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Editor's Note (Toru Nakagawa, Feb. 6, 2021)
I have obtained the permission of Japanese translation of Darrell Mann's "Innovation Capability Maturity Model (ICMM)" book and publishing the Japanese Edition. In the Japanese page of this website, the Japanese manuscripts are being posted in full text for wider public notification. In the present English page, I am going to show the Detailed Index, where section headings (below each Chapter) are added by the Japanese translator to the original Index for better readability.
[(TN, Mar.20, 2021): Posting of the Japanese texts has been completed
Editor's Note (Toru Nakagawa, Apr. 18, 2021)
The Japanese Edition has just been published. I have chosen the title of the Book in the sense "Organization's Capability for Success in Innovations: Introduction to ICMM". I borrowed the nice cover design by Darrell, see the figure (right). The Author kindly contributed a new foreword "ICMM – A Decade Down The Road" and a new afterword "ICMM – Into The Future". Thus the ICMM Book originally published in 2012 demonstrates its significance and applicability even more clearly in the current era of crisis, when the needs of innovation (and hence the needs of innovation capability for organizations) are much demanded.
Though full texts are posted in the Japanese pages, here in this English page, selected items are posted as follows: Original Preface, new Foreword, Table of Contents (of the Japanese Edition), new Afterword.
[My introduction (Feb. 3, 2021) and post note (Mar. 20, 2021) are also posted in English. But my Foreword is not shown in the Enlgish page.]
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Introduction to Mann's ICMM Book (Toru Nakagawa, Feb. 3, 2021)
Last autumn, I had a chance of listening to Darrell Mann's presentation at TRIZCON2020, and was much impressed with his deep and large-scale thoughts backed up by his hard-work for practices and promotion of TRIZ/Systematic Innovation. Re-recognizing the importance of his work, I have already posted his paper (based on his TRIZCON talk)
of the paper, I respected his work very much and published Japanese Editions of his books HOSI and Matrix 2003/2010 in the field of technical innovation. But I did not follow much his later works in the fields of business & management and (Systematic) Innovation in general. Reflecting much on my failures, I am starting to study some of them with the hope of translating them into Japanese, and posting and publishing Japanese Editions.
I started with the book "Innovation Capability Maturity Model: An Introduction" published in 2012. The author worked first in technology fields and then in business fields by use of TRIZ and its extension (i.e. Systematic Innovation), and did research, application, and promotion all over the world as a consultant. After such 16 years of his experiences, he built the model and wrote the book.
He defines Innovation by 'Successful step change'. Success is achievable only all through the process from the beginning to the end by the collaboration of the whole organization. Step change is not a result of improvement and optimization based on the current knowledge and rules but obtainable only by breaking the current prevailing knowledge and methods (or common rules). Since innovations request organization-wide collaboration and breaking common senses, it is very difficult for organizations achieve it; this results in the 98% failure rate of innovation attempts. Organization's capability of achieving innovations can only be obtained gradually for years step by step. The author has built the ICMM Model through his experiences of working with many organizations (including multi-national corporations, SMEs, and government organizations) as a consultant and his extensive surveys.
This book is addressed to individuals and organizations who are keen to accomplish some innovations, especially to the top managers of organizations. It is an excellent book.I have obtained permissions by the author for me to publish Japanese edition and to post the Japanese manuscripts in my website before publication.
Translation into Japanese is rather a difficult task for me, because author uses quite complicated sentence structures and colloquial expressions. Avoiding direct or free translation, I am trying to translate faithfully to the logic of the sentences and also in a way easy to read and understand in Japanese. In the Japanese texts, I am trying to make the book clearer to understand by inserting section headings, inserting some more carriage returns, and using boldfaces on important words and phrases.
Detailed Index (prepared for the Japanese Edition) is shown below for English readers.Please see the Editor's Note (PS)
Original Foreword (Darrell Mann, 2012)
Foreword:
Form Follows Function Follows Meaning'Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change,
but in the dialectic between the two.'
