There are four elements that I want to cover in the Generate platform and these elements are the ones that are Top of Mind And the ones that I believe companies should pay attention to even companies that already have an innovation practice in place. The four elements are a unifying innovation process, innovation, mentors, ecosystems, and I pipe and metrics. Let's look at the second element in generate. We just finished the unifying process. And now I'd like to look at I mentor. You know, as I work with companies around the world, and as I give keynotes around the world at conferences, this is one area that seems to spark the imagination of innovation leads in the audience, I think, because it begins to show patchable positive actions that you can take in a company To enable innovation, let's look at it.

I think there is one best practice that companies adopt and that is creating AI mentors for innovation. Let me describe them to you. I mentors are the X Factor for scaling innovation to everyone and everywhere. They are akin to master black belts, not exactly the same. But like master black belts. They're facilitators of innovation.

To help your business teams innovate. They also help unleash creativity in teams and individuals. They're highly skilled at working with teams to find the creative sweet spot. Because of their highly traded nature and their connection to the Innovation Initiative, they help communicate the strategic mandate. They also acquire deep expertise in innovation and innovation tools and in teams and team process. So they're very good at helping teams get from A to Z.

Okay, some of the benefits to the Innovation Initiative, not all of them, but some of the benefits that come from having AI mentors. First of all, ai mentors are tool and process experts. So they're always out scouting the world for the next set of practices that can help. They're also very networked within your company. They help each other, teach each other as well as helping and teaching business teams. They're also very network outside of the company across a wide range of industries.

Now, this network can be engaged at a very low cost to your company, so that you don't need to pay roll more I mentors Then you need, for example, at peak times you can tap into the network. And generally for a hotel and airfare, you can acquire resources to help you in peak times providing you're willing to do the same in return. And I mentors are key and trusted feedback loops to the company lean on innovation on what's happening on the frontlines of innovation. You know, at the high watermark at Whirlpool, we had trained over 1200 ai mentors throughout the world. They were in almost every location and every factory and every sales office. And I would frequently meet with them in groups to get their feedback on what they were seeing in innovation, the trends that were happening, both good and bad.

For example, at one point, some of the I mentor teams, were working with business groups, and finding that some of the most amazing innovations were not Prioritize to move forward. And so we did some work to try to dig deeper and find out what was happening. And we found that the leader of the business unit was really emphasizing Quick Hits and really didn't want to spend time developing deeper concepts. We work with the leader to try to get a better balance, so that there could be more sets a new to the world innovations coming out of that business unit. So that's a good example of how I mentors can help. The innovation lead and the Innovation Initiative keeps getting to the next level.

Now, in addition to benefiting the Innovation Initiative itself, there are also large benefits to the company. It gives you a few of them, of having an AI mentors in the innovation space that also help the company. First of all, they do the heavy lifting for innovation projects in terms of research. Meeting facilitation, outreach to customer segments etc. This allows business teams that are working on innovation to go back into the day to day and run the business. Why the eye mentors are working on these intercession work like perhaps during more research in between innovation sessions.

I mentors are also accessible to all employees. They're part of this casting a wide net. Great companies have them located in all the key areas and have them identified as mentors, either through a company registry or physically, perhaps something on their nameplate that says that they're and I mentor or certified I mentor. Now, when you're working on open innovation, let's say with the installed base of strategic partners, and you assign eye mentors to those innovations, they also can help create competitive advantage because these partners see the value of having IE mentors. And sometimes they will prefer to work with you over competitors because you bring the AI mentors along and make the process a lot easier. Because the AI mentors are in the trenches, they can help innovators find resources, and they can also help call out.

The ideas that maybe on the fuzzy front end are not suitable from a sandbox sandbox standpoint, and that saves the company time and money. Now, if you have a lot of mentors, several you can call them up as a group to work on high leverage projects that needs special attention. I work with a large privately held manufacturing company who's trained over 200 mentors, and about every 24 months the C suite identifies four or five strategic areas to mine for innovations and what they do is they assign I mentors and people from their strategy group together in teams to go out to spec the spaces to see if there's an opportunity there. And if there is, they ask them to then work with the business teams to continue to look for innovations in the space. Having AI mentors in the company is also a benefit to employees.

