This is an abridged version of the presentation given by Ray Ziganto, President of Bi-Link at AME Jacksonville 2014. The presentation discusses Bi-Link's journey and pivot points in support of innovation at the company.
2. Our Journey
• Setting the Stage
• Phases of Bi-Link Evolution
• Entrepreneurial
• Opportunistic
• Strategic
• Point of Inflection
• Making Things Happen
• Collaboration Phase
3. Why Innovate?
• There’s a ‘Gap’ between the current state and
the desired state
• A relatively narrow gap can be reduced through
continuous improvement activities to achieve
incremental improvement.
• A wide gap demands innovation – a geometric
progression. Change the game and the rules.
4. The Facts about R&D
• R&D spending levels have no apparent impact
on sales growth, gross profit, enterprise profit,
market cap, or shareholder return
– Strategy + Business: The Global Innovation 1000
• “Innovation has nothing to do with how many
R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up
with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100
times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s
about the people you have, how you’re led, and
how much you get.”
– Steve Jobs, 1998
5. Innovation Imperatives
• Define your innovation strategy
• Communicate it throughout the organization
• Align your business and innovation strategies
• Ensure that your culture is aligned with
• Ensure that technical community has a seat at
the table when defining corporate agenda
• Manage the R&D portfolio
• Pull the low potential projects
• Manage the risk of big bets
6. Creating Breakthrough innovation …The
Fuzzy Front End
• Fuzzy Front End (FFE) is the “messy”, “getting
started” phase of product development
• Customer problems are understood in great
depth, potential solutions conceived
• Incremental innovations have little to no FFE
• Desire to seek patterns
• No formal process to navigate the FFE
• “Process” is often not considered to apply
Serial Innovators, Griffin, Price, Vojak
7. Thomas Edison
• The King of Innovation and Collaboration
• Document duplication – mimeograph machine
• Telecommunications – carbon button transmitter
• Recorded sound – first record and phonograph
• Electric power – incandescent bulb, distribution
• Motion pictures – motion picture camera, movies
• Storage battery – iron/nickel battery – no special handling
• Edison’s innovations contributed to 3% of global
GDP at the time of his death in 1931
• Industries bred of Edison’s innovations are
worth over $1 trillion globally
Midnight Lunch, Sarah Miller Caldicott
8. Midnight Lunch
“I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would
not swap for the favor of the kings of the world”
– Thomas Edison
Midnight Lunch, Sarah Miller Caldicott
9. Gathering Ideas Through
Networks
• LinkedIn – Stay in touch with engineers, buyers,
etc. as they transition to other companies/roles
• Gather insights from suppliers
• Who was catching high volume from proto?
• Trade and economic conferences that matter
• Look to local trade groups
10. Online Research and Networking
Following Threads
• Distill the information overload into useful points
• What things relate to us?
• What is the connection to be made?
• What things diverge?
• Interrogate a robust data set
11. 200 page Binder
• An exercise in exposure to ideas
• Studies on innovation, R&D, the culture of
Silicon Valley, background on innovators
• Researched contract design trends and
evaluate against capabilities, strengths, and
weaknesses
• Explored the “Maker Movement” heavily
• Sought out thought-leadership
• Studied incubators, accelerators, etc.
• Contact with VC’s, marketing, tech, etc.
12. Deep Dive:
Internal & External
• Strategy became a topic in our quarterly meetings
• Opened up the dialog with my team
• We began to tinker
• R&D lab became a customer facing space
• Began to bridge the gap with contract
engineering firms who understood
• Harness the Maker Movement
• Make small bets on new technology
• Brought in interns to modern-day apprentice
13. What is the Pattern? How do we
nail it down?
• Key components
• History
• Culture
• Capabilities
• Informed perspective
• Feedback and experience from small bets
• We had something interesting, but not enough.
14. Journey with Edison
• Collaboration as a process is highly consistent
with Bi-Link culture
• Adopted the Midnight Lunch session
• Members of our team are trained facilitators
• This became a tool to create not just optimize
16. The Takeaways
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route
to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise
before defeat.”