Octavio PazWhen I look back, my whole life seems to have been focused around creativity and innovation. I read my first (Edward DeBono) creativity book when I was ten; I spent the first fifteen years of my career working in R&D, and have now completed the second fifteen leading a team of innovation researchers and working as an innovation consultant. I very quickly learned that my world was going to be a world full of paradox, conflict and contradiction: meeting business leaders declaring they want more of the i-word inside their organization, but in reality wanted nothing of the sort; working with some of the smartest, most inventive brains in the world and realizing they never achieved a single successful innovation over the course of, sometimes, a whole lifetime; working in some of the most efficient, structured and process-driven operations on the planet and seeing those processes repeatedly killing all the best ideas; seeing government agencies devote billions of dollars of funding into 'innovation' and getting nothing – literally nothing – back again in terms of any real measure of innovation success.
Over the past sixteen years, I've employed and attempted to steer a cohort of what consider to be the finest big-picture thinking, pattern-finding minds I could find to try and understand why so much good intention, time and money has realized so little useful outcome. This book is the results of what we've found. The research continues, but I think we've now – finally – seen enough of the micro, macro and meta-scale world of innovation to be able to assemble the first coherent, actionable answers to the question.
This book is for the leaders who really want to innovate; for the baffled financiers looking for a better way to manage their risk; for the frustrated scientists and engineers, seemingly blocked at every turn; and for the hamstrung government officials who wish to make a difference.
Strap yourself in. This ride could be a bumpy one.
Darrell Mann
Shanghai
January 2012
New Foreword (Darrell Mann, Apr. 2021)
ICMM – A Decade Down The Road
It's hard to believe we're approaching a decade since the initial launch of our Innovation Capability Maturity Model. The initial idea was to repeat the success of the Carnegie-Mellon initiative to build a Capability Model for the IT world. They saw a need to professionalise that world, and managed to enter the market quickly enough and well enough to gain a critical mass before anyone else had realised what was happening. History tells us that, though we managed to do the ICMM job well enough, speed was not our ally. In part because we took too long to get agreement from our academic partners (Duke University, IIT, Tsinghua, UTS, LSE) to put their respective logos on the material, but mainly because we failed to listen to our own predictions regarding periods in history when innovation become everyone's necessity rather than merely nice to have.
As long ago as 2009, we'd seen that the world was in the first phase of a Crisis period. A period that we said would reach a climax between the years 2020 to 2025. Our TrenDNA research had revealed a number of insights explaining the abject failure of futurologists, economists and politicians – the very people tasked by society with the job of seeing what the future holds. Firstly, that the world was complex and therefore emergent: this in turn meant that solid prediction of the future was only possible using bottom-up, first-principle-based methods. One of which was that, while events (tsunamis, stock-market collapses, pandemics, etc) happened at random, society's reactions to those events was conditioned by repeatable generational patterns.
Secondly, and crucial to the creation of ICMM, was a 'blinding flash of the obvious' recognition that the future was not predictable by extrapolation of trend information. Sooner or later one trend direction would conflict with another. Conflicts that economists and politicians would conveniently ignore, but in reality turn out to be the secret to a step-change in prediction capability: it isn't the trends themselves that determine how the future emerges, but rather the relationship between multiple trends. Specifically the inter-trend conflicts. And the realisation that it is when innovators came along and resolve these conflicts that the real, messy, discontinuous – one s-curve to the next – evolution of industries and society happen.
Listening to our own predictions should probably have caused us to delay launch of ICMM until closer to 2020, the year when Covid-19 tipped the whole world off its current s-curve into the sea of chaos that currently affects almost every institution on the planet. But, we didn't do that, and quickly found ourselves drowning amongst what eventually turned out to be literally hundreds of other premature Innovation Capability focused Models.
To call the majority of them 'Models', however, would be something of an over-statement. Most were little more than naïve questionnaires. Questionnaires that for the most part missed or mis-understood the importance of conflict-resolution as the foundation of innovation. And then usually compounded this fundamental mistake by further assuming that the building of organisational Capability was, like the parallel world of 'continuous Improvement', a simple continuous yellow-brick road journey to a rosy future. Unfortunately, like everything else in life, building Innovation Capability is all about the emergence and resolution of conflicts and contradictions. Only this time they are contradictions relating to the organisation of people within our enterprises and institutions. It also, finally, didn't help that most players entering the Innovation Capability domain sealed their fate early by using the wrong definition of innovation (Reference 1).
