Leadership & Business

What if… Analysts cared more about Innovation

When I was a kid, Marvel Comics put out a series called “What if…?”  Each would fill my head with wonder as I read through the daydreams the comic’s writers came up with for heroes like Spiderman, Captain America, and the Hulk.

Jeneanne Ray let me relive this sense of wonder and excitement in BusinessWeek by sharing her fantasy conference call which took place in a (hopefully not too distant) future where Wall Street analysts understand the value of structured innovation, and corporate executives, seeing how an integrated innovation program directly effects their stock price, do as well .

I love this.   It’s very clever how Jeneane understands that while broad brush stroke innovation may never appeal directly to Wall Street, structured innovation and the value it creates, is something analysts could actually wrap their brains around.   And of course, pressure from Wall Street can always help change a company’s priorities.

As Jeneane says, “just as quality became a serious business discipline 20-plus years ago, and is now embedded in most organizations through standard operating procedures, innovation must be developed as a discipline. And we believe that, over the next 20 years, it will be.”

I agree wholeheartedly.  Innovation needs to make the jump from being perceived as an art to that as a discipline. 

However, what Jeneane left out is that, whether acknowledged or not, when implemented, structured innovation programs already add real value to companies that have implemented them by making them more productive and competitive.   And by helping companies succeed, they already do affect stock price.   

Now if we can just get the analysts out there to take notice…

Innovation: Who Cares?

Check out Lee Gomes’ “Portals” column in today’s Wall Street Journal: “Some ‘Breakthroughs' Deserve That Title – But Definitely Not All.”

Gotta love it.

I’ve been thinking a lot along similar lines lately in terms of innovation. Until the recent changing of the guard at Ford, it seemed as if everywhere I turned, I saw Bill Ford’s face in full page magazine ads and 30 second television spots touting Ford’s innovation culture (actually, Bill’s still popping up on the Ford Innovation web site), but take a look at Ford’s recent financial performance— it stinks!

Now, the folks at Ford will probably tell you that the campaign will pay off “in the long term,” but they’re wrong. These days consumers don’t care about what’s coming down the road. In their eyes, you’re only as good as your last product.

Consumers don’t care about what Ford is doing to benefit them five years from now, they’re interested in the cars they can buy today. In five years they’ll be ready to buy their next car, and you know what, if Ford has delivered innovative products, they’ll look at them then. But buying a Ford today doesn’t have a big influence on what consumers will buy five years from now — that brand loyalty thing is old school thinking.

Now don’t get me wrong, Ford’s done some amazing work with TRIZ and USIT in the past (and I’ll be among the first to applaud them for that!), but it seems to me that their latest “innovative” direction is veering them away from the structured innovation path and into the IBM and Intel world of, as Mr. Gomes calls it, “breakthrough inflation.”

What executives around the world don’t seem to understand is that consumers, whether retail or business, don’t care what you’re going to do for them in five or ten years. They care about what you’re going to do for them today, and maybe tomorrow. So for all the talk of innovation, keep it to yourself. It does not impress anyone outside your company. Treat it like your secret weapon and focus on actually producing innovations, not on promising that you will. Because until you get a grasp on what it takes to truly innovate, all you will produce is talk.

So what can CEOs do about it?