Innovation driven by passion
Passion drives us all; this is one of the unifying and defining aspects of mankind. Our passions can lead us anywhere we let them take us. Whether it is sky diving from space, creating new symphonies, inventing new ways to communicate, or making the best “Labels for the stuff kids lose!”™, passion leads to innovation.
The passion for innovation in technology comes from a desire to improve, to simplify, and to give a customer what they really want, whether they know they want it or not. Steve Jobs was the best modern example of someone who understood this combination. With the iPod and iTunes Apple created beautiful technology that was simple to use (iPod) and iTunes gave a user simple technology to manage playlists, music, podcasts from their computer onto the iPod, simplifying the whole music on the go industry, giving people what they really wanted.
How did he do this? He watched people. He asked questions. He listened to the answers, not just the words more importantly, the emotions behind the answers. He was passionate about solving the emotion problems people had with products.
He was right.
Take the time to look around. See what people are doing. See what they avoid doing. Why do they hate doing that so much? Walk a mile in their shoes. Intimate knowledge and empathy with your customers and you connect with them. Then you have a passionate reason to make changes, to innovate a process, to create a new product, because you feel the pain.
At Mabel’s Labels, a few members of our IT team watched our production floor at the busiest time of the year. Sheets of labels all around our facility. Someone was packing an order for Jane; she said “Who has sticky labels for Jane?” It was like the New York Stock Exchange floor! Three hands shot up in the air each waving labels for Jane! We gazed at each other totally astonished. But how…? Turns out that there were reprints done because the quality was not good enough, and there was more than one person named Jane buying labels that day! Everyone then got together to figure out which was the right set to be shipped. Again and again we saw this happen during a number of days. One of the IT team was helping in production and was part of the “figure out which is the right one” process. Painful!
He proposed a simple tracking system using wireless bar code scanners transmitting data to an internal web service which then stored the data into a table in our database. These scanners have an O/S with simple web browsing capabilities built-in. The information scanned contains order number, item number, state and location. Another web app reads the database tables and can tell us what is where, and its status. When we discussed this solution with the production team, some said that tracking was not really a problem. But their body language and facial expression told a different story. We suggested the ability to handle reprints better; a perceived bigger problem, both solutions tied together, and this gave us buy-in for the change to the entire system. This simple innovation allows us to track each order at each stage of production. The result? On our busiest days, the production floor was calm, organized and ran smoothly! An added bonus – our customer service team received almost no calls about incorrect orders!
Simple yet effective innovation – generated by passion to simplify a process. Proposed, designed, and executed by empathizing with IT’s customer. The benefit was internal to our production team; the company’s customer was the beneficiary.
Many companies talk about creating a “culture of innovation”. The belief is that if you put a bunch of creative people together and let them think, that innovation will flow. In any brainstorming session, new ideas will be generated. Some will get major buy-in, some will even reach the project planning stage. To really drive the innovative ideas though, a leader has to emerge who will champion the project, with a real passion for the idea. Passion is the key. Create a culture based on passion and the innovation will flow.
Anand Sinha (@AnandSHamilton) is IT Manager at Mabel’s Labels (@mabelhood)