Being wrong about something, however, doesn't necessarily mean that you will fail. Especially when entering markets that also don't know what 'right' is. In the short term – the years 2014-2018 mainly – whenever one of the Big Five consulting organisations launched their own, inevitable, Innovation Capability Model, the fact that they had a famous logo meant that their myriad client organisations were lured into a horrible trap. The blind were now leading the blind. And by 2018, the world of Innovation had hit something close to rock bottom: senior leaders (almost none of whom had reached their lofty position by doing anything relating to innovation) were being advised by continuous improvement consultants, almost no-one at the working level was being taught even the basics of how to innovate, and worst of all, middle management (truly 'The Blob' when it came to innovation) were utilising KPIs and measures that unwittingly made sure that virtually no innovation attempts had a chance of becoming successful.
Because contradiction-solving sits at the heart of innovation, any tool, method or work-related philosophy that fails to acknowledge this fact is bound to fail. Of the myriad problem solving and 'creativity' tools available to the unknowing manager, only one or two have understood the vital role of contradictions. We were fortunate enough to have been well-versed in the three main ones – TRIZ, Theory Of
Constraints and the work of Edward De Bono – when we embarked on our ICMM journey. This knowledge allowed us to quickly recognise that building Innovation Capability inside an organisation was also subject to the emergence and resolution of, what turned out to be, a very finite number of different conflicts and contradictions. It was like the original TRIZ research all over again – a realisation that engineers and scientists the world over are all working on basically the same problems, and end up solving them using the exact same small number of strategies. Except that, in the world of business, the number of different Innovation Capability-hindering problems was an order of magnitude smaller: every innovation-seeking enterprise on the planet, in other words, would experience almost exactly the same contradictions as every other one.
Today, in our New, post-pandemic, World, when every enterprise has had a step change forced upon them – some for the better, most for the worse – the future belongs to those that can adapt and re-learn the fastest. Despite the best efforts of TRIZ, TOC and De Bono educators over the course of the last twenty-plus years, where innovation has occurred, it has invariably happened as a result of generous amounts happenstance, luck and trial-and-error dominated persistence. Today, it is a brave organisation indeed that decides to rely on these traits. Innovation-by-guessing was okay when the need for innovation was relatively low, but now, when the need has become an imperative, it absolutely is not. Companies and institutions need better, more repeatable ways of achieving successful step-change, and I'm proud to say, only our Innovation Capability Maturity Model has been proven to help.
We may not have had the leverage or logo of a Big Five consulting company, but we have had the very good fortune to work with a host of large and small enterprises over the course of the last decade since the arrival of ICMM, and we now know that the theory translates completely into practice. Yes, it will be difficult, yes, it will cause frustration and in some cases anger that the education systems of the world have equipped us all so badly for the innovation job, and, yes, it will require some brave, counter-intuitive decision making. But it will work. Systematically, scalably and fast. The future beyond the next five years will belong to those that best prevail through the next five years. And those most likely to prevail will surely be the ones with the highest ICMM Level.
I am very happy to learn that this Japanese translation of the ICMM Introduction book comes at just the right time to catch this Crisis period in history.
Darrell Mann
Lockdown, North Devon, UK.
Reference
- Systematic Innovation E-Zine, 'Defining Innovation (40 Years Too Late)', Issue 221, August 2020, http://systematic-innovation.com/assets/iss-221-aug-20.pdf.
Table of Contents of the Japanese Edition (in detail, TN Apr. 2021)
""Organization's Capability for Success in Innovations: Introduction to ICMM",
authored by Darrell Mann, Japanese translation by Toru NakagawaOriginal Foreword (Darrell Mann, 2012)
Translator's Foreword (Toru Nakagawa, Apr. 2012)
On the main themes, Background and process of preparing the Japanese Edition, Outline of this book, Situations and further development after the publication of the original book (2012), Translating and publishing the Japanese Edition
New Foreword for the Japanese Edition (Darrell Mann, Apr. 2021)
Intention of starting the ICMM Model, Foreseeing the future, Confusions in the innovation models by others, Contradiction solving is the core of the innovation methods, The ICMM Model is already working in the practice
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1 Definition of Innovation
1.2 Looking for the reasons for failures in innovation
1.3 Five main reasons of failures in innovation
（1) Failures in products and services, (2) Failures in market needs, (3) Failures in route to market,
(4) Failures in production means, (5) Failures in coordination
1.4 Root basis of failure factors and the basic characteristics of innovationChapter 2. ICMM (Innovation Capability Maturity Model) Philosophy
2.1 Software development world: situations in 1980s and CMM model for process improvement
2.2 Capability Maturity Model (CMMI) in the field of software development
2.3 From software development world to innovation world: toward a new model
2.4 Structure of this book: 5 Levels of ICMM (Innovation Capability Maturity Model) and the Journey
to improve the capabilityChapter 3. Innovation Universals
3.1 Core process for innovation: cyclic process with 6 steps
Step 1: Sense, Step 2: Interpret, Step 3: Design, Step4: Decide, Step 5: Align, Step 6: Response
3.2 Running the cycleChapter 4. S-Curves and Discontinuous Jumps
4.1 S-Curves for evolution: Shift from an S-Curve to a next new S-Curve
S-Curves for evolution and shifts from an S-Curve to another are observable everywhere
Representation by an S-Curve, and relative position of the next S-Curve
Reasons why jumping to a next S-Curve is so difficult
Looking for pioneers and examples of jumping towards next S-Curves4.2 "Hero's (S-Curve) Journey" -- Human wisdom universal in myths and literatures of all over the world
Research results by Joseph Campbell
"Hero's Journey": Overall structure and its relationships to the discontinuous S-Curve jumps
12 stages of the "Hero's Journey" process and their suggestionsChapter 5. (Intermission 1) Contradictions
5.1 Defining contradictory problems: Not "A or B" but "A and B"
Arguing over "A or B" is a wrong definition of the contradictory problem
Two ways of emerging innovations: Delivering with new functions/attributes, and Solving contradictions
Redefining the problem as "A and B" instead of "A or B"
Contradictions which would appear in the Journeys of ICMM Level jumps5.2 How to define and solve contradictory problems: Use of a universal Contradiction Template
Representation in the Contradiction Template
How to solve contradictions (1) Solving the "A and not A" contradiction problem with Separation
How to solve contradictions (2) Solving "B and C" (instead of "B or C") with 12 strategies
How to solve contradictions (3) Challenging assumptions in the problem setting with "Why?"
Some suggestions for solving contradictionsChapter 6. (Intermission 2) The Hype Cycle
6.1 The Hype Cycle concept proposed by Gartner
6.2 TRIZ and other innovation methods viewed with the Hype Cycle
6.3 Relationships among the S-Curves, the Hype Cycle, and numbers of competitors
6.4 "Hero's Journey" of ICMM level transitions in relation to the Hype CycleChapter 7. Where Am I ?
7.1 25 Questions for Self-evaluating the ICMM Level of your organization
Role of the leader, Successful changes, Success factors in rapidly changing market, Success factors in stable market, Values, Role of strategy, Determining customers' needs, Determining non-customer needs, Determining needs of innovation, Determining the timing of innovation, Objectives and directions, Integrating a change into the current business, Right questions to customers, Buy-in to change activities, Business planning activities, Waste is, Strategy against disruptive threats, Motivating when times get tough, Manage complexity, View of the future, Predicting the future, Resources, Learning, Growth, Leadership
7.2 Scoring the 25 questionnaire and evaluating the ICMM Levels
How to evaluate your ICMM Level, ICMM Level distribution, Evaluation sheet, Scoring table
Chapter 8. The Five ICMM Levels
8.1 The five ICMM Innovation Levels
Level 1. Seeding, Level 2. Championing, Level 3. Managing, Level 4. Strategising, Level 5. Venturing8.2 Stepping back to see the overview
Five types of innovation project in relation to the scope,
[See Fig. 8.5 below (TN, Mar. 20, 2021)]
Complicated vs. Complex,
Different books and methods depending on the ICMM Levels8.3 Summary tables of characteristics of the five ICMM Levels (Posted: Mar. 20, 2021)
Characteristics of ICMM Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, and Level 5Chapter 9. FAQ： Frequently Asked Questions
Can organizations leap-flog Levels?
