Everyday Influence

The Leadership Imperative to Facilitate Innovation and Design Thinking

In a recent blog post I discussed the virtues of Design Thinking as a framework to facilitate the creation of innovative marketing and communication strategies.

In this post, I offer thoughts on what leaders need to do to create a culture where innovation and design thinking can actually thrive.

Lessons from Harvard Business Review.

In an article published in the December 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review entitled “The Innovators DNA" authors Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregerson, and Clayton M. Christensen discuss the characteristics of leadership that drive innovation cultures within organizations.  The article is the result of a six-year study to uncover the origins of creative - and often disruptive - business strategies in innovative companies.

The authors discovered that the best leaders in many organizations are not the genius behind ground breaking innovations.  Rather they are the curators of ideas and design and are the facilitators of collaboration that often lead to great innovations.

The ability to innovate is the secret sauce of business success. 

Companies that embody the spirit of innovation through design will lead and win in the market.  Companies like Apple, Amazon, and Proctor & Gamble are great examples of companies that are leading and transforming the competitive landscape of their respective markets based (in large part) by the culture of innovation that runs through their DNA.

In an effort to isolate the characteristics of innovative leaders the authors of the HBR article identifed the following fundamental characteristics and skills that leaders must posess.

Basic Use of Twitter to Understand Stakeholder Brand Perception

For many executives, when it comes to understanding basic stakeholder perception and sentiment towards a company's product or corporate brand in the social web, Twitter is a great and safe place to start. 

People who 'tweet' want to be listened to, they want to be heard.  As such, Twitter is a perfect platform for people to channel their emotions, thoughts, experiences and ideas.

There are a number of free Twitter applications available that allow you to run an infinite number of Twitter queries at the same time - such as TweetDeck. 

As an example, you can start by running the following queries, side-by-side:

• Love [insert your company/product name]
• Hate [insert your company/product name]

This is a safe and easy way to understand the sentiment of people toward your company (brand, products and services) - at the extremes.  You can also conduct the same with your competitors as a comparison or benchmark. 

If you want to take things one step further you can 'engage' with and thank customers who support and love your products/services - by responding to tweets.  Perhaps ask a few questions while at it: "What do you like best about x products?" "How can we improve your experience?"

Design Thinking for Developing Innovative Communication Strategies

 
I have drawn great inspiration from concepts of design thinking over the last four years as a basis to create and implement innovative communication and influence programs. 

After a recent conversation with a member of my team at SAP - Carly Cooper - I am further inspired to delve more deeply into the realm of design thinking as I feel that it represents one of the best frameworks for marketing and communication professionals to understand as they adjust to the current socioeconomic trends transforming business - as a result of social media.

The unstated ideas and principles of design thinking have been in practice for centuries and have served as the basis for many technology and business model innovations.

Companies like Apple, Dell, Proctor & Gamble and recent upstarts like Better Place and Salesforce.com have famously validated these principles to create significant game changing business models and innovations that in many ways have redefined the landscape of their respective industries.

The team at IDEO have formalized these concepts over the last decade with frameworks that have been refined, debated and discussed among an impressive group of thought leaders, practitioners and innovators.

Hasso Plattner a co-founder of SAP has become a patron of design thinking through his great efforts to sponsor the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University and the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

What is Design Thinking?

Wikipedia defines design thinking as: