Know Thy Collaborator: Seven practices

Focus groups, opinion polls, tests and even ethnographers are enlisted to better understand clients. Why? If their needs, interests, emotions and concerns can be better understood, they can be engaged and their loyalty -- whether for purchases, influence or votes -- can be assured. Success in our society requires the action and commitment of others.
It's no surprise that innovation -- a social activity where trust is so vital -- also requires the engagement and loyalty of others. Unfortunately, many innovators just let this happen, counting on their own instincts and skills in relationships to get the job done.
Let's think about that. If building these ties comes so naturally, why do firms invest so much in studying clients? Why is such data coveted to the point that many activities (such as harvesting of clicks) have become privacy concerns? Perhaps, without crossing the line, it would be valuable for innovators to become more systematic about knowing and understanding their collaborators.
Since it is unlikely that a piece of the research or development budget has been carved out for this purpose, let's look at some low cost approaches to learning more about collaborators.

1. Know what you need to know. The biggest things to understand are the skills your partners can provide and how the collaboration benefits them. But it is also important to know what limits they operate under, what measurements are useful to them and many other of their parameters for success. The list can get long and particular, and it needs to be written somewhere. Don't forget the soft stuff, like attitudes toward promptness and pet peeves.
   
2. Listen. A lot of people are very good at listening. Few people are great. Many innovators are so focused on their ideas that they form their next sentences as the other person speaks and listen with half an ear. Or they may even interrupt. Listening involves not just paying attention and letting people finish. It involves creating opportunities for them to talk (such as having regular calls and putting them onto the agenda). It means watching body language, hearing intonation and hesitation and looking beyond what the words denote to their implications. What the people are really saying.
   
3. Practice contact management. Make it a practice to be in contact on a regular basis with everyone who is a potential collaborator. Keep track. If you can see the person face-to-face at least every 90 days, that makes a big difference. If you haven't done a favor (which can be connecting with a useful contact or just passing on an article of interest) within 90 days, that partner is not part of your network anymore.
   
4. Work together. This is a great way to get to know collaborators in small ways. Project like presenting a paper together or doing volunteer efforts in the same group can provide a sense of style, mutual commitment and trust. Playing together is good, too. (Sometimes better.)
   
5. Ask. Innovators have an advantage over pollsters, they can actually engage in real conversations with the potential and current collaborators. For the former, they can get answers to outstanding questions. For the latter, they can, like one-time NYC mayor Ed Koch, ask "How am I doing?" Of course, open-ended questions that can't be answered yes or no are best.
   
6. Keep score. Track the benefits provided, the success in improving the relationship, the contacts from both sides -- whatever can allow you to keep active and gain insights. Don't count on your memory alone.
   
7. Share prudently. You are not the only one connected to your collaborators. Others have insights and information. And you have all that you've learned to offer them, as well. Naturally, you need to be careful of gossip or violations of trust. But the knowledge and perspectives of others can augment what you have and provide a reality check to some of your assumptions.
   

This is not a comprehensive list. And, none of the steps is done and finished. They all move into the future with repeating, enriching and editing. But this can be a starting point for those who are just beginning to get systematic about the relationship side of collaborative innovation. The benefits? By understanding partners, you become a better person to work with: more considerate, more valuable and more interesting. It becomes easier to determine who the best collaborator is for a given opportunity. The collaboration itself becomes more productive, and new, more ambitious projects become possible.

Peter Andrews, coauthor of Innovation Passport -- This post reflects my own views and not those of IBM.
(I still am going through materials from Atlanta. More on that in a future post.)

Enterpreneurs Fool Themselves... and That's a Good Thing

Successful innovators tend to be optimistic. They take on more risk than their peers. But like all of us, they need to manage uncertainty and risk. From on objective standpoint, at least some successful innovators -- academics applying for grants -- don't do that well. In fact, they treat their assumptions -- including assumptions over which they have no control -- as facts. This gives them an illusion of control and can make them overconfident.
One of the highlights of my visit to the Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy was Dr. Megan Haller's presentation, "Rethinking Academic Entrepreneurship." She surveyed over a thousand academic scientists, asking them questions about the influences of their advice networks and collaborators in their decision making. She had some interesting findings:

• While large, diverse advice networks provide a good reality check, that doesn't translate into more success in getting funding.
• Scientists with large efficacy networks (bigger pools of potential collaborators) are more likely to show an illusion of control (believe they can influence things beyond their actual reach).
• Scientists with more of an illusion of control are more likely to be overconfident.
• The overconfident scientists make fewer applications for grants, but they have higher success rates.

I think the most interesting thing is that an illusion of control leads to fewer attempts. So much for "you have to play to win." This tells me that, though it may take more for these scientists to take a leap of faith, once they do, they are fully, even unrealistically, engaged. And it works out for them.

Another interesting point is that there is such a big difference between the impacts of advice networks and efficacy networks. I think what this boils down is that advice is cheap. The influence of people who have skin in the game is what really matters. This would imply that the wisdom of crowds is more wise when there is an admission charge.

That partners need to have skin in the game was one of the main lessons of FOAK, and I think it is confirmed here (interestingly, in an academic setting). There is also, between the lines, a confirmation of the role of passion. Here we have hundreds of successful scientists grabbing their illusions of control with both hands -- once they believe the work is worth doing.

This is just one jewel from the conference. I'll have some more remarks on what I learned in Atlanta with my next posting.

Peter
(I do not work for IBM and my views do not reflect IBM's views.)