Beyond Level 5?
Why do you say the current surge of innovation 'punctuated equilibrium' will last for the next 15 years? Why not more or less?
What happens after the 15 years is up?
Does everyone have the ability to follow the Journeys?
How do I know what you're saying is true?
How do I convince my boss?
Aren't there lots of other innovation capability measurement tools and methods already out there? Why do we need another?
How much is this going to cost me?
How long is it going to take?Chapter 10. What now?
Chapter 11. References, Bibliography & Further reading
Classic references on management and innovation, References cited in this book
Chapter 12. Global Contacts
New Afterword for the Japanese Edition (Darrell Mann, Apr. 2021)
Measuring objectively the Innovation Capability (ICMM Level): (1) Measuring the quality of patents, (2) Analyzing scopus and documents, (3) ICMM Levels of various organizations in the world, Relating the contents in all the business textbooks (about 2000 books per year) to ICMM Levels, Books on the ICMM Journeys, Concluding: Now for innovations
Profiles of the Author and the Translator
New Afterword (Darrell Mann, Apr. 2021)
ICMM – Into The Future
While ICMM may not yet have become the global standard we would still like it to be, the last decade has seen the arrival of sufficient client organisations to justify a continuation of the research and the development and the realisation of a number of significant advances to the work published in the original 2012 Introduction book.
We knew, for example, when we included the assessment questionnaire in the book, that these kinds of survey instrument are prone to gaming and distortion by respondents, and that therefore we needed to at least complement it with better, more automated ways of measuring Innovation Capability. This desire was cemented when it quickly became apparent that clients taking the survey to reveal their own Level also needed to know the corresponding Levels of their competitors. A big part of the Model is about helping organisations get from where they are to where they need to be. And a big part of knowing where they needed to be was driven by where their competitors were along their own Journeys. Given the impossibility of getting competitors to fill out survey questionnaires, we needed to create 'outside-in' tools that could make use of public domain information surrounding an enterprise – their patents, annual reports, speeches and interviews with the Senior Leadership team for example – in order to make a credible and meaningful assessment of Capability Level. This challenge fitted well with a number of analysis tools we developed for a more general innovation requirement to measure what is important rather than what is merely expedient. It is easy, for example, to measure the number of patents owned by an organisation, but such a measure only becomes useful if we can also measure the quality of those patents. Measuring patent quality was something we were able to do thanks to our knowledge of TRIZ and particularly the Trends of Evolution part of the toolkit. The resulting 'ApolloSigma' tool has now become a core part of the Systematic Innovation method, a tool that we have been using consistently for the last decade in order to analyse any and all new patents and thus help us to continue the momentum of our ongoing, 'someone somewhere already solved your problem' TRIZ research.
In a similar fashion, we co-founded the spin-out company, PanSensic, as a platform designed to help clients make other important measurements – what is the morale of staff? How much trust is there inside an organisation? What are the Values of the people that work there? What frustrations are customers experiencing? What are their contradictions? All of these things, we've found – usually through painful and time-consuming experimentation with brave clients – are eminently calculable provided you're able to harness the masses of unstructured narrative data floating around in and around an organisation.
Even though we're ten years into the PanSensic evolution journey, there is much that still needs to be done. Yes, we can already make an accurate assessment of an enterprise's ICMM Level. Yes, we can calculate not just their Level, but how far they are in the Journey to the next Level. So, not just being able to say an organisation is 'Level 2', but now that they are at Level 2.4. This outside-in capability has also meant that we've been able to assess the ICMM Level of thousands of different organisations across different industries. The overall picture this presents is one of continuing innovation capability dysfunction:
One of the main implications of the realisation that almost 90% of organisations across the world exist at very low Levels of Innovation Capability, is that the large majority of innovation tools – most notably TRIZ – are in many ways too far ahead of the game. The majority of TRIZ tools need ICMM Level 4 Capabilities to make effective use of them. This over-shoot problem presents a not insignificant set of chicken-and-egg challenges for any institution seeking to get better at innovating.
