You hear the word "innovation" all the time these days, especially as it relates to competitive

advantage. Most people just see innovation as a rare big bang. It's a lot more than that.
In reality, innovation is a series of little steps that, cumulatively, lead up to a big deal that
changes the game. Yet in so many companies today, everyone defaults to thinking, "Innovation
Einstein. Edison. Jobs." "That's for somebody else, some genius."
The word just scares the bejesus out of everyone.
"I can't innovate."
"I can't come up with a new theory of relativity or a new light bulb or a new iPad. I'll leave that
for the crowd over there to do."
That's all the wrong headset. Organizations should make it their mission to reward every little
incremental improvement their people make. There's a saying we've been using for the past 15
years or so with all the companies we work with: "Find a better way every day."
It's not just a slogan, it's an operating principle. You want to engage every single person on your
team to find a better way. You want to champion them for doing it and make a celebration out of
what they improve, whether it be a more efficient accounting system, launching a new customer
program, or making a screw in a factory turn a little faster to make things run a little better.
Those are the real innovations. And together, with every mind in the game, they are what makes
a company competitive.
So when you think about innovation, don't let it scare you. Don't let it be a buzzword that isolates
10 people in your company while the other 90 sit on the sidelines, waiting for the innovators to
innovate. You've got to make innovation everyone's job, all the time.

Case On XEROX

The Wall Street Journal reports that Xerox started rapid prototyping of services in its innovation
process. And they are not the only one.
Does Xerox need an introduction? The American producer and seller of printers, photocopiers
and digital production printing presses employs more than 140.000 people. Xerox has always
been a real innovator: in 1959 it introduced the famous Xerox 914, the first plain
paperphotocopier. A Xerox researcher (Gary Starkweather) invented also the laser printer in
1969. The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is renowned. Innovation is still at the core
of Xerox's strategy. It spends 3.2% of the revenues in R&D, which amounts to $ 600 million in
2013.
Xerox has refocused on back office business processes like document management, bill
processing and IT outsourcing services the last years, as is reflected in the Xerox mission
statement:
Through the world's leading technology and services in business process and document
management, we're at the heart of enterprises small to large, giving our clients the freedom
to focus on what matters most: their real business.
A nice example of one of their recent innovations is the 'digital nurse assistant' Xerox has
developed. The WSJ reports: "In 2011, for example, a group of ethnographers from the
companys famed Palo Alto Research Center began studying nurses working in a Southern
California hospital. They discovered that nurses spend only about 30% of their time with
patients and the other 70% of their work day is spent on administrative duties including
searching for patient information and recording the administration of medication. Xerox wanted
to help nurses spend more time with patients, and less time on paperwork".
Now here's an essential condition to be successful in service innovation: identify relevant
customer frictions (as I call them) of your target group. Why? If you want to innovate a market
with a new service, your target group must change it's behavior? The must buy and use your new
service. Why should they? They will break their pattern only if you offer them a new simple

solution for a relevant issue they like to solve. That's the next step: ideate and prototype a new
simple solution.
"The researchers decided to create a prototype for a digital nurse assistant. The digital nurse
assistant is a combination of in-room displays and mobile technology that delivers information
on past, current and planned actions for a patient. It is a service that extends electronic medical
records and combines analytics and mobile computing to automate many tasks. As a nurse
receives patient updates on a tablet, the system reprioritizes work and gives nurses automatic
notification when medication arrives. A mobile badge is a key part of the system. The nurse
wears it, and when he or she enters the room, it automatically pulls up relevant patient
information on an in-room screen. The first prototype the nurse didnt like at all. The
information on the screen scared the patients because it showed red flags and information that
only a nurse or physician should see, she said. Then the Xerox unit that provides services to
healthcare organizations took the product and began to test it in pilot sites around the world.
The product has been on the market now for about six months".
Hardware companies, like Xerox, refocusing on developing service solutions for customers
require some radical changes in their mindset, competences and processes. This applies also for
their R&D departments:
1. They integrate the customer at the front end of the innovation process, studying his/her
behavior in practice and identify their customer frictions as a starting point for ideation.
2. They use design thinking tools in a structured way to understand customers, visualize their
processes and brainstorm and design new solutions.
3. They experiment at the front end with prototypes or even pretotypes (partially mocked-up of
the intended product or service, built in minutes, hours or days instead of weeks or months;
introduced by Alberto Savoia).
Innovating this way, helps you to create a new service to be commercialized must faster than
with your regular innovation process. As you integrate customers at the front-end of innovation,

you will improve your speed and effectiveness. Quoting Ms. Vandebroek, president of the Xerox
Innovation Group on this:
Its much better to start with a minimum viable approach we learned a lot very early on.And
that's the main advantage of professionalizing the front end of innovation. You learn fast. So you
don't waist a lot of money and people on bad ideas either.