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Team Innovation Management (TIM)
Research Into Practice
Don O'Neill
Independent Consultant
ONeillDon@aol.com
Macroeconomic Positioning
Michael Porter of Harvard University has identified the macroeconomic stages that drive national competitive development including cheap labor, investment in infrastructure, innovation, and economic advantage. The U.S. is now transitioning from the investment driven stage where the infrastructure is organized to improve productivity and quality to the knowledge-based, innovation driven stage where software and information technology intersect with application domains in every industry sector to produce novel and useful results that extend the state of the art [NII 04].
The outcomes envisioned in dealing with the dual challenges of innovation and offshore outsourcing include increasing U.S. innovation in both the production and use of software products and systems, aligning global software participants and functional tasks according to an innovation-driven, value hierarchy, and retaining high value, knowledge-based service innovation onshore while pushing the highest skill work to the lowest cost of performance whether onshore or offshore [Software 2015].
R&D and Innovation
Government sponsored R&D is aimed at a limited number of large innovations. This Innovation in the Large results in public goods not appropriable by a single enterprise and open to all both onshore and offshore. The artifacts of Government R&D are roadmaps and agenda that facilitate dissemination and foster collaboration.
The business enterprise focuses on an uncountably large number of small innovations. This Innovation in the Small yields private goods fully appropriable unless the enterprise chooses to make them open, an emerging business practice. The artifacts of enterprise innovation are the distinguishing products that deliver business success and boost competitiveness and the patents that insure future success. Here inventors are the point of the spear in the struggle for global competitiveness. The TIM Research Into Practice is seeking a systematic approach to achieving Innovation in the Small.
Business Context
While achieving innovation is sporadic, management insists on something more systematic. Team Innovation Management (TIM) Research Into Practice bridges the gap between the realities of uncertainty and experimentation associated with creativity and invention and the more focused goals and objectives environment of the enterprise and its managers. IBM's “Global CEO Study 2004” reported that today's CEO's are intent on increasing revenue through new and differentiated products and services and on containing cost through strategic offshore outsource partnering.
Value Point
“Software: the infrastructure within the critical infrastructure” [Software 2015] disciplines the TIM focus on software usage where the value points of critical industries are identified. A Value Point is a computer program or software system within an enterprise product line that is strategically essential to the competitiveness of the enterprise. Once identified, value points are tagged as strategic assets subject to the rigors of the enterprise strategic planning process. This ensures that allocated resources are committed to achieve the best industry practice in their project management, product engineering, and process management.
Research Direction
The Team Innovation Management (TIM) research is committed to identifying, applying, and verifying the practice, knowledge, skills, and behaviors needed to substantially increase innovation in both the production and use of systems and software. It is specifically focused on the systems engineering and software engineering roles and capabilities needed to systematically collaborate in the cross discipline intersection between producer and consumer.
Goals and Benefits
The goals of the Team Innovation Management (TIM) Research Into Practice are to:
1. Encourage innovation within the U.S. software industry in accordance with “Software 2015: A National Software Strategy to Ensure U.S. Security and Competitiveness,” report of the Second National Software Summit. http://www.CNsoftware.org [Software 2015]
2. Advance the competitive development of the enterprise by renovating functional tasks and activities and accelerating the innovation management capability and capacity needed to substantially increase innovation in both the production and use of systems and software.
3. Provide systems engineers and software engineers with the essential knowledge, skills, behaviors, and motivation needed to substantially improve team innovation management in the enterprise and on the project.
The benefits of the Team Innovation Management (TIM) Research Into Practice include:
1. Improve systems and software engineering team capability to systematically collaborate on the cross discipline intersection between producers and consumers.
2. Improve enterprise compliance with the Organizational Innovation and Deployment process areas of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) aimed at selecting and deploying improvements and institutionalizing the defined process associated with innovation and its management.
3. Improve the capability to guide producers and consumers towards intersectional, process transforming innovations that address deep needs.
4. Improve the capability to guide producers and consumers towards directional, rules-based innovations that improve efficiency and productivity.
