of action on their ideas.

But what really interests me about the Gumball Challenge is precisely the fact that its wackiness is effective.  Last year, 47 teams took up the challenge and managed to raise $2000 for micro-lenders.  That means that on average each team raised about $44 in proceeds off of a $27 investment in one week.  Not too shabby.  The challenge reminds me of a similar project done annually in a class taught by Stanford professor Tina Seelig, where she gives students $5 and two hours to make as much money as possible.  In her book, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, she chronicles many of the projects done over the years, including a bicycle-tire-refilling operation that netted the students several hundred dollars.  (Watch this for a short presentation on the project.)  As she notes, the most successful teams thought beyond the 5-dollar and 2-hour constraints and did something that they could have done with nothing.  I think the big lesson here is that the gumballs and the $5 are examples of successful catalysts for entrepreneurial thinking.  In other words: Set the stage for the event, give people something a bit wacky, and watch the innovation flow.

Innovation Incentives

In my experience in business school, every time a professor has brought up the subject of innovation, he has noted that it must come from the top.  Since innovation practices are part of a company culture, and since company culture is defined by upper management, they argue, innovation must be started and evangelized by upper management.

That makes a logical sort of sense, but it is exactly the opposite of what I was trying to do while I worked for Intuit.  As an intern there, I had the idea for a 24-hour prototyping competition, pitting teams' entrepreneurial and coding skills against one another.  The idea generated a lot of interest among my fellow interns, and happily my group's management was supportive and chipped in food and prizes.  It turned out to be a big success in the sense that all of the participants counted it as the most memorable experience of the summer, and in the sense that management thought the entries were incredibly innovative.  The problem was, nothing happened after that.  Nobody was given time to continue building on their prototypes; the projects were left to be forgotten in an old source code repository.  What's more, that type of event wasn't repeated until a year later, when the next class of interns wanted their own Intern Hack.  That event had similar results: tons of excitement, management blown away by the talent and the ingenuity displayed, no follow-up.

A year after that, a fellow former intern approached me about resurrecting the Hack, and we moved forward with it, this time advertising to all employees, not just interns.  Similarly awesome inventions, but there was an issue: The event attracted a boatload of interns but only three full-timers, including me.  Why such little enthusiasm from the full-timers, even those who were just a year or two older than the interns?

That question frustrated me.  When asked, most of my coworkers expressed high regard for the event, but inevitably there was "not enough time" or they were "behind on a project."  Translated, that said to me "it's not as important as project work."  But why not?  For the previous year our CEO had been giving speech after speech about his vision that he wanted Intuit to be a Premier Innovative Growth Company.  Why weren't people getting the message?

As I have come to realize, the problem came down to incentives.  Incentives drive the culture of an organization.  Even though the CEO mentioned "Premier Innovative Growth Company" four times a day, there was no clear incentive structure to lead employees in that direction.  Pay decisions were largely up to the direct manager and were foremost based on outstanding performance on assigned projects.  If someone did an outstanding job on a project they created or joined themselves in their spare time, they may get a gift card or even a larger bonus, but most managers would give a simple pat on the back.  Participation in "unstructured" projects and idea competitions was often at odds with assigned work, and was explicitly or implicitly only allowed as long as it didn't "distract from assigned deliverables."  This led to only a few pockets of innovation where direct managers actively encouraged their employees to be entrepreneurial.  Adding to the problem was a lack of incentive for management to encourage entrepreneurial behavior.  The bonus structure was based mostly on annual company performance, so most managers would push employees to "get the job done" rather than be creative and build something that would pay off further down the road.

What makes an incentive structure conducive to innovation?  Some companies, such as Lincoln Electric, pay for ideas: at one time they were handing out $25 for each idea that was somewhat reasonable.  I'll be on the lookout for innovation-inducing incentives, as management of incentives is the key to producing an innovative culture.

Milkshakes

Picture: Michael Perini

Recently, the rate of me coming across the milkshake story has increased dramatically.  The story to which I refer is Clayton Christensen's research involving the purchasers of milkshakes at an unnamed fast food chain.  The story resonated with me when I first heard it a few years ago, and I've often casually thought about how to apply it beyond milkshakes.

For those who haven't heard of the research, the best way to learn about it is from Christensen himself in this 7-minute interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3fGwsrXuZw.  The gist is that a particular fast food chain wanted to know how to increase milkshake sales.  They had done traditional market segmentation and focus group studies to no avail, so they wanted to try something different.  A researcher spent one day observing a restaurant and noticed that about 40% of milkshake sales occurred during the morning commute hours, so the next day he asked these morning purchasers some questions to understand why they came in to buy milkshakes.  The most popular response was not that they wanted a sweet dessert or that they wanted a breakfast replacement, it's that they all had long, boring commutes and that they needed something to stave off the inevitable mid-morning hunger at work.  In Christensen's words, these were parts of the "job" for which the purchasers were "hiring" the milkshake.  A banana didn't perform the job well because it was eaten too fast to reduce boredom; a donut didn't perform the job well because it left the eater hungry by 10am.  The best employee for the job turned out to be a milkshake since it took 20 minutes to consume (reducing boredom) and left the consumer full until lunchtime.  Thus a successful innovation in the milkshake space would be increased viscosity, further reducing boredom by causing the milkshake to last longer.  Improving flavor would have no impact on sales because the customer wasn't hiring for taste; the customer would not be willing to pay for such an unnecessary feature.

I see two excellent benefits to Christensen's jobs-based approach to innovation:

1. It provides focus for product improvements (or for developing new products) on a small set of important features, increasing both the accuracy and speed of innovation.
2. It aids in identification of competitors.

The second benefit is a bit less intuitive than the first, but it can be just as beneficial as the first in some contexts.  Returning to milkshakes, what would be a competitor for Wendy's milkshake?  One might be tempted to say "a McDonald's milkshake" or "a Burger King milkshake."  While that may be true if you consider only the milkshake market, it is not at all true if you consider what the customer is actually paying for.  The customer is paying for a job that involves reducing boredom on a morning commute and staving off mid-morning hunger.  Thinking in that context, it is clear that many products are competitors for Wendy's milkshakes, including bagels, bananas, donuts, granola bars, and egg sandwiches, to name a few.  If a lot customers are hiring bananas for this job, you must consider what features of a banana are attractive to the customer and use those to better position your milkshake.  For example, a customer can buy bananas in convenient bunches, so she only has to make one trip per week to hire them; perhaps a pre-packaged milkshake sold as a package of 5 would be successful (indeed, note the prevalence of meal shakes).

Thinking about everyday products in the context of jobs being performed casts them in new lights and makes it easier to think of replacements.  Plus, it's fun to think through why I hire one coffee mug over another when all I want is a cup of tea.

Universal Translator

In the Star Trek universe, a Universal Translator is a device that completely obliterates language barriers by instantaneously translating all speech to the user's native language.  In essence, it makes it so that everybody appears to be speaking one language.  In the Star Trek: Enterprise series, which takes place in the early years of humans' exploration of inhabited space, the translator is an imperfect device that merely produces a text translation of speech and often mistranslates, especially in the case of unfamiliar languages. The choice of the writers of Star Trek: Enterprise to portray the ancestor of the universal translator as a speech-to-text device is logical given that languages can be written down and text is easier for computers to work with than audio, right?

Earlier today I came across a TechCrunch article that got me thinking about speech-to-speech translation in the modern day.  One commenter mentioned an Android app that does speech-to-speech translation, so I took his tip and tried out Talk To Me Cloud.  The app's algorithm essentially includes three steps: 1) Listen to the Language A speech and translate it to Language A text; 2) Send the Language A text to a server in the cloud to translate it to Language B text; 3) Translate the Language B text to Language B speech. The interface took a minute to figure out, but true to its intention, it listened to my elementary Spanish and said it back to me in English.  Awesome!  But not quite a Universal Translator, or really all that useful.  Yet.