- Sun Tzu
17. Thank You!
Please complete the session survey at:
AMESurvey.org
Session Code: ThP-51
Innovation and Collaboration
in Job Shop Manufacturing
Ray Ziganto
Bi-Link.com
Ray@Bi-Link.com
LinkedIn | Twitter
Editor's Notes
Another way of saying that the only constant is change…
Every company has a unique history, culture, and collection of stories that define what it is.
In our experience…working ‘with’ our culture allowed us to move faster because the changes proposed were more readily understood.
Source: Strategy + Business The Global Innovation 1000: Proven Paths to Innovation Success
“ R&D Spending levels have no apparent impact on sales growth, gross profit, enterprise profit, market cap. Or shareholder return. (10000 statistical analyses or the relationship of R&D spending vs Corp Success)
Steve Jobs 1998: Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollare you have. When Apple came up with the MAC, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. Its aobut the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get.
Source: S+B
Define your innovation strategy, communicate it throughout the organization, and identify the short list of innovation capabilities that will enable it.
Tightly align your business and innovation strategies.
Ensure that you innovation culture is aligned with, and support of, your innovation strategy.
Focus on developing deep customer insight by directly engaging and observing end-users of your product.
Ensure that the technical community has a seat at the table defining the corporations agenda
Systematically manage the R&D portfolio, aggressively winnowing out the low-potential projects and ensuring that the right risk management capabilities are in place to support big bets.
Source: Serial Innovators
The typical Stage-Gate process, which works so well for incremental innovation where there are few market or technical uncertainties, does not work well for creating breakthrough products. These processes are deficient in 2 ways. First, the Formal NPD process used in firms assumes that the product is conceptualized already and that the technology development is more or less complete. Second, they assume that projects have been approved and accepted by management for development.
Stage-Gate types of processes are not helpful in navigating through the “Fuzzy Front End” (FFE) of innovation or in obtaining initial corporate approval and funding for a project.
FFE is the “messy, getting started’ phase of product development (smith & richardson 1992). In the FFE, customer problems are understood in great depth, potential solutions to those problems are conceived, and the technologies necessary to turn those potential solutions into concrete products are found or invented.
Incremental innovations have little or no FFE.
No formal process has been developed to help innovation teams routinely and successfully navigate the FFE for breakthrough innovation projects. Indeed, some suggest that the term ‘process’ is not appropriate for describing what happens in the FFE because ‘Process” denotes structure, whereas the FFE is inherently chaotic and nonlinear (Koen et al. 2002)
The king of ‘cred’ with regard to innovation and collaboration
Pioneered industries:
Document Duplication – mimeograph machine
Telecommunications – carbon button transmitter
Recorded Sound – the first record, the first phonograph
Electric Power – first incandescent electric light, a distribution system for electrical power, the worlds first central power station.
Motion Pictures – the wrls first motion icture camera, the first motion picture studio, the first movies
Storage battery – iron/nickel batter shich contained no liquids, no lead, required no special handling
Edisons innovations contributed 3% of global GDP at the time of his death (1931)
The industries which have been upon those which edison established today are worth over $1 Trillion globally.
Ref. Midnight Lunch by Sarah Miller Caldicott
Edison often returned to the Menlo Park Lab after dinner to check on his experiments.
Edison connected with other workers who were also at the alb after hours
He read their notebooks, and asked them to share experiments wit each other.
By exchanging expertise and seeing new patterns, new insights were created.
There was no “agenda”, only casual dialogue.
Edison did not profess to ‘know the answer’ to what was being discussed.
At about 9 p.m, Edison ordered in food for everyone.
For and hour or so, the group sang songs, told stories, and sometimes smoked cigars.
Then, the group would go back to work until midnight
These sessions mixed work language with social launguage in a unique way.
Midnight Lunch created a foundation for collaboration in Edison’s laboratories’
It yielded an organic way for people to converse and exchange insights beginning from a neutroal point.
Midnight Lunch transforms employees into colleagues.
There’s an abundance of research on team dynamics that supports this process as a way to break-down barriers between colleagues. It sops the typical team member habit of constantly ‘sizing each other up” (Anne Donnelon)
LinkedIn – Allowed us to stay in touch with engineers, buyers, etc. as they transitioned to other companies and other roles.
