One of the better speakers on innovation, in my opinion, is Vijay Govindarajan. I saw him speak at the World Innovation Forum in May of 2009 and published my thoughts about his ideas.
A word that Vijay frequently uses when describing innovation is adjacency. Innovation by adjacency is without doubt the form of innovation that I have practiced the most throughout my career.
In a June 22nd interview sponsored by the MIT Sloan Management Review and the Wall St. Journal, Vijay defined adjacency in the following way:
“I distinguish between two types of innovation: adjacency innovation, which is a little less risky because you are innovating in a business area adjacent to your existing core business, and breakout innovation, where you are going multiple steps outside of your core business."
Adjacency For Intrapreneurs
While Vijay discusses innovation adjacency from the business point of view, I've always thought about it from the "building software" point of view. In particular, how does an intrapreneur find adjacent software opportunities? What are the customer pain points that can be solved and the product opportunities that can be gained by adding a twist to the combination of two different technologies?
My first experience with this type of innovation occurred during the design of the CLARiiON RAID algorithms. I was writing software that would return customer information based on mathematical calculations; this information might not exist on the surface of any disk (e.g. the disk containing that data had completely failed). I was concerned about data integrity and I needed a solution to give me the confidence that my software was rock-solid.
A picture tells a thousand words. I was an expert in my own implementation of RAID. Customers had an expectation of quality, performance, and data integrity from their storage systems. The product needed an innovative solution to address the data integrity requirement. The solution was unknown and is symbolized with a question mark in the diagram.
Innovative Adjacency: Collaboration with Peer Experts
At the time I was working on this problem I was aware of a test engineering group down the hall from my cubicle. I was no expert in the qualification of systems; I decided to find the person who was. I sat across from an expert and described my problem. I answered questions about my design of the RAID algorithms. We began to do some "what if" whiteboarding. This back-and-forth exchange led to the creation of a brand new piece of software with the following mission:
Automatically inject faults at all critical RAID state transitions.
I had never imagined a piece of software that would shut off disk drives, corrupt disk data, kill power to a disk array, and flood rebuilding disk areas with over-writes. But that's what we built, and we called it the disk array qualifier (DAQ). This piece of software has been maintained and enhanced for nearly twenty years.
Pulling in a third, adjacent sphere is the essence of Venn diagram innovation (another form of innovation by adjacency). The intersecting areas of the three spheres can result in an innovative solution (in our case, the DAQ).
This brings me to the subject of being an intrapreneur, which I define as "an innovator that conceives and delivers an idea at a large corporation". Intrapreneurial behavior can thrive in a company that has a large intellectual property and product portfolio. As an EMC intrapreneur I have access to a huge number of adjacent spheres (and the experts that go with them!). For example, when an EMC intrapreneur from PowerPath collaborates with an EMC intrapreneur from RSA, the result is a PowerPath Encryption product.
There's one catch to this type of behavior and it's called "initiative". The second half of Vijay's post contains a statement which I also agree with:
"I would shift to spending more like 70% on the core business and perhaps 25% on adjacency innovations—and maybe 5% on really breakout innovation."
This quote highlights Vijay's philosophy of balanced business spending on innovation. I like to apply his thinking to the behavior of individual intrapreneurs and how they manage their time. Each intrapreneur must have the discipline to regularly search out adjacent technologies (while still getting their core job done!). This means dedicating time not only to learning about all of the products in the company portfolio, but also getting to know the experts as well. EMC's internal social media platform (EMC ONE) has made this type of collaboration much easier.
What happens if the manager of an intrapreneur mandates that 100% of work time be spent on advancing a core product? The key thought here is time management skills. Keep a laser-like focus on hitting goals related to your core responsibilities (getting them done early if at all possible) while simultaneously displaying initiative in the exploration of adjacent technologies.
One final point for intrapreneurs: don't focus solely on the adjacent technology, but focus as well on the customer and market need.
Steve
http://stevetodd.typepad.com
Twitter: @SteveTodd
I appreciate the comments on Intrapreneurship and innovation investment. I completely agree that you need to have a balanced portfolio of core business, adjacency innovations, and breakout innovation (or as I like to call them, incremental, evolutionary, and revolutionary projects). I think the percentages will vary greatly from business to business and industry to industry, but the 70/25/5 ratio is probably a good average.
The final point -- "don't focus solely on the adjacent technology, but focus as well on the customer and market need," is absolutely critical, and is worthy of an entire blog unto itself. I suggest reading "Customer-Centric Product Definition" by Sheila Mello, "What Customers Want" by Anthony Ulwick, and "The Alpha Factor" by Wes Ball for further exposition of this important point.
Thanks for the excellent post, Steve!
Posted by: Brad Barbera | August 07, 2009 at 06:37 AM