Spark

Thanks for Coming

Thanks for coming to the Spark blog. I've been focusing most of my writing energy over on my regular blog, Under the Radar. Come join the conversation!

Welcome to the SPARK blog!

Hi. Welcome to Spark. Come on in! This blog and the book it is base on is about innovation – meaningful innovation that comes from co-creating with your customers and your fellow employees. The purpose of Spark is to inspire you to think about innovation in new ways. To do that, I have gathered several perspectives on innovation, and appropriately, this book also uses an innovative structure and design.

Spark, the book, is structured in four sections: Section One – You and Your Team; Section Two – The Customer; Section Three – The Company; and Section Four – The Culture. Each of these sections represents a different part of the innovation ecosystem. Successful innovation happens in the zone where these four parts of the ecosystem intersect and overlap.

Within each of these sections are four chapters. Each chapter provides a source of inspiration for you in your quest to be more innovative. The chapters, in turn, have four segments, including Inspiration, Tools, Interaction, and Resources.

Each chapter opens with the Inspiration, an interview that offers one perspective on a unique innovation issue. The Tools segment in each chapter presents ideas on how to put some of the ideas discussed in the opening interview into action. The Interaction is a place for readers to join in the co-creative process by interacting within the pages of the book.

Each Interaction segment poses a provocative question or exercise and space to draw or write down your thoughts. There is also an online component to this section, giving readers the opportunity to form a community around the ideas presented in Spark and to actively co-create new innovation solutions. Lastly, the Resources segment in each chapter can act as a road map for further exploration on the subjects discussed.

To introduce to this blog, I have included an introduction for every chapter and a question to get your creative juices going.

In my exploration of innovative ideas, I consciously set some rules for myself in writing the book:

Innovation at Every Level

Spark was not written just for CEOs or innovation teams. Hence, I did not set out to have conversations with “rock star” innovators. The point is that every person within an organization can find interesting ways to be innovative.

Not Just Technology

I consciously left out technology companies for the simple reason that throughout our conversations, people often made the point that technology companies often exist for the sake of innovation, regardless of their profitability. Most companies don’t have the option of being unprofitable. So I focused on the process of being innovative, which can be applied across any industry, from manufacturing to technology.

Inspiration is Everywhere

The people I chose to participate in this book are all people I know well and who have inspired me in various ways. This highlights the concept that being innovative is not a holy grail, but is all around us. Instead of being separated from innovative thinkers by six degrees, innovative thought and becoming more innovative yourself might lie only one degree away. I want to encourage readers to look around and learn from those who are nearby and accessible.

One of Spark’s primary goals is to be a resource. My hope is that it can become an innovation journal for you, and you will be inspired by the wonderful people who have participated in this book and on this blog. So, make Spark yours. Become an active part of the Spark community.

Enjoy.

Develop New Connections

The whole world of blogging and its implications on the co-creative process has intrigued me for quite some time. When I published Beyond the Brand, I started a blog to accompany the book. My subsequent, active participation in the blogosphere has changed my ideas about how to interactively engage in a relevant dialogue with people.

When I was working on a couple of technology questions for my own blog, I came across Stonyfield Farm’s blog site. Since 2004, Stonyfield has been publishing five blogs, including: Baby Babble, a daily web log “Where parents can meet up, rant, offer and seek advice, or just tell us their trials and triumphs;” Strong Women Daily News, “The latest news and insights from our Strong Women partners;” The Bovine Bugle, “Daily moos from the Howmars Organic Dairy Farm;” The Daily Scoop, “Daily life at the yogurt works, and daily ways we try to nurture and sustain the environment;” and lastly, Creating Healthy Kids, “Daily updates from our Menu for Change healthy food in schools program.”

As Christine Halvorson, Stonyfield’s Chief Blogging Officer, mentions in her interview, it really was Stonyfield’s CEO, Gary Hirshberg, who drove the idea to use blogs as a way to connect with customers and the culture (no pun intended) that surrounds organic yogurt.

In a recent Business Week interview, Hirshberg said, “If you're going to go into this as a marketing device, be careful. That's just not what it is, and if you treat it that way consumers will see through it. You have to be willing to let go and allow a really honest expression of genuine things that are going on.”

How does new technology, like weblogs, effect your business?