One of the ways to help resolve this contradiction has been another piece of ongoing research within the Systematic Innovation Network: the systematic assessment of the innovation literature – which has averaged close to 2000 business texts per year for the last decade – in order to contextualise each contribution relative to the various different ICMM Levels. A useful analogy here is thinking whether it would be a good idea for me to get tennis tuition from Roger Federer. Given that my tennis-playing capability is these days quite low, probably not. I'm more likely to make progress being coached by someone one or two levels ahead of me rather than four or five. We started the job of identifying innovation texts suitable for each ICMM Level in the original Introduction book. We have continued that job over the course of the last decade, mainly through manual and often painful reading of those 2000 books per year. And now, going forward, we will no doubt continue to do the same. Albeit now assisted by the aforementioned narrative-analysis software tools, which are almost as able as identifying a book as being suitable for, say, Level 2 innovators, as a long-term ICMM researcher.
All of this knowledge feeds into the final piece in the ICMM jigsaw, the often mentioned 'Journey Books'. Books designed to help management teams make the difficult step-change Journey from ICMM Level 1 to Level 2. Or 2 to 3. Or 3 to 4. Or, probably last in the sequence of publication given that there are realistically less than half a dozen enterprises that can claim Level 5 status, the Level 4 to Level 5 Journey book.
Much of the material for at least the first three of these Journey books has existed for some time now. Thanks again to those brave clients that have allowed us to work with them to travel through the various Journey stages. The Level 2 to Level 3 Journey book looks like it will finally have all of it's 'i's dotted and 't's crossed ready for publication before the end of 2021. The Level 1 to Level 2 book – probably the most needed book based on the high percentage of organisations that find themselves at Level 1 – looks set for publication in 2022… it would have perhaps been more desirable for us to publish this book first. The problem has been that the sweet-spot for Systematic Innovation client work has very definitely been the Level 3 and 4 organisations of the world. It is much easier, we have found, to talk about contradictions with people that understand what a contradiction is. Another chicken-and-egg situation that hopefully again, the broader awareness of the Innovation Capability Maturity Model following publication of the Japanese edition will help create.
And then, of course, one of the other inevitable consequences of the pandemic-driven Crisis is that many people have already lost or will likely lose their jobs in the next few years. No sooner had we published the ICMM Introduction book, we realised there was a need for a 'Level 0' on the ICMM scale. Level 0 being the state that any start-up enterprise will find themselves in. Their primary job is to turn their innovative idea into a money-making business. Which in essence means that they start with an innovation attempt, and if they're successful end up being an operationally-excellent, ICMM Level 1 company. Given the urgency of catering for this start-up challenge, 2020 saw the publication of our 'Hero's Start-Up Journey' book. It describes the Capability-building Journey from zero to Level 1. So far, by way of indication of the changing times in which we live, in just the first four months since publication, it has become one of our best-selling books.
Meanwhile, whether start-up or established business, the innovation clock is ticking. The time for innovation is now and for the next four or five years. After that, when the world has found its new s-curve, it will perhaps be time for us all to re-focus our attention back in the world of Continuous Improvement. A world that, as far as we can tell ('Operational Excellence Capability Maturity Model (OECMM)', SI ezine, Issue 228, March 2021) is for the most part still stuck at its own Level 1.
Editor's Note (Toru Nakagawa, Mar. 20, 2021)
At the end of Sec. 8.2.1, the following figure has been inserted for making the Author's discussion clearer.
The relationships between the Innovation capability and possible Innovation results can be described clearly in Fig. 8.5. Its left part comes from Fig. 8.1 (5 Levels of Innovation Capability) after rearranging the 5 levels from bottom to top. Its right part comes from Fig. 8.4 (5 Types (or 5 Levels) of Innovation Results). Its middle part represents the Author's explanation with arrows showing possible Innovation Outputs based on the ICMM Innovation Capability Level. This figure happens to be the essence of the whole ICMM book.
Fig. 8.5 Relationships from the 5 Levels of Innovation Capability to the possible 5 Types (or 5 Levels) of Innovation Outputs
[Note (TN, Mar. 24, 2021): Description in this Editor's Note (PS) has been posted on Mar. 21, 2021 in the 'TRIZ and Innovation' Group in LinkedIn. See
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Last updated on Apr. 18, 2021 Access point: Editor: nakagawa@ogu.ac.jp
