Technology and Organizations

Aaron Eden isn't only an Intuit Innovation Catalyst, he's also an entrepreneur in his own right. Now he's part of a group helping Intuit bring the ideas of lean entrepreneurship inside an 8000 person company with an audacious goal: 100 Startups in 100 Days.

Aaron has watched Intuit grow over the years. He spent eight years at Intuit before leaving to work on his own startup. Though his new business was successful, he was drawn back to Intuit for another three.

Intuit has become a different company company in the time Aaron was away and he resonates with the design thinking and Design for Delight he found on his return.

While working on his own business, Aaron had been listening to podcasts on innovation and creativity. The work of former HP CTO Phil McKinney on Killer Innovation (now author of Beyond the Obvious: Killer Questions That Spark Game-Changing Innovation) and that of The Lean Startup Machine (inspired by Eric Ries' book, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses), were foundations for him in his own business and as he came back to Intuit.

Aaron had the chance to think about how these ideas might support the company given Intuit's 10 percent unstructured time policy. After one data focused innovation project, combining random datasets and storyboarding with what the team might be able to create with them, the data and analytics team manager Aaron had worked with remarked that Aaron should use his skills as one of Intuit's formal Innovation Catalysts.

He went through Innovation Catalyst training in February of 2010.

Innovation Catalysts

Innovation catalysts help people throughout the organization work on innovation. The number of innovation catalysts has grown from 10 in the beginning (fiscal year 2009) to over 150 now. The idea for the role of innovation catalysts came from Intuit’s director of design who was challenged by Intuit's founder, Scott Cook, to find a way to support a broader perspective: Design for Delight where the focus is on solving customer pain through products and services developed through direct field research and speedy/iterative prototyping.

The innovation catalysts typically perform their role as part of their own unstructured time contributions. The number of catalysts, their actions, and how they are selected and trained has all followed the same design for delight interactions as regular service and product innovations do at the company. The next story is no different.

Lean StartIN

Aaron participates in "startup weekends" outside of Intuit, hosted by The Lean Startup Machine and the Kaufman Foundation. He realized that a similar approach of testing assumptions (i.e, rapid and iterative prototyping) while developing products and services might also work well inside of Intuit.

Aaron and Ben Blank (another Innovation Catalyst) piloted a customized event including five teams and several coaches. The success of the initial program led to a cheer of, "lets do a second event." They upped the participation to 15 teams. Their goal wasn't to replace the Design for Delight ideas that have become key to Intuit's values, but rather to give those values another stage on which to perform.

The second experience was such a success they they took on an even greater task: 100 Startups in 100 Days across 10 different Intuit sites. Intuit's Chief Technology Officer supplied the support for the ten events.

During our first conversation (about midway into the 100 Startups in 100 Days programs), Aaron offered me the chance to attend the the final presentations of one of the two day workshops. Of course I said yes.

Mountain View Lean StartIN: 100 Startups in 100 Days

For two hours I saw the most vibrant engagement I’ve seen all year. Teams started with ideas, ran a variety of experiments using a combination of face-to-face interviews on a local shopping street, Google AdWords campaigns, and the like… anything that would let them quickly test assumptions of what would delight their intended customers. Pivot after pivot these teams found ways to improve their options — all in just two days.

I've told my students that I've raised my expectations. Given the results these Intuit teams had in two days, imagine what I expect out of their 10 week projects.

Aaron and I are in complete agreement. This process is yet another example of how Intuit makes the most of their people, their technologies, and their organizational practices. They support this important mixing at all levels of the organization. The Lean StartIN participants come from all sections of the organization. As they take the show on the road in search of 100 startups in 100 days, they ensure the tools and values are available across the organization.

This is  also a beautiful example of what I'm calling 2020 Engagement

I'm working on a related book proposal and I'm starting it out with a longer version of this story. My idea is that 2020 Engagement takes us into "new work" where transparency is demanded of organizations, responsibility of individuals, and personal professional development is the norm.

Intuit and the now 250+ Lean StartIN participants are early entrants into the 2020 Engagement model. From them I'm learning the basic tactics and how to track and pivot around lean, minimum viable test results. In my recent book, The Plugged-In Manager, I describe this kind of activity as effective use of stop-look-listen; mixing across people, technology, and organizational process; and then sharing to bring more people on board. Where being "plugged-in" is a life skill (similar to swimming), 2020 Engagement is participating in an Olympic relay race using a variety of strokes. 

I thank Intuit and Aaron for sharing so much with me. I expect we will all continue to learn from their experiences. I hope you too will share your thoughts and experiences. 2020 isn't very far away and we all need a moving start.

A shorter version of this post appeared on Technorati.