Build a Community

I first met Jake McKee when he commented on my blog, www.johnwinsor.com. I was running a contest, The Audible Response, and Jake entered. When I went to his blog, www.TheCommunityGuy.com, I liked what I saw there. Here was a guy who was truly passionate about community. What a great person to be involved with Spark.

During the day, Jake works at LEGO Group as their Global Community Relations Specialist, focusing on the adult market. As Jake says, he’s not a manager of the community: “The company’s community interaction isn’t about management, because it can’t be managed – it can’t be controlled; it can be encouraged and can maybe be guided or possibly influenced here and there.”

In playing the role of guide for Lego, he has set a very clear mission for himself with his motto, “Everybody goes home happy.”

With this focus on facilitating the relationship between LEGO and its adult customer community, Jake has set up an early warning system that any other company would love to have. Most people think about community in the context of word of mouth marketing, but as Jake reminded me, “You can’t build word of mouth, you can only set up the right environment for it.”

His ideas about being a guide, hiring passionate outsiders, focusing on personal relationships and experiencing the good, the bad and the ugly are important ideas when thinking about the ideas of community around any company and its products.

Can you form a community around your products and services?

Let the Culture Create Itself

I was looking for a way to introduce the open source philosophy in the context of innovation when I thought of Pat Keane. When you meet Pat, a cofounder of PM Gear, the first thing you realize is how passionate he is about what he does. Heck, he calls himself a “Maggot;” that seems pretty passionate to me! Another thing I really like about the company’s perspective is their real focus on acting as the conduit to help push the culture forward; in this case, it’s the backcountry ski culture.

This energy and perspective is not unique; every industry, from software to automobiles, has small companies owned by passionate customers that have made their passions a business reality. But the guys at PM Gear have followed a creative path to take them where they are today.

While this happened a few years ago, our networked society has put PM Gear and its ski customers-turned-business owners into direct competition with bigger, more established brands. Some people inside larger organizations might think that their customers couldn’t possibly start competing with them. However, one only has to look at Microsoft and the threat that open-source software has provided them to realize that none of us are immune.

In this day and age, with our deepest secrets being shared online, and access to our suppliers and technologies no longer unique, the only way to survive is to engage customers and their culture in the process of co-creating innovation.

Whether you are PM Gear or IBM, you have no choice if you want to keep up today. This means being open, sharing both your successes and your failures, engaging in your culture in a very real, participatory way and often, operating at the speed of light.

How can you take advantage of the open source philosophy in your business?

Develop New Relationships

Most people who work in the natural foods business know Barney Feinblum. He has become an icon in the industry, spending the past quarter of a century either starting or investing in 25 different companies. Barney got his start working for the herbal tea brand Celestial Seasonings. From there he went on to serve as President and CEO of Horizon Organic Dairy, creating the leading organic food brand in the United States. Currently, he is the CEO of Organic Vintners.

One of the things I really admire about Barney is his ability to find unique ways of working with suppliers. He has literally been on the ground, working with farmers and dairies to understand and comply with basic processes to meet his companies’ standards. As a consumer, I remember when Horizon started.

At the time, the word “organic” was being defined in several different ways. One of Barney’s strategies was to give solid meaning to the word “organic” in the dairy business. That meant not only defining the word but co-creating innovative practices with suppliers to make sure that Horizon could guarantee its customers the quality they wanted.

            

In an effort to be more innovative, all of us can work with our suppliers in new ways. Barney’s thoughts about leveraging relationships with suppliers, not re-inventing the wheel, working with smaller suppliers, getting out with suppliers and looking at smaller niches are all important ideas when thinking about new ways to co-create.

How do you currently co-create with your suppliers?

Immerse Yourself

One of my favorite clients is Michael Perman, Senior Director of Consumer Insights at Levi’s. He makes me think. He wants to know more. And most of all, he wants to immerse himself in the lives of his customers.

When Michael used to work in the food industry, he would occasionally go out and ride with the independent truck drivers who delivered his products to convenience stores. Michael says, “Riding in the truck and being in the factory were a couple of places to have points of contact with reality.” Michael has had an interesting journey in his career, starting in the food industry, owning his own marketing firm and in his current role at Levi’s.

            

Michael is all about immersion, whether it’s riding along in a delivery truck or checking out a customer’s closet. We can all learn a great deal from Michael about the power of firsthand experience in having a dialogue with your customers.

