NBF 2013 Vijay Govindarajan Talk 1

Vijay Govindarajan on 3 Box Innovation

My thoughts on the speech lies underneath. 

As you can see I did not manage to get them all done yet. These take some time but I must say that I'm super happy for taking proper notes (for once!)

Also feel free to comment of course. Especially those who were present at the event.

3 Box Innovation

Is actually a term coined to give a person a different focus point to look at innovation in all of its possible forms related to time. In the end we all know that time is the deciding factor in innovation. It would not pose a huge effect to the world if you were to come up with a new way to build a light up an oil lamp.

With his example Vijay brought up high jump and it's four different styles/ways of jumping in olympics. I won't go into much detail to the example because you'll come up with many of your own once you see what the 3 box thinking is about.

1 Box - Operational Excellence

When most people are given a task their first idea is to see how it is done around them. This is common sense after all. It is of human nature to look examples. This is what some people call: monkey see - monkey do. I've got nothing against monkeys but the truth is that most of the time this way of working won't get you far in business or in life for that matter.

How many of you have trained the high jump sciccor style?

But this is the way hundreds and thousands of companies work everyday. They think that they must work in a certain way only because it's the industry standard. Too bad that most of the time common sense is not common practise. Which leads us to the second box...

2 Box - Best Practise

In this box we can "find" the way the current industry leaders operate. They have found out the best ways to get stuff done for their company and their industry.

These things can be ways of leaderhip or use of the best tools for the job and trade. Sometimes it just means being more stubborn and hardworking than the competitors. Other times it can be just a great "innovative" use of other industrys way of work that suits to you and gives you the advantage over your competition.

The biggest challenge with the "Box 2 company" is that they have the highest fall to fall. To be the industry leader and having blind faith in the ways of your (present) success might actually be the reason for you downfall (This wouldn't be a blog about innovation without a reference to Nokia...) Which leads us to the "last" box.

3 Box - Tomorrow

Now we step into the most complex of the boxes with out of the box thinking (lovely word play isn't it?)

This is something where you cannot still exist but you should be thinking and designing for. So actually you are designing something for a market or a customer that doesn't know about the place yet. Enter Mr. Ford:

So instead of just trying to perfect and lubricate the thing you are currently doing is never enough in the long run. Here lies the best thing about innovation. It is not going to remain the same. There will always be ways to improve the current world and ways of working. Mostly because we still haven't even realized or created the problems that we will be facing in the future.

The biggest learning point for me was the idea to segment innovation related to time. There is a right place and time for (almost) everything.

Ideas that popped into my mind with this talk?

Where do I or my company use energy and focus?

How am I tracking the weak signals to base my innovations about?

What sort of adjecant fields can I find next to myself or my business? Is there something I could add or learn from those businesses (box 2 & 3)?



I've also added here the wonderful visualized notes from Linda Saukko-Rauta.

Pictures:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/EthelCatherwood1928.jpgwww.nbforum.fi