Remember that big bang I talked about? mentors help bring that big bang with it within each of us to the forefront and channel it through innovation. I mentors are for many companies, a new career path for highly motivated, curious, smart employees who want to teach and assist others. Becoming an AI mentor is a continuous learning experience both about innovation but also about your business. I'm interested get out of their day to day space and help others throughout the company, which in many ways in and of itself. is rewarding.

They are highly networked. And that relationship is highly valued time mentors. And finally becoming an AI mentor is akin to creating a portable MBA I mentors can take those innovation skills to any job in the company and begin to add value, whether or not they're facilitating innovation, because what they've learned about the business and the company equips them with critical thinking and problem solving tools. When we started innovation at Whirlpool, there were not very many companies, hardly any that had anything like AI mentors. But over the years, many, many companies have created this resource. They may not call them I'm mentors, but they are there.

They're the people that are facilitating innovation. And so let's look at some variations that companies have used throughout the Yours and use today that you might consider first of all, and I mentor can be in a full time capacity, or they can also be part time and part time means they have a full time job and accounts payable or marketing or finance or wherever they come from. But part of that time is spent being assigned to innovation projects. So they come from all different kinds of background. They have accounting, technology, marketing, design, you name it, the more varied the background, the better. And they can either be selected by supervisors or departments or your talent pool or they can self select, you can have a process and I've seen several companies that have done that allow people to raise their hand and volunteer to go through the process to become an AI mentor and to go through a certification process.

Now some companies also use them to save money with large contracts with innovation consulting firms, they negotiate this upfront. they assign their AI mentors to the project. And they do a lot of the research and heavy lifting. But they're also there to transfer those skills so that if the company wants to conduct a project like that, again, they can do it for themselves. I mentors are the most passionate people you will ever meet, they're always thinking, talking about innovation, they're out there unleashing it all the time, even the ones that are part time on innovation. So in some sense, they're always on.

They receive rigorous training and many companies have more than one level of I'm mentors much the same way that companies have with belts in six sigma. And one benefit not to overlook is that their very presence communicates innovation. I mean, they're from the ranks and file if you will, and they communicate to everyone that we can all innovate. They embody communication to your employees. So how you address it, mentors in your company is completely up to you. These are just some variation.

On the theme. Now let's look at the MVA that I've identified for mentors. This is a little bit difficult because unless you have AI mentors, it's kind of hard to select tool for AI mentors and I thought, well you might be able to do is do an AI mentor, test or questionnaire. And so what I'd like you to do is on the screen is a series of questions likely to find someone in your company who's the closest to the innovation effort and ask them to go through the series of questions. And to give you a reaction to the questionnaire. If you have trained mentors in the company, no doubt they can answer most of these questions.

But the questions themselves because you get begins to give you an idea, the breadth of the value that AI mentors can add, that sometimes is unforeseen. And so I'd asked you again to turn off Module find someone in your company that is really involved in innovation effort, go through the questionnaire, either answer it into the questions and talk about the answers. But more importantly talk about what having yes answers to all these questions. But having someone that can do all of these things be a value add in your company. The next section under generate is the ecosystems. This category sometimes called Open Innovation, but you'll see it's much more than that, because it includes aspects of an open innovation, but other ways to think about your ecosystem.

This section focuses on how you collaborate with others, and how you find innovators to help you achieve your goals both inside and outside of your company. But it also looks at how you can be found However others who are looking for partners in the areas related to your street strategic mandate can find you. If you're the innovation lead, I would ask you to think about what needs to be put in place. Before you unleash partnering. Many companies get their internal innovation engine running before they branch out to the external world. Others start here, it all depends on what's best for your company.

But it has to be a deliberate decision. One of the things I'd like you to consider when you think about ecosystems and building an ecosystem for innovation, where you can collaborate and partner with people in the outside world, I'd like you to think about preparation and balance. So before you unleash this aspect, this ecosystem aspect I urge you to consider a few things. Or if your company's already often running, then it asks you to retrofit some of these ideas to help protect the company and to make it easier for innovators. There are two words I'd like you to consider preparation and balance. So one thing to think about are the tools and metrics that you're going to use the process with external partners.

Will you use your unifying process? Or there's where you use I'm mentors, etc. And there are all kinds of ways to answer this question. You may say, we're not going to ascribe a process, we're going to let the innovators figure it out. And all of these are okay answers, just to urge you to make a deliberate decision of how that process is going to work and what tools you may or may not need. At a minimum, you will need to measure the progress.

So it's helpful to try and decide what metrics you're going to use for your innovation collaboration. Now, a huge area here is IP or intellectual property. You know, for many companies, this is the Rubicon, that is Difference between crossing over and making it in a collaborative world or getting stuck behind the line. And many companies just lose it here. They have a history of leading their market. And they don't have a history of partnering.

And so this is very difficult. So I would suggest working through this is more of an evolution than a revolution, you would feel like you'd want it to be a revolution, you want to move fast, but there's so many things inside the company that you have to account for. I've worked with this really great company one time who spent a year put a project team together for a year and put their attorneys on the project team to look at the open innovation space. And the real reason they did this is to open their attorneys minds to what's possible, because they had lived in a world of closed innovation if you will. And so this was all new to them. And and it worked out very well.

And short circuiting it tried to do it faster, I don't think would have worked. proprietary information isn't the same. boat, think about how much can innovators share with your partners? Do you know how much they're sharing and in the end, do you need some kind of standard that allows them to share what they need to share. And that's usually more than we're comfortable with. But to keep a handle on what kind of proprietary information is out there.

And the other thing to be mindful of is that what you're providing is a synergistic support both for innovators and for the companies. I work with a lot of companies who really don't know what's, what partners are being worked with the outside world, and sometimes they learn about a partnership to the outside world themselves instead of knowing internally, and being able to get that synergy as a result of working more than one part of the company working with the same partner. So it's a balancing act, and one that you'll get better with with experience. The only advice I can give you here is to tread lightly On both sides on this too much and not enough. And lastly, here, think about your company's reputation. And what is the perception out there of how hard or easy your company is to partner with, you know, this innovation world, this open collaborative world is a pretty small world.

And if you get a reputation of being hard to work with, then other entities won't seek you out. So it's all a balancing act. So this piece of the ecosystem is how you go out and find strategic partners to help you with your innovation agenda. And one of the things I do I suggest to companies who are starting in this space to maybe start with what I call their installed base, you know, companies have partnered for years in terms of business transaction with quite a few companies across the value chain, suppliers and other kinds of partners. I would say start there, get your relationship leads that work with those companies to help you out. identify who might be good partners, and who might have a shared space for innovation, and then work your way out.

From there. You can add customers and end users or trade partners. You can then work out to external spaces or external collaborators, that you need help from that have an expertise that you may not have a history with, such as innovation marketplaces that have scientist and business leads and other people that are available to bid on a project that you might want to put out for bid technology scouts, people that are on your payroll that really know the landscape and could go out and find people for you find other companies open and crowdsourcing is a great opportunity universities, labs, incubators, both private and public. So there's lots of ways to expand out and there are lots of companies consulting companies in this space. That can help you figure out how should you approach this ecosystem. These are just a few ideas to help you start thinking about it.

You know, the other side of this is to be found. So while you might go out and look for other partners, there are other partners who have strategic mandates that your company might be able to help fulfill. So you want to put your company out there so that others can find you. And that means finding ways to communicate what's important to you what your sandboxes maybe through conferences, articles blogs Association. Hey, look at your website and see if there is a section for collaboration and see what it's communicating to the outside world. You can also look at university public and private incubators and others to decide which ones might be best for ROI for your company.

And you might go in working on one project but others might see you there other other companies and seek you out for additional innovation. And that's where this idea, again of your reputation as a company to collaborate with is really important. Again, word gets out fast, if you're hard to work with, or if you have a ton of bureaucracy, or high demands. And so you want to be sure that the image that you show to other potential partners is an innovation spirit. So keep an eye on this and work hard at being a preferred partner, if you will, it will pay off when they cast their net to include you. Let's look at the ecosystem MVA that I've selected for you.

You know, there are many, many tools and many consultants out there on the ecosystem area. And the one I think might be helpful right now is to look at this website that I have on the list from 100 open and they have a readiness survey. Then includes questions across the eight categories that include things like policy, process, pace, purpose, etc. Here's the link. So please go to their website and take the survey. In a minimum, the process that they're showing and the questions can help you think about what might need to happen in your company to create the right ecosystem for innovation, or to improve the ecosystem you already have.

That is the centerpiece but there's some things that have to happen around it to make that work well and also to make that repeatable, to make that work over time. This one is a key ingredient to this is I pipe and metrics. Now the innovation pipeline or I pipe is the visual representation of the number of innovation projects that meet that definition and criteria that you did earlier and frame and that are being tracked in a visual and financial way in a pipeline. And I'll show you what that looks like in a second. Of course metrics you know, what metrics are metrics are these measurements that the company selects to set goal and goals and measure the results of innovation? Let's talk about the eye pipe first.

Now, creating an innovation pipeline is critical if you want innovation to be on par with the other core business processes in your company. And I think you do you want it to go beyond just a series of projects. You want it to be a core business process that gets the same resources. says that gets the same attention, leadership attention, etc as other key business processes. Now, this starts with something we've already completed in frame. And that is the definition or criteria of innovation.

That's what starts this innovation pipeline. And if you don't have that, it's important to go back and do that, because that is kind of the that's the portal into the innovation pipeline. So the idea is that, once a product or service meets the definition, that it's loaded into this innovation pipeline, and it's tracked as it progresses along all the way through the pipeline, or is it shelved or stopped. Now, the pipeline extends out into the marketplace. And as we said earlier, it's beyond just launching it it's post launch and tracks the health of innovation over time. It also tracks what's in the pipeline, the net present value, if you will.

Of what's in the pipeline. how robust is that pipeline? And is it going to launch in the kind of cadence that you need to keep the right kind of business rhythm going? Now everyone's AI pipe is different, so it has to reflect the unique attributes of your company. But here's an example of an AI pipe based on the unifying process that I showed you earlier. You can use any organizing principle for your AI pipe.

This one is by product, but you can create AI pipes for each business or by customer basis examples, you just have to do what is important to your business. Now you need to decide the front end at what point does an innovation get looked gets loaded into the pipeline and tracking begins. In this example, you may not start counting until it completes the ideation phase or the ideate phase. Some companies use a tollgate process and only start counting Once significant resources are applied to it, usually somewhere in the elaborate phase, others track the entire process. They want to know how many ideas are passing through the frame process, for example, and the back end has to be figured out as well. And that is once it's launched, how long are you going to count it as innovation, versus maybe having it being counted by some other operations measure.

Some companies say we're just going to give it a year or two years and other say as long as it still meets that definition, we're going to tell you to track it as innovation. Now, once it starts, stops getting tracked of innovation, it'll be tracked in other mechanisms, it'll still be important, it just won't be considered an innovative product or service. Once you have an IP, you can then decide what parts you want to analyze and measure. This picture shows a fairly mature version of a pipeline so you won't get there at the very beginning. But this shows the analytics that are important to the company that owns this pipeline. And the financial picture that I'm showing here as a result of the pipeline, this is how you report the results of what's happening.

It shows a year over year account of two types of measures. First, it shows new revenue created as a result of innovations that meet the definition. And it also shows the net present value of the health of the pipeline in that given year. And so the last visual here is from a company that took this one step further and created a dashboard to show how the AI pipe for the business units and categories for their businesses are performing. Now, you don't have to take it this far. This is just showing you some examples.

The takeaway here is that innovation should have the same level as rigor and reporting as the other core processes in your company. is different and it depends on what you're trying to do and where you are in the innovation process. The chart that I'm showing you here is a good starter. It's based on a report by BCG, entitled measuring innovation. I've used this Over the years, there are lots of good reports out there, I highly recommend this one and other one to go through and to figure out which metrics work for you. What I like about this one is we're not all in the same place in innovation.

And I know at Whirlpool, and we started, we started with input measures, because we didn't have output measures it took took us a couple years to get over to the other side of the chart, but we still wanted to know how we were doing. So, you know, we could spend hours on metrics. And again, this is just a key element that you have to figure out and figure out the right fit for your company, and make sure they have the rigor and they're akin to the other metrics metrics that you use in the core business processes of your company. I've mentioned probably a couple times this idea of a core business process. So I just want to take a few minutes to talk about core business processes in your company. In order for innovation to thrive and to really be embedded in your company, it has to be seen as a core business process, not a series of projects.