5. Improve organizational readiness to deploy strategic offshore outsourcing.
The Paradigm Shift
While the pursuit of innovation may be systematic, achieving innovation is more chaotic. In some ways innovation management resembles quality process improvement, but the paradigm is essentially different. While the infrastructure-based quality process demands conformance, standards compliance, and risk adversity with the hope for perfection, the innovation management process demands creativity, experimentation, and risk taking with the hope for success but the possibility of failure. Consequently, the enterprise faces a competency destroying change management challenge for both staff and management.
The enterprise beginning the transition from an infrastructure-based quality process to an innovation management operation may tend to depend too much on getting lucky and not enough on being good.
1. In getting lucky, success is measured in terms of return on technology where gains too easily labeled as innovative are commoditized at the outset, and directional changes originate from the producer that tend to promote efficiency and better-cheaper-faster, all of which draw upon existing enterprise staff skills and old visions from the infrastructure stage.
2. In being good, success is measured in terms of return on innovation where truly innovative gains are more strategic, and intersectional changes originate in the cross discipline collaboration and culture clash between producer and consumer where changes are deep seated and transformational, all of which require the renovation of enterprise staff skills and new visions.
The Intersection
Innovation lies at the intersection of invention and insight dependent on ideas, collaboration, and expertise [Johansson 04]. At the intersection there are many ideas and many combinations, and there are many forces including culture, science, and the leap of computation. The intersection is modeled as shown below:
Once at the intersection, it is the role of the systems engineer and the software engineer to generate as many ideas as possible.
1. Some will be simply directional, rules-based work force reducing efficiencies [Levy 04]. Directional ideas spawn new features and capabilities, are often customer driven, and can be implemented by planned and predictable steps. These new features extend the dwell time of the product line within the niche.
2. Others will be intersectional, process pattern transformations [Levy 04] that involve radically new directions driven by the cross discipline clash with new directions not based on detailed knowledge and ideas originated from people least expected. These new directions may open new niches.
The Lab
The centerpiece of the Team Innovation Management (TIM) Research Into Practice is the TIM Lab, which is structured to accept teams of five systems engineers and five software engineers. Here systems engineers and software engineers are paired-up for their appearance in the intersection of innovation where the application domain and information technology clash and where each pair generates as many good ideas as possible presenting the results to the group which rank orders the most promising ideas. Participants engage each other in seeking out the deep needs in the application domain, identifying process transforming innovations, and pinpointing rules-based innovations. Participant pairs with the most promising ideas are invited to record their innovations in the form of innovation value statements and to present these to an Enterprise Innovation Committee.
The Lab Results
As systems engineers and software engineers enter the intersection in pairs to discuss needs and capabilities, each pair generates as many innovative ideas as possible. These ideas are explicitly recorded and categorized according to directional or intersectional, rules-based or process pattern, deep-seated need or nice-to-have capability, and producer or consumer innovation.
The Way Forward
The modes of team collaboration among systems engineers and software engineers, the TIM Lab process, and the model of the intersection with its distinctions for directional and intersectional innovations that are rules-based or process patterned and producer or consumer sourced may reveal valuable insights with respect to achieving highly valued novel, useful, and nonobvious innovations.