            

Michael’s thoughts regarding getting to know your customers better, inspirations that drive design principles, how to explore your environment, getting down on the individual level of a customer, contextualizing customers’ lives to find inspiration and escaping the focus group trap are wonderful examples of how to break out of the routine of sitting in an office and analyzing data. Instead, finding powerful insights by immersing yourself in the customer culture not only fuels innovation through inspiration; it lays a foundation for further co-creation.

            

Michael shows that even within a large organization with a great deal of its own innovation heritage, you can, as an individual, seek a new path and add something substantial to the innovation dialogue through immersion.

How do you immerse yourself in your customer’s world?

Be Customer Inspired, Not Reliant

The idea of being customer inspired without becoming customer reliant has been a very hot topic over the last few months on BrandShift, a blog I co-edit. One interesting comment from a designer was: “Sure, good designers listen and observe users as a source of inspiration for the design process, but when you start doing what GM did with the new "baby" Hummer, and force your skilled, highly-trained designers to change the visceral elements of their designs based on the feedback of visually uneducated critics, well, the train bound for Mediocrityville has already left the station.”

As you can see, there is a constant tension between the idea of being customer reliant and being customer inspired. The ultimate goal is to co-create with customers in a way that exceeds their expectations. This idea is perfectly expressed by Michael Jager, Creative Director of Jager Di Paola Kemp, a design firm based in Burlington, Vermont. Jager provides an interesting and inspired look at this dynamic between reliance and inspiration in the world of co-creation.

His viewpoint comes from participating in the creation of the Burton Snowboard brand and being deeply connected with youth culture. Michael’s concepts of differentiation, progression, creating a culture inside your company that mirrors your customer’s culture, companies as inspired protagonists and the importance of always learning are important ideas that are seeping from the confines of individual sports like skateboarding to the boardrooms of the world’s most progressive companies.

Are you more customer reliant or customer inspired?

Constantly Experiment

To get a handle on the concept of constantly experimenting, I thought I would turn to my friend Adam DeVito. Adam was trained as a chef, starting his career with a classical French cooking apprenticeship.

He followed his passion for food by owning restaurants, writing books and even starting a professional cooking school. This passion also took him into the halls of corporate America as Kraft’s Executive Chef and Director of New Concept Development. Adam is also an experienced strategist and futures planner from the time he spent at Sterling Rice Group as the Managing Partner.

Currently, Adam has been chasing his own entrepreneurial dreams by co-founding and acting as CEO of a toy company, Big Boing Toys. These days he spends a lot of time thinking about how children co-create and innovate.

Adam’s ideas about creativity, merging ideas, problem solving, nourishing play, developing curiosity and creating dialogue are important concepts to think about when allowing a more organic and powerful approach to innovating through the constant experimentation co-creation demands.

Adam is one of those rare individuals who empower you through the engagement of dialogue. I am always humbled by my conversations with Adam. He’s smart. He’s also very caring and thoughtful. When I finish a conversation with Adam, I’m always smiling, and my head is full of optimistic possibilities.

How can the idea of constantly experimenting help fuel your creativity?

Have Fun

When I think of innovative corporate cultures that are fun, I think of Patagonia. And, Rob Bon Durant, the Director of Brand Development at Patagonia, typifies many of the people who work there. First, they passionately believe in the vision that the company’s owner, Yvon Chouinard, has laid out.

Patagonia is more than a company; it is a cause to improve the environment and make the earth a better place to live. Since 1985, the company has pledged 1% of sales to the preservation and restoration of the natural environment; they have given away over 18 million dollars in grants to environmental groups worldwide. Who wouldn’t want to be part of a company with such a wonderful vision?

It’s easy to believe in and join a cause that is aligned with your own personal beliefs; that’s one of the reasons Patagonia receives thousands of applications for the small number of positions that become available each year!

I wanted to include Rob in the book because he also perfectly represents the “fun hog” aspect of the company. When you’ve got a compelling corporate vision, people will work hard, but they’ll also have fun. Sure, it’s easy for the folks at Patagonia to have fun; they work in the outdoor sports industry. But fun can be instilled in any company.

The bottom line is that if people are doing something they are passionate about and having fun, chances are they are going to be innovative. Such an environment encourages co-creation with suppliers, customers and the culture itself.

Rob’s thoughts on the importance of a broad corporate vision, getting out of the office to spend time with customers, working in an open environment and, last but not least, having fun, can give you options for applying some of these principles, with the result of being more innovative.

How can you have more fun by getting out to be with your customers and being apart of their culture?