The app is plagued by several drawbacks, some within the developer's control and some without:

1. The visual interface is clunky.  It looks like the developer took the technology behind the app, translated its steps into UI components, and just tossed those onto the screen in linear fashion.  "Let's see... The user has to select the language that needs to be translated, so let's put a drop down box in there.  The user has to see the text of what was said so they know if the speech-to-text worked right, so let's toss a big text box in there.  The user has to tell the app when to start listening, so let's put a microphone button in there, but let's make it REALLY BIG so it's easy to find.  Etc."  The net effect of this is the app feels like a techie tool, not something that opens doors to otherwise impossible conversations.  Make it fun, developer!  I can use this app to ask someone to point me to the nearest restroom in Italian!
2. The hardware doesn't match up.  The app relies on the phone's mic for the speakerphone to hear the speech it should translate.  The problem is, the speakerphones on current smartphones (at least those that I've dealt with) are pretty poor about picking up meaningful audio outside of a few feet away, and that only in a quiet setting.  Now imagine using this app for one of its intended purposes: Suppose you are traveling in Germany and you are trying to describe your hotel (you can't recall the name) to a taxi driver.  You have this great app that will let you talk to this driver, so you bring out your phone and, naturally, set it between you two.  The app happily translates about 1 in 3 words, plus whatever is on the radio and the road noise outside.  The only solution available to you is to bring the phone close you, speak, quickly hand it to the driver who speaks and quickly hands it back to you, and so on.  That's a bit of an awkward interaction.
3. You have to tell the app which language is being translated and which language to which it should be translated.  That's fine if only you are speaking, but in most cases you're having a conversation in which more than one person speaks, and more than one language needs to be translated.  Luckily, the developer put in a "Swap" button that allows you to swap the input and output languages.  But consider the taxi driver interaction:  Now, not only do you have to pass the phone back and forth, but each time you do, you have to press the Swap button.  And since you have to keep swapping languages, you have to break up the audio recordings, and thus each swap you make also requires a press of the microphone button.  The awkwardness of the conversation just went up a few points.
4. Speech-to-text technology isn't very accurate.  As you can see from my screenshot, the STT translator got a word wrong ("Tus" became "Chris").  If the first step in the translation process fails, what hope is there that anything intelligible will come out the other end?  There is a reason STT technology hasn't been enormously successful commercially: It's a really tough problem to solve.
5. Text does not include emphasis or accents.  The usage of text as an intermediary makes sense given current technology (text-to-text translation is getting pretty good), but does away with the benefits of verbal communication, namely emphasis and accent.  The former can alter the meaning of the speech entirely, and the latter can provide insight into the speaker's origins as well as (more practically) change the meaning of the speech due to differences in dialects.  For sure, creating speech recognition technology that could recognize dialects would be very difficult, but it is simply an impossible task for text.

#1 and #2 will likely be addressed within a few years as better phones and better UI interactions are developed, but #3, #4, and #5 are interesting to think about.  I believe that there is a simple solution to #3: Rather than the user telling the app which language to use on each round of speech, the app ought to be able to figure out the language itself after one round.  Put another way, the app ought to be able to figure out which person is speaking after hearing each one once.  Assuming that speakers do not change languages, the identity of the speaker can tell the app which language to translate.  One way to accomplish this would be to use the assumption that the speakers in most conversations have differing pitches of voice.  Another way would be to use the position of the speakers relative to the phone (though this would require multiple microphones on the phone, of course.  Many phones indeed have multiple mics, such as my Droid X).

#5 is a basic problem with text, so some other medium must be used to address it.  Video, scent, and touch would be pretty interesting, but audio seems to be the most practical.  In this case, audio also brings the benefit of reducing the number of translations from three (speech-text-text-speech) to one (speech-speech).  Assuming that any translation is imperfect, the multiplier effect would say that one translation has a much greater potential for high quality than three translations.  Further, direct speech-speech translation would bring the benefits of emphasis and accents, which are vital to verbal communication.  If we truly want a Universal Translator, it needs to be a direct speech-speech translation device.  That would take care of #4 as well.

Finally, it seems to me that speech-text, text-text, and speech-speech are all different problems.  They may have some underlying similarities such as matching algorithms, but progress in the text-text space may be unhelpful to the progress of the speech-speech space.  Thus I feel that the writers of Star Trek: Enterprise were misguided: The speech-text translation device is not a stepping-stone to the Universal Translator.  If computer scientists and developers focus their energies on direct speech-speech translation, we just might have the UT before Star Trek's predicted late-22nd-century arrival.