Bibliography
[Carmel 99] Carmel, Erran, “Global Software Teams”, Prentice Hall, 1999
[Christensen 97] Christensen, Clayton M., “The Innovator's Dilemma”, 1997, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts
[Christensen 03] Christensen, Clayton M. and Michael E. Raynor, “The Innovator's Solution”, 2003, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 304 pages
[Dobbs 04] Dobbs, Lou, “Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed is Shipping American Jobs Overseas”, Warner Books, 196 pages, August 2004, ISBN 0-446-57744-8
[Florida 05] Florida, Richard L., “The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent”, Harper Collins, New York, 2005, 326 pages
[Friedman 05] Friedman, Thomas L., “The World Is Flat: Brief History of the Twenty-First Century”, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. New York, 2005, 488 pages
[Hamel 96] Hamel, Gary and C.K. Prahalad, “Competing for the Future”, Harvard Business School Press, 1996, 357 pages
[Johansson 04] Johansson, Frans, “The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures”, Harvard Business School Press, 207 pages, September 2004
[Kelly 98] Kelly, Kevin, “New Rules for the New Economy”, Penguin Group, 1998, 179 pages
[Levy 04] Levy, Frank and Richard J. Murnane, “The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market”, Princeton University Press, 174 pages, 2004, ISBN 0-691-11972-4
[McNamee 04] McNamee, Roger and David Diamond, “The New Normal”, Penguin Group, 256 pages, 2004, ISBN 591840597
[Moore 96] Moore, James F., “The Death of Competition”, Harper Business, 1996, 297 pages
[NII 04] “Innovate America”, National Innovation Initiative Report, 15 December 2004, Council on Competitiveness, ISBN 1-889866-20-2, 68 pages
[Porter 90] Porter, Michael E., “The Competitive Advantage of Nations”, The Free Press, New York,1990, 896 pages
[Schwartz 05] Schwartz, Evan I., “Juice: The Creative Fuel That Drives World-Class Inventors”, Harvard Business School Press, 2004, 238 pages
[Software 2015] “Software 2015: A National Software Strategy to Ensure U.S. Security and Competitiveness”, Report of the Second National Software Summit, Center for National Software Studies, 29 April 2005, 24 pages
[Thurow 03] Thurow, Lester, “Fortune Favors the Bold”, HarperCollins Publishing, Inc., 2003, 340 pages
[Washburn 05] Washburn, Jennifer, “University, Inc.”, Basic Books, 2005, 326 pages
[Zander 02] Zander, Benjamin and Rosamund Stone Zander, “The Art of Possibility: Transforming Personal and Professional Life”, Penguin Books, 224 pages, 2002, ISBN 0142001104
Instructor Biography
Don O'Neill is a seasoned software engineering manager and technologist currently serving as an independent consultant. Following his twenty-seven year career with IBM's Federal Systems Division, Mr. O'Neill completed a three year residency at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) under IBM's Technical Academic Career Program. There he developed a blueprint for charting software engineering evolution in the organization including the training architecture and change management strategy needed to transition skills into practice.
As an independent consultant, Mr. O'Neill conducts defined programs for managing strategic software improvement. These include implementing an organizational Software Inspections Process, directing the National Software Quality Experiment, implementing Software Risk Management on the project, conducting the Project Suite Key Process Area Defined Program, and conducting Global Software Competitiveness Assessments. Each of these programs includes the necessary practitioner and management training. As an expert witness, he provides testimony on the state of the practice in developing and fielding large scale industrial software and the complex factors that govern their outcome.
In his IBM career, Mr. O'Neill completed assignments in management, technical performance, and marketing in a broad range of applications including space systems, submarine systems, military command and control systems, communications systems, and management decision support systems. He was awarded IBM's Outstanding Contribution Award three times:
- Software Development Manager for the Global Positioning (GPS) Ground Segment (500,000 source lines of code) and a team of 70 software engineers within a $150M fixed price program.
- Manager of the FSD Software Engineering Department responsible for the origination of division software engineering strategies, the preparation of software management and engineering practices, and the coordination of these practices throughout the division's software practitioners and managers.
- Manager of Data Processing for the Trident Submarine Command and Control System Engineering and Integration Project responsible for architecture selections and software development planning (1.2M source lines of code).
Mr. O'Neill served on the Executive Board of the IEEE Software Engineering Technical Committee and as a Distinguished Visitor of the IEEE. He is a founding member of the Washington DC Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) and the National Software Council (NSC) and serves as the Executive Vice President of the Center for National Software Studies (CNSS). He was a contributing author of “Software 2015: A National Software Strategy to Ensure U.S. Security and Competitiveness”, a report on the Second National Software Summit. An inventor, he has a patent pending on “Business Management and Procedures Involving Intelligent Middleman”, an apparatus and method for the inside track to offshore outsourcing. He is an active speaker on software engineering topics and has numerous publications to his credit. Mr. O'Neill has a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Contact: ONeillDon@aol.com, (301) 990-0377