John Gabrick
John founded MindMatters in the 90's to help companies compete better by leveraging innovation, improvement, and IP. Having worked with top companies like Sony, 3M, PPG, and J&J, John has earned a depth of experience in making innovation "work". MindMatters' solutions support hundreds of customers in their efforts to improve processes and sustain innovation.
John's expertise lies in engineering, business process management, and healthcare. He has experienced innovation form the perspective of academia, business, inventorship, engineering, and marketing and has been responsible for fostering, creating, managing, and selling innovation.
In this book, you'll read the story of one person's task to create innovation within his company. Although the characters are fictitious, they represent real successes—and failures—garnered from thousands of interviews, training sessions, and system deployments in organizations around the globe. You'll recognize the issues that arise in engineering, marketing, and deployment, and how they're solved. In this, you'll find your key to success.
See How We Can Help YouMuch of the inspiration for this book came from my exasperated attempts at getting "innovation to work" at companies around the globe. One of the biggest frustrations was the observation that everyone believes that they know how to innovate. After all, it seems simple: get people to give you good ideas—and everyone is always more than willing to give you good ideas, right? Not quite. There is a complex psychological contract that must be established between the idea submitter and the recipient. This "contract" contains provisions important to the submitter, such as "Will I be promoted or demoted?", "Will I get credit if the idea is successful?", "Will you spend the time reviewing the idea if I spend the time submitting it?" and so on. From the recipient's perspective, there are conditions as well, such as "Will you provide me with 'good' ideas?" "Have you considered the political, economic, etc. implications of your idea?", and "Is someone really going to come up with a better idea than me?"
You may be attempted to brush these off as selfish thoughts that would never come up in your organization, but you'd be wrong. We seem to believe that innovation is a byproduct of a "happy" organization, and that "happy" employees will give us a bounty of relevant, implementable ideas. The hard truth is that innovation is not an employee requirement. No one gets fired for failing to come up with a good idea. However, many more employees get ridiculed for coming up with 'bad' ideas, that is, bad ideas in terms of the people who review them. (It is interesting to note that nearly 90% of successful entrepreneurs took their bad idea with them and started a successful business). So, in many ways, the desire to innovate is suppressed by the organizational structure and environment, and the overwhelmingly negative consequences (to most people) for trying to innovate.
So, what am I driving at? If it was easy, everyone would be successful. You'd simply send an email, or post a note on the bulletin board, and a flood of good ideas would come pouring in. In reality, "real" innovation is difficult. It is a carefully crafted recipe that combines culture, economics, psychology, tools, and serendipity to produce demonstrable results. Real innovation solves issues that the organization struggles with and it enables growth. It creates competitive advantage. It is repeatable.