And it has to be seen in the same ilk in the same light that your other core business processes are, whether they're product development or quality, or free cash flow, whatever the big core processes are, most companies have four or five, not hundreds. So here's some steps that are necessary to turn innovation into core business process. First, this this definition that we've talked about, you have to have that that comes from the frame module. And once you have that, you can begin to determine which ideas and concepts fit the definition and which do not. And of those ones that start meeting the definition, you can begin to flag those ideas and begin to track them through the innovation pipeline as we talked about earlier Now, part of the unit process is that you want to count them and track them and monitor them. Now also determine what analytics you're going to use or metrics.

So you can look at different metrics and how you're going to gather that information. You know, some metrics may be great, but if it takes 4000 FTS together the information they're not great. So you have to figure out what works and what are the best metrics and what are the easiest ones to collect the information and report it. And then lastly, think about your normal business cycle and report the innovation progress in that operation type reviews the way other core business processes are being reported. And then this year and results that you can look at year over year that you can begin to go year over year. And then some companies very mature companies and innovation begin to target their compensation system based on this year over year.

Result. Here's the MVA for AI pipe. And I thought what might be useful here is just to do a few steps to get you started in creating this innovation pipeline, and perhaps some of the metrics. Now I have six steps here. They're not necessarily in order. They're the things that you have to consider.

Let me go through them very quickly. First of all, what is this AI pipe going to look like? What are the stages or toll gates? Is it going to be based on your process or something else? And also think here about any fit that this pipeline might need with any other core process? One of the things I learned in working in products companies that have a product development process is you have to spend some time and I talked about this quite at length in my second book on unleashing innovation, a lot of time to figure out how those two processes fit together.

So think about that and then figure out what is the trigger on the front end when you We're going to start counting it, we're in the process does it need to be? Can it be a concept a fuzzy idea? Or is it at the point where we start applying resources, get that definition and criteria for innovation and begin to start flagging the innovations that should be in the pipeline and at what stage and then figure out that back end when you're going to stop counting them. Now, think about the analytics or the metrics throughout. You don't need a lot, three or four is probably plenty. There are a lot out there to choose from.

So just figure out which are the most meaningful and then figure out what is the business business rhythm that this reporting needs to be in. It's an operations review a quarterly review, a strategic planning review, a monthly meeting, however, it needs to be in parallel with the other core business processes are is how it needs to be reported and tracked. So Take a few minutes and turn off the module and work through this and go out and talk to people in your company who also might be stakeholders in this and try to figure out how you can begin to get innovation on a path to be a core business process. Okay, let's look at generate at a glance we've covered a lot of ground in generate, I know it can be overwhelming. So let's just do this at a glance. First of all generate is the second platform in the innovation universe.

It is the one that is focused on customer driven problem solving. And its outcome is to facilitate innovation and innovators to achieve results. And so when we think about generate, we think about everybody getting in a room coming up with ideas. And now we know it's more than that. And there are four aspects to it. First is a unifying process to determine if you want a common process and to figure out how to create the right kind of distance.

Suppose to gain synergy, and to help innovators in their needs. Why it's matters is it's a common language, it's a way to, to create a lean system so that people can move fairly quickly. And the MVA tool we used here was an innovation project plan, it came from the frame, part of the model. The second element is I'm mentors now this is this x factor for scaling innovation to everyone and everywhere. And it's important because they're accessible to everyone. They can create competitive advantage, they can really create the right kind of platform for innovation to grow.

An MBA we had here as this I mentor test. The third element is ecosystems. And we know this is a big space. This is how you're going to collaborate internally and externally but mostly externally, with partners either that you've worked with before or new partners or entities. And it's important because it extends your reach into the innovation world and creates an open innovation landscape. And the MPAA I suggested you use here was a link to the website to look at an open innovation readiness test.

The fourth area I pipe in metrics, this is the physical representation of the innovation progress in the way you reported in the company. This is how you create a reporting platform with the right financial metrics and how you communicate the progress of innovation and the MVA that I recommended that you use here are the six steps to create an innovation pipeline. Okay, let's just go back to the wayfinder for the innovation universe, just to remind you where we are, because you've went through the introduction, we spent some time with frame and we've just spent the Last few minutes here on Generate and remember, generate is the customer driven problem solving part of the model. It's the center of the universe, and it's where the Big Bang happens. But I think what we've learned here is there's more to it than just creating innovation. There's some other things that you have to put in place around it.

So that generate can work not just once or twice, but can work over and over again. Congratulations, you just finished the module on generate the next module. We'll be on embed