Innovation: The Path to
Heaven … or … Hell?
Po Chi Wu, Ph.D.
Adjunct Professor
School of Bus. & Mgt.
School of Engineering
HKUST
Agenda
• Context & Perspective
• PCW background and experience
• What is innovation?
• Innovation approaches: past, present, future
• Knowledge Economy – 21st Century
Context & Perspective
• The Entrepreneurial Mindset
• Seeking opportunities
• Taking initiative
• Being accountable
• Delivering practical outcomes
• Courage to iterate
PCW background
• Cross-disciplinary experience
• Bridge Asia-Pacific-Europe
• Greater China (Taiwan, Hong Kong)
• Silicon Valley
Why innovate/change?
• Natural response to challenges
• Innovation => Resistance to change
• When not to innovate?
Investor perspective
• Long-term return on investment
• Risk-averse (conditional)
• Market-driven
• Innovation-driven
• Not futurists
• Insights from society/ecosystem
• Need stable financial industry infrastructure
Who are innovators?
• Change agents
• What do they need?
• Infrastructure
• Ecosystem
• Talent
• Guidance/nurturing
Space for innovation
• Why do most innovations fail?
• What are the conditions for innovation to succeed?
• External (ecosystem) – Internal
• Drive for creativity
Innovation approaches
• TRIZ/ATRIZ – Theory of inventive problem-solving
• Design-thinking – practical consumer-oriented
• Agile Innovation – organizational change
• In practice – try everything
• Challenge: Find what works for your organization
TRIZ/ATRIZ
• Early 20th Century Russian solution for mechanical objects
• Theoretical study of repeated patterns in patents
• A study of change, theory of “contradictions”
• Repeatability, predictability, and reliability to problemsolving process with a structured, algorithmic approach
• Best for physical/engineering problems
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCT_92.htm
TRIZ/ATRIZ
• Practical – training broader base of innovators
• Useful for eliminating “weak solutions”
• Mindset/philosophy – approach to work
• Management tool more than a creative tool
• Key question: What have we missed?
Challenges
• Starts from internal conceptual design
• Can be “mechanistic”
• Where is proprietary, competitive edge?
• Samsung consumer electronics
• Super AMOLED displays
• Image-processing chips in digital TVs
• Frequency-filtering technology to reduce
smartphone noise
• Economic value created: €1.5 Billion
Made with TRIZ – P&G
•
http://www.xtriz.com/MadeWithTRIZ.pdf
•
Proctor & Gamble’s most successful product
Design-thinking Objectives
Empathy
Rationality
Creativity
Principles
• Origins in architecture & design
• Focus on human concerns
• Learn from people’s behavior
• Find patterns
• Design principles
• Make tangible
• Iterate relentlessly
Design-thinking
• Knowledge-driven (people)
• New use of old tools: ethnography, intuition, STORY
• New technologies
• Problem definition – by customers, ecosystem
• Objective: unique, proprietary solutions
• Creation of new, fundamental IP
Design-thinking
• Combines empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the
generation of insights and solutions, and rationality in analyzing and
fitting various solutions to the problem context.
• Goal: “Matching people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and
viable as a business strategy” - Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO
• Ref: Tom Kelley and Dave Kelley, Creative Confidence, Crown Business,
2013, ISBN 978-0--385-34936-9, pages 19-20.
• Design Thinking - Thoughts by Tim Brown,
http://designthinking.ideo.com
•
Apple
Mobile APPs
• Newest, most intimate interface
• Simple, appealing design
• Designed for customer usability
• Flexible back-end
• Leverage – extends reach of knowledge
Intuit
• SnapTax – prepare tax return using
smartphone
• In 2006 – 6 designers at executive level.
In 2014 - 35
•
http://investors.intuit.com/press-releases/pressrelease-details/2015/Building-a-Design-DrivenCompany/default.aspx
Agile Innovation
• Organizational change
• Unique, people-based growth process
• Facilitated, not “managed”
• Focus on “resistance” to change
• Holistic = systematic, disciplined, inspirational
• Experimentation
Agile Leadership
• What kind of culture fosters true innovation?
• What is required of leadership?
• How is this culture implemented?
• How is this culture maintained?
Challenges in ecosystem
• High degree of uncertainty
• Accelerating change
• Fierce, global competition
• Technologies/products more complicated
• IP an increasingly important strategic asset
• Knowledge workers are young
• Senior management challenged to learn
What is disruptive innovation?
• Technology-driven
• Redefines industry sectors
• Shifts power
•
We seek to be Earth’s most customer-centric company for four primary customer
sets: consumers, sellers, enterprises, and content creators.
How is leadership adapting?
• The Entrepreneurial Mindset
• Next-generation leaders (knowledge workers)
• Communications challenges
Industrial Economy
• Early 20th Century manufacturing model
• Based on extraction of resources
• Production of tangible, physical products
• Value of human labor – to serve machines
• Temptation – keep doing the same thing
• Why innovate (change)?
Knowledge Economy
• Based on intangible assets
• Knowledge, IP
• Value of knowledge
• Value of knowledge workers
SMEs
• Challenges of entrepreneurship
• Entrepreneurs are passionate learners
• Learn from experience
• Learn to innovate, beyond surviving
• New tools/resources
• China environment unique
Silicon Valley model
• May be wrong for China
• Spirit of innovation rooted in local culture
• Different resource base
• Different opportunities
• Different definitions of success
• Different paths to success
• Money is not best metric of successful role model
New business models
• New measures of value in ecosystem
• Based on “sharing”
• Platforms of knowledge, communications (ICT)
• Value of shared knowledge increases
• Value of unused IP decreases
• Direction of increasing value is irreversible
Summary
• Change is inevitable => innovation is essential
• To survive, we must adapt.
• Learn from others what might work for us.
• Accept that we don’t know enough, so experiment
wisely.
Conclusion
• If you do not change direction,
you may end up where you are heading
Lao Tzu