My topic today is called how to get your

innovations adopted. Is anybody interested in that topic? Let's start out with a quiz here



How many of you think innovation is unpredictable? Raise your hand. so in other words

the rest of you think you can predict when your idea is going to get accepted.

How many of you think that innovation is mysterious?

A few.

How many of you think innovation is a skill?

Good we're in the right group here.

How many of you think it's learnable? something you can learn. That's good. Some of the groups
I've talked to they think innovation is kind of unpredictable, you can never tell which
ideas are going to make it. They think that its mysterious and certain people seem to have a gift for it
and others don't. And when you propose that

it is a skill that could be learned they say no that can't be true.

I figure that the World Technology Network is going to be the people who believe it's a skill and who
are exercising that skill to make things happen. So my claim is that innovation is a learnable skill and I'll be talking about
why I've come to that conclusion and what it means to you today.

Now, Jim mentioned that I come from the Naval Post Graduate school.

There what my job is to teach navy officers, marine officers, army officers, air force officers and
international officers computer science.

And this is a really wonderful group of people to teach because they are all professional leaders. They're all
going to be leaders of the future. Many aspire to become admirals and generals later on in their careers.
So these are people who have great influence.
Also contrary to public opinion, in the military defense department, there's a very large
concern for innovation and if you think about it for a second, the U.S. military if is very interested in
being ahead of whoever the enemies are going to be in terms of the inventiveness and innovativeness of the miltitary forces
.

That said, on the other hand, on the other side it, the innovation and the military is a very high risk game


It's one of those things where if you make a mistake a lot of people could pay for it with their lives.

Or if you make a really big mistake, a country could be destroyed. So in this environment they're simultaneously interested
in innovation. They study it hard and they're also very careful about what they decide to adopt.
.

In the computer science department as in other departments there, we have

we have the mission given to us by the Chief of Naval Operations because we are a naval post graduate school

to help our students learn how to be members to be a culture of innovation.

And we believe that culture of innovation is nothing more than the collective behavior of individuals who are
confident that the basic skills of innovation.

and in some as we know some companies believe they cultivate a culture of innovation and this
seems to be a hit or miss proposition. There's lots of books on how to do it.

We believe that the culture of innovation begins with the skill of the individual and on top of that
the organization builds its culture. So we're trying to work directly with our officers and teach what are the
elements of the skill they have to learn.

We don't get enough time with them because they are trying to do all their other studies in computer science
to get too deeply into this so mostly we are interested in trying to teach them what the process looks like
that they have to become skilled at.

Now you might also have a question of why is a computer science professor, let's say a former geek,
a former technology developer still have my hand in that but no where near the depth I used to,
what is this computer science geek guy doing studying innovation?

What computer science professor have to add to that conversation?

Well, I think I have a big stake in that for a couple of reasons. Number one is as a guy who was most responsible for the
software developement and also trying to teach students to be good software developers, I see an awful lot of students
and an awful lot of people who think that a good idea will automatically win on its own merits. And all they
have to do is create the good idea and put it out there somehow and the world will pick it up and there idea will
become accepted.

And and as you know, this is not the way the world works. There's a lot of bad ideas that make it and a lot of
good ideas don't make it. so, we technologists, need to help those ideas along. If we want the good ideas to win,
we have to work that. it's not simply enought to put the-m out on the table.


A lot of low quality software makes it into the software marketplace and high quality stuff is known to exist
in labs and in open software communities and other places and a lot of the software people are actually
baffled about how come their good stuff never makes it out there.

My reaction to that was not like its bad luck or anything but rather there's a skill
involved that some people understand and they excercise the skill and their good ideas win.

Or there's people who have the skill and they exercise the skill and their bad ideas win.

And if you're a guy who is generating good ideas, and you want your ideas to win, you need to know what that skill is
and you need to excercise it.

I have actually interested in this topic because I've have been dealing with students who are trying to become good designers
and good software developers for almost twenty years now and was about of fifteen years ago, I started trying
to teach people the skill of design.

Some people believe that designers are born and the rest of us we have to put up with whatever we were
given. I started worry, be interested the question how would you teach computer sciencists the
skill of design said they would produce good software.

And when i came to the Post Graduate School, I got interested in the question how to teach the skill of innovation so that the military
would be able to generate their culture of innovation.

Well.

I hope that gives you a notion as to why a former geek would be interested in this.

One of the first things I've discovered

in the process of trying to understand how to teach this was, I think most of everybody would agree with this,we need
to have a definition of what innovation is so that we know what we're trying to teach.

Well, it turns out that if you study the dictionary and stories of people and ask people what do they mean of innovation, you will
get definitions over the map.

And this makes it very difficult to figure out what you're going to teach.

However, despite of the fact that the stories were all over the map, we did find that if we asked the question
the same way we always get the same answer. so if we ask the question what is innovation? you'll get things like, well, it's the generation of the new
idea.

It's a creation of a product that makes it in the marketplace.

It's the adoption of some new technology. It's an idea that has an impact. We can come up, you will
hear all these kinds of things, probably the similar kinds of things that are going through your mind.
So if we say what is innovation?
and I took a poll in the room, I bet you that we would have different points of view about what is innovation.
It is a feature that is not very helpful to me because I can
only satisfy a piece of the group.

When we ask the question, a slightly different question, sounds like almost the same question but it's not really the same question
we say how do you tell when an innovation has happened?