What was clear was that business hadn't stopped, but it had changed dramatically:
- Many buyers in Automotive found homes in the medical industry.
- Medical device companies began look for additional suppliers with a global footprint
Automotive companies (tier 1&2) scrambled to find suppliers that were still viable.
Engineers (good ones) scattered – Tech on the west coast, start-ups, contract design/engineering
Our suppliers: we asked them who was busy?
- proto/short-run
- Packaging
- Government/Defense
All supporting local demand….we wondered, who was catching the high-volume work when it transitioned out of proto?
Attended Trade & Economic development conferences: - Medical Conf in Boston – saw how govt, universities, business collaborated - Crain’s Mfg Conf – Thought leaders spoke on additive mfg, innovation, start-ups (1871)…saw the Gap between Chicago and Boston - Forbes “Reinventing America” conference – 30 under 30, Start-ups not just in Silicon Valley, importance of the industrial commons, the Maker Movement
Looked to local trade groups (TMA):
Typical small business response was to hide and wait for things to return to the way they were before.
Got me thinking about heritage/culture…what it must have been like for the founders of these companies.
Maybe our salvation was in returning to a way of thinking that we were familiar with…being entrepreneurial…being innovative
What things relate, what things connect, what things diverge…we needed a robust data set to interrogate.
The internet is an amazing tool
PWC studies on innovation, R&D, and the Culture of Silicon Valley
Researched contract design trends and dove into capabilities, strengths, weaknesses
Explored maker movement trends and drivers…motivators
Sought out thought-leaders
Studied incubators, accellerators.
I expanded my network and talked about what I was seeing w/VC’s, Marketing, Technologists, Engineers…did they see what I was seeing?
I had reams of info and my own attempts at pattern recognition – but what was at stake wasn’t how well I could adapt…it was how well we could adapt
I started making ‘strategy’ a topic in our quarterly mgt meetings and opened-up the dialog with my mgt team.
We knew we needed to achieve a better operating state – something that worked with our environment…but we couldn’t find the right words, the right story.
So, we did what had always served us well in the past…we started ‘tinkering’:
Already had the R&D lab, began inviting engineers from local customers to come to our place for meetings…face to face vs email-to-email.
I talked to Contract Engineering firms to see about bridging the gap…most didn’t grasp what we were doing, they already had work around (preferred vendors) and didn’t see the need to go any further…2 firms, (out of a dozen) ‘got’ our intentions immediately.
The maker movement holds huge entrepreneurial promise…and it’s based on Open Innovation (Henry Chesbrough; “Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.“)…not unlike what we already saw in the community of engineers we were regularly working with…sharing helps them iterate/improve a design quickly.
We began placing small bets on new technology. Our R&D lab was moving beyond diagnostics towards applications.
3D printing, small format CNC, Injection Mold tooling via 3D printing
We had unleashed our innovative legacy.
Brought in some interns – interns are the modern-day apprentices. The major difference is that they bring useable knowledge/value on t day-one. The real magic happens when you match the interns with “journeymen”. New ideas + Experience = Internal Application Engineering.
We engaged with the 2 forward-thinking Contract Engineering firms…tested our new working methodology (based on open innovation) with them…and were hugely successful.
History
Culture
Capabilities
Informed perspective on our operating environment (200 pages of research)
Feedback/Experience from our ‘Small Bets”
What we had was interesting, but lacked cohesion…the plan wasn’t yet obvious, more work was required.
Collaboration as a Process is Consistent with our Culture
We’ve run Midnight Lunch Sessions in Bi-Link (2 in north america, one in China). Three memebers of our team are trained as facilitators.
Gave us a tool to use…a process…that helps us create, not just ‘optimize.
We’re a ‘tooling-centric’ company…the engineering mind-set is dominant.
With that mindset, comes a level of built-in suspicion…outsiders need to prove themselves.
I was fortunate to find Sarah Miller Caldicott was based in the Chicago area…and is genetically pre-disposed to be innovation (and manufacturing) friendly!
Sarah is more than just a reference, but a definite resource.
“Nobody calls us names, except for us” – Last Vegas
