What was the impetus for launching Cutter's innovation practice? Why now? It's kind of arisen by accident. We've been doing a research project at Harvard Business School since 1998, studying processes and practices used by innovators, from oil painters to drug researchers, designers, colorization guys in media, film directors, etc. There are some people who are pretty good at this thing we call innovation and we're looking to see if there are embedded management principles. There are, though most of these people wouldn't call them this.
As part of this, we've developed methods for assessing the degree to which people have the characteristics of these expert innovators. So when we go into these organizations, we interview the key innovators and managers and create these maps to show the various people in the organization and how teams exhibit these characteristics of expert reliable innovators. Companies are interested in looking at these maps and trying to figure out what they mean. That's given rise that there might be an interesting consulting practice here for executives who believe innovation is critical to creating business value.
The process we've put together has a component of figuring out what the organization's stated objectives are and doing a comparison of what they say they want to do and -- by evaluating these maps -- how ready they are and [how to put] together an action plan for filling the gaps that exist.
In some companies, senior managers and innovators are pretty well aligned. In other instances, they aren't.
Who are some of the advisors? Members of my research team are all listed as people involved with this [as well as] people I encountered through my travels in northern Europe from August 2005 to July 2006 where I studied how designers work. People like Paul Robertson, who is a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School who at one time was first violin for the Medici String Quartet. Daniel Hjorth, a northern European entrepreneur expert, who's also with the Copenhagen Business School.
What are some of the services that will be provided to clients? The most obvious starting place will be an assessment. We'll go in and do interviews and surveying and come back to companies with their maps, put together workshops to describe what they mean and put together a plan of action. We're also going to help companies with interventions, to carry out a plan of action -- and one of the forums that will play out of this is executive education. We'll do executive education, with people including Dick Nolan from the University of Washington.
Who do you see as the primary clients? IT managers? Business executives? I think it's a mix of both. In our early days here, we've found early involvement with IT groups, but the methodology is certainly broader than that. In some cases, the CIO wants his organization to focus more on innovation.
What are the primary challenges these clients are facing? IT kind of got hammered in the aftermath of the [dot.com] bubble and Nicholas Carr's article caused IT to focus on the cost side of the income statement. It seems to me that this is changing in the last year; I'm hearing from more CIOs who don't feel that their entire mission in life is to reduce headcount and improve efficiencies. They're seeing opportunities to grow the business.
Frequently in business we overshoot equilibrium and then stagger back. We did that during the Internet craze and overshot. We then came around and cut too much in the aftermath.
After years of cost reduction, we're seeing this as a way of turning the ship around.