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Robin Spencer: Idea Management as and Enabler of the "Pull" Business Model
Summary from The Front End of Innovation Conference-Europe 2008
Robin Spencer, a Senior Research Fellow at Pfizer Global R&D, is responsible for Idea Management and Innovation. He showed how an idea management platform can be leveraged to support a variety of tasks in the context of innovation management. This refers to – as he called it – the third question, namely : “How to organize a “pull” innovation model?”
This third question follows questions 1 (“Why innovate?”) and question two (“What to do to innovate?”). After reviewing the usual suspects why innovation is indispensable, he answered question two by explaining the “Push” and the “Pull” strategies to direct resources to achieve a business goal. He stating that companies need to realize both the push and the pull strategies. Push is traditional: analysis, decisions, and planning are done before pushing resources at targeted goals or problems. But it is ineffective in a uncertain, complex, or fast-changing environment. Here, the Pull paradigm may help where resources are pulled towards a problem as needed. However, one needs agility, quick decision making and flexible tools for it.
Mr. Spencer explained how they organize a Pull strategy at Pfizer. They use an idea management platform to pull resources from all over the organization for a broad range of issues. This platform proved valuable not only for innovative R&D in a narrow sense, but for a broad range of management topics.
As an example Mr. Spencer shared the experience made when the R&D team at one site was dissolved and people were asked to move over to another U.S. site far away. Normally you would expect a lot of employee churn as a reaction. By using the idea management platform to help employees to get advice from colleagues at the future site, to-be-relocated staff quickly got answers about urgent questions like: Where best to settle? Which is the best school for my handicapped child? Based on that help, a much larger percentage of employees could be retained.
Another successful application was asking employees for their preferences how their future workplace should look.
In more mainstream applications, Pfizer uses the platform for hundreds of small and mid-size campaigns, typically sending out a technical challenge to thousands of people and creating collaborative teams among the respondents. Innovation comes from the number of small steps assisted by the idea management system. The system supports these initiatives as it requires zero end-user training, is scalable to 10,000s of participants and supports ideation, comments, evaluation and decision making.
The presenter gave numerous examples how the tool was applied. The most successful results used a combination of the idea management tool with personal meetings. Among them the “speed dating” events are notable: These bring people together in multiple short encounters. By facilitating in a rapid-fire, five minute sessions where people describe what they need or what they have, Pfizer gained 73 ideas from a single-day event.
As Robin Spencer pointed out, the Pull strategy means a culture change in most companies. However, one should not talk about culture change. Instead, initiate many small projects which use Pull technologies to effect such a change.
(See Robin Spencer: Learning New Tricks - Innovation Architecture)
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Chas Martin
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