Structured innovation--the only way

Here's an interesting story from Whirlpool about their efforts to innovate:

Believing that brilliant ideas were buried in the corporate hierarchy, he invited each of the company's 61,000 employees to unleash their creativity: Everybody everywhere, he exhorted, Go out and innovate!Off in the Italian Alps, a crew of workers got right at it. Handpicked by managers from across the company's European staff, the 25 employees were freed from their regular jobs and packed off to Whirlpool's office in Comerio, Italy, with a single purpose: to dream up products or services that would truly differentiate Whirlpool from rivals. A year later, they came back with their big brainstorm: an Internet business that would enable people to race one another over the Web on stationary bikes. So much for that experiment. It was obvious that Net bike racing, which didn't draw on any of Whirlpool's strengths, was a nonstarter.

The point is that innovation must be structured for it to get anywhere and to not end up wasting a whole lot of time. That means brainstorming too. Any idea in the abstract is as good as any other idea in the abstract, but you may end up with something that is highly unworkable on the ground--Whirlpool's experience. To get a good result requires structure and, I might add, a leader to hold people's feet to the fire-- figuratively speaking, of course.

This all goes against what people believe. They think that creativity is structureless, that it requires no judgments to be made on ideas until they are all in. A complete waste of time. (And, by the way, not borne out by any study on the subject--not a one of them.)

Whirlpool learned the hard way that real innovation requires a lot more than simply urging thousands of employees around the world to tap into their inner designer and then waiting for the great ideas to roll in. It requires hard work, structure, and unwavering discipline. After its inauspicious start, the company retreated from the all-out effort to democratize innovation and moved to a more traditional centralized model of product development. That did the trick. Since 2001, revenues from products that fit the company's definition of innovative have zoomed up from $10 million to $760 million in 2005, or 5% of the Benton Harbor (Mich.) company's record $14.3 billion in total revenue. Whirlpool's shares, at $92.64 on Apr. 25, have almost doubled in price over the past five years.

That's about right.

By the way, what Whirlpool ended up doing is thinking contextually. More companies need to do that.

There's a lot more in the article.