Imagine that you are an experienced movie director. The writing team gave you an amazing script. You were able to cast the perfect set of actors and special effects gurus. The filming went exceptionally well and you are even happy with the editing and music. The studio’s marketing team is doing a great job and you hear that presales of the related merchandise is at record levels.

Your job is done -- or is it?

The movie opens in two days and your team is still testing the interactive component of the film. Using personal sensors worn by audience members, your movie adjusts on the fly based on the audience’s emotional response in real time. Not scared enough? Add a bass beat in that particular showing to match a faster heart rate and some subsonics to make the skin crawl. If heart rates and other stress indicators show the audience is too scared to follow the plot... bring down the bass and make other subtle changes.

This is not science fiction, but rather how I think the application of biomedical sensors to entertainment (and entertainment is just the tip of the iceberg) could go given the players already in the field.

Irish innovators from Shimmer Research are developing a variety of wearable wireless sensors. Shimmer has worked with filmmaker and new media consultant Gawain Morrison of Filmtrip as Morrison’s team develops, “Sensum,” an emotional response system that can easily be worn by audience members. Filmtrip makes movies more engaging and has gained acclaim for their work at South by Southwest and other new media festivals.

This level of engagement with our own reactions, our customers, clients, and colleagues is available today. You may already be involved in some level of engagement through sharing your workouts, blogging your interests, or tweeting about your work. Filmtrip gets to the leading edge by creating a film, a work, that is better due to the engagement with its actual audience at the moment, not just with what they thought the audience would be like during production.

We all need and can have this level of engagement in our work.

We may not all have biomedical sensors to show how we are connecting with our work, but we all need to think about how else we can get 20/20 insight into:

• Our own work
• The work of our teams
• Our organizations
• The organizations we cross paths with

And then, how to use that insight such that our work, no matter our industry, is improved.

This is 2020 Engagement

Greater transparency, greater responsibility given the trust offered along with the transparency, and a supporting need for continued professional development. Do you have an example to share?

For more on the Shimmer technology see Kieran Daly's (VP Business Development) recent post on using the technology during the Allianz Business to Arts Awards -- tracking his biomedical responses as Shimmer won!

To follow Gawain Morrison, Filmtrip, and Sensum, please visit their blogs at http://www.filmtrip.tv/ or http://sensumco.tumblr.com/

Posted with Blogsy

Each year the Leavey School of Business (Santa Clara University) publishes a list of books the faculty have read and would like to recommend. I'll add a link to the list when it's available. I'm sharing my response with you here, in case you missed my earlier reviews, and for those great books I've yet to formally review.

My favorites:

Looking forward to reading (in press or on my shelf):

What did you read this year?

The Plugged-In Manager: Get in Tune with Your People, Technology, and Organization to Thrive was the August book for 12 Books, "the only author led book group in the world." Jacob Paulsen was my gracious host for the month and led the webinar where we summarized the month-long on-line discussion. All in all, a great experience for me as an author and I hope a great one for the participants. Thank you to all for the opportunity.

Video from the webinar (my overview of the book starts around 4:00, round-up and questions & answers begins around 26:30):

My friends and colleagues at e-Work, LiquidSpace, and Aalto University in Finland are working through the topics for our South by Southwest proposal. We're pushing the ideas about how we all decide the what, where, and how of our work… and we'd love your vote (quick registration required to vote).

Every day you wake up and either make a decision, or follow someone else's decision, about where & how you work.

Is it:

• Distributed
• Co-located, but mobile
• Co-located in your own place, with its own walls
• Co-located, Hacker Dojo style (one place, not formal with walls)

Are you making the most of your design?

We don't know the answer to the question, but we'd like to share our experiences and work with you to get closer to a practice of how to decide.

We offer a debate in our SXSW proposal. We envision at least four tables covered with paper and markers. The speakers will share 10 minutes of background and then jump to the question of how to best make daily and longer term work place/design/tool decisions. Speakers and recruited facilitators (if you're going to SXSW please let us know) join the tables to lead three rounds of debate, breaking to ask people to switch tables and build on the ideas already on the table notes. The notes become a visual record for participants to take away (isn't that why we have cameras in our phones?)

We've done this before on other topics. It's amazing.

Questions Answered:

• Is working in a garage the best way to start a business?
• What do you need to know to make a winning decision about how you do your work each day?
• Does everyone need to be with other intelligent beings every day?
• Is technology the key to locationless work?
• Are you making the most of the resources you have access to?

Feel free to start the debate now. How confident are you in the work design decisions you made today?

• Terri Griffith Santa Clara University
• Kate North e-Work.com
• Mark Gilbreath & Doug Marinaro LiquidSpace
• Anu Sivunen Aalto University, Finland

Posted with Blogsy