I'll say that again. How do you tell when an innovation has happend? Almost everybody will answer the way you could tell is that some group
or community has adopted a new practice.

So we took that as our operational definition. we said were trying to produce that. We want to help people learn the skill
how to induce other people to adopt their ideas or their technologies
for themselves. To put them into practice.

If something is not adopted or put into practice, it doesn't count as an innovation under this
definition.

So under this definition somebody comes up with a new technology and says, this new technology, and holds up a little thing in his hand,
and says this new technology is an innovation. well, what he's trying to do

is take credit for something that has happened yet. Namely the adoption. so my definition, our definition, we say
don't believe. If he's holding up in his hand

an invention which has yet to be adopted, and we don't know if it's going to be adopted, we don't even know if anybody
is going to accept it.

So, when you adopt this definition as your operational definition,

you are forced to make a distinction between invention and innovation. Invention

being the creation of something new. Innovation being the adoption of a new practice.

It's easy to see what the use there's awful lot of confusion about a lack of distinction between
invention and innovation out there. A lot of people create marvelous inventions and they think they are innovating
and when their stuff doesn't get accepted by anybody, they're completely baffled and mystified.

And the reason is that they're engaging in the wrong process. Well, obviously we need to invent things
but if you want your stuff to be adopted, invention is not enough.

Invention is simply a conceptional process sometimes backed up with prototyping process but if you don't work
to get it adopted, it's not enough.

So I make, put a big underline on that all the time, if there is a big distinction between invention and innovation.

These are related to each other because typically if you look at the process of change
from the start to the finish, the start of it is somebody sees an opportunity or possibility

and the end of it is you see a group or community that have adopted a new practice based on
that possibility. And in between there is various steps that they go through to get there.

So. This beginning part

where you see the possibility and you start talking about it and you put it up as an idea, that part we call the
invention part where you created something new that didn't exist before. and the rest of it where you take your idea or your prototype
and you make a proposal to the world or at least to your community. We propose that you adopt this
And then you go through some more steps to bring about that adoption and finally reading it to the community abopting it
That part is what I call the innovation part.

So process of change starts with invention at the beginning and ends up with adoption at the end.

Unfortunately a lot of, when you ask about innovation as skill a lot of what the books have to tell us

is the most energy goes into that beginning part

The most we need to do is study things like puzzle solving and creative thinking and conceptional blockbusting.
All these kinds of things. They don't help bring about adoption unfortunately. they help us create something new
but they don't help us bring about adoption. If you think that studying those things will make you into an
innovator, you'll be one of the ones that set up for failure because you'll not see any reliable way to get your ideas
adopted and you'll be baffled when it doesn't happen.

So that was our first job which was to come with a definition we could work with.

and to distinguish innovation from invention.

The next part I thought was going to be easy. The next part is we're going to do a literature search and find out what
Gurus have to tell us about the skill of innovation. And I thought it was really going to easy according to Amazon.com there's 8400 books
in their library with the word innovation in the title


And another 300 books in their library with the word innovator in the title. So, there are a lot
of books out there to choose from.

Well, I, my team started looking through these things trying to find out what's the skill of innovation and we
actually came up pretty dry. The closest we got was probably from Peter Drucker, who, as you know, passed this past week,
and is no longer with us. but he more than anybody

talked about innovation as a skilll and how it might learned. But by and large the consensus we've found in the
literature is that innovation is unpredictable meaning that if you take a look at a particular idea or a particular new
technology, it's very hard to predict whether it's ever going to be adopted. Another thing we've found, there is a

consensus that innovation process is governed by forces beyond human control.

It's like economic forces pushing and pulling and shoving and there's so many of them that human beings
can only exercise a minimum amount of influence over them.

We also find the consensus that it's risky and the risk takers are the ones who wind up winning.

As you may know, Peter Drucker disputes that one. He says the good innovators who are not risk takers, they
do a lot of analysis and they're pretty sure they can push something through and they hate risk.

Another thing we've found, is a consensus of what I call around the wall of large numbers, which means that
even if we can't figure out which individual is going to produce something new and we can have
hundreds of them in our organizations and somebody's going to come up with something new, so we can put up with all the failures because
every so often something good pops up and makes up for the rest of them. So a lot of those books out there will
tell you about organizational approaches to try to make the conditions right for individuals to randomly pop
up with good ideas which you can then turn into innovations.

Well none of this, of course, is very helpful towards the question, what does the individual need to know in the way of an
individual skill.

So we had a guy on my team that had to set out on process of discovery since the literature wasn't to helpful and what we did
was we the analyzed lots of innovators stories. There's plenty of books of those out there. One of the most resent ones, a really
good book, it's called They Made America, how many have seen this book, They Made America. It's by Harold Evans. It's a
very worth while book to get. It's stories of 70 American innovators and how they did it and it's all focused
around the idea that their their innovations were adopted.

And the stories all bring out all the stories they had to deal with in order to bring about adoption.
So there's a lot to be learned from that.

We also studied profiles, you know, those very popular of every other week and a magazine comes along
with the profiles of top 50 somebodies or the top 100 somebodies, so there's lots of stories to read that
talk about how they did it.

Occasionally some of the innovators write their own stories like Tim Burgers Lee wrote his own stories about the Web and there is
a lot to be learned<