Increase your innovation

Here are a series of case studies on how innovation works:

Calgary’s DIRTT (Doing It Right This Time) is proud of the fact it’s seen as a disruptor in the interior construction industry. In fact, the company got its start due to a belief that traditional methods of construction can be improved upon, because the industry has not embraced technology, isn’t sustainable, lacks consistency across jurisdictions and has both cost and timing challenges.

“In today’s world it’s very easy to communicate remotely from anywhere, but there’s nothing more valuable than a face-to-face conversation, sharing a meal and spending time developing a relationship.”

The company has developed its own proprietary technology, ICE, to overcome the usual challenges faced with construction projects. The software enables real-time design and pricing while it simultaneously feeds all of that information into its manufacturing processes, which reduces the margin for error.

All of these stages of the conventional construction process have human interface, input and are fraught with error, ICE is taking it off one dataset.

The end result: A customized solution with cost certainty and the ability to make future changes.

“We are truly changing an industry, construction, that needs to be disrupted. But disruption can be a challenge because people are afraid of it. We are trying to change the status quo in such a different way that has been harder than we ever anticipated.”

Nevertheless, changing the status quo has paid off for the company so far. In 13 years, it’s become multinational with more than 1,100 employees and revenues exceeding $293 million.

Smed says that while technology has made developing relationships easier, nothing is better than face-to-face meetings.

“You can’t be successful in exporting by doing it remotely; you need to have boots on the ground and you have to spend time in the specific markets,”

Sometimes a conversation can lead to a great idea that can be developed into a global niche market business. That’s the case for Winnipeg’s Robb Denomme, CEO of Genuwine.

The company got its start in 1995 on a whim when Denomme’s partner Lance Kingma, had an off-the-cuff conversation with a journalist who reviewed wines.

Ironically, Denomme was just 17 at the time, with no experience in either construction or business. However, he had a vision and a strong belief of what the business could be – the best in the world. Twenty-three years and hundreds of custom Genuwine cellars on five continents later, that vision has materialized.

While having a virtual monopoly on the market in the early years, today the company is dealing with many competitors who want to tap into the lucrative industry, but are having little luck.

“There are competitors that build wine cellars, but we can handle projects others will walk away from – and we take them with a big smile on our face,” adds Denomme. “We are at a different level. No matter how difficult, if you can dream it, we will build it. Anything’s possible.”

Toronto entrepreneur Stuart Lombard didn’t set out to create a market-disrupting product. He was driven by the desire to reduce his environmental footprint, but ended up creating the innovative ecobee ‘smart’ thermostat used by thousands of households in North America in the process.

With heating and cooling accounting for 50 to 70% of a household’s energy bill, the software developer tried to cut his family’s energy use by programming their home thermostat – what he describes as a very frustrating and complicated process – because his thermostat was “dumb as a doorknob.”

However, it was arriving home to a 10-degree Celsius household in 2007 that was Lombard’s a-ha moment.

“That sparked the question: if we could make these thermostats smarter, connect them to the Internet, make them easier to use, how much better could we do?” asks the ecobee CEO.

The company launched the industry’s first Wi-Fi-connected thermostat in 2009 and sales took off. Homeowners admired the Toronto company’s sleek, easy-to-use design and liked using a mobile phone to control temperatures, even when they weren’t home. They enjoyed reducing their energy bills even more.

However, it didn’t take long for competitors to appear in the marketplace, specifically Google’s Nest. And that forced the company to focus more on innovation.

“When we started we were the only product in the market and people really loved us,” says Lombard. “We thought we were playing in the NHL but when Nest came along, we realized we were just the champions of bantam house league hockey.”

ecobee retrenched and focused R&D in an effort to better the user experience.

“We decided that to win in this market, we really needed to have a best-in-class user experience,” he adds.

The company overhauled its device, added a number of new capabilities and launched the ecobee 3 in late 2014.

“That really propelled us to a new level,” says Lombard.

The company also started selling directly to consumers. Retailers like Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowes and Walmart put the ecobee on store shelves and Amazon offered it to online shoppers.

“I think we did really well against Google Nest,” he concludes. “Competition makes us stronger and customers win.”

In terms of global success, the lesson learned for Calgary’s Blackline Safety is that customer demand and innovation can lead to an entire new product line.

Founded in 2004, Blackline GPS originally focused on wireless location technology for automotive security. However, the company changed gears in 2007 after identifying a growing opportunity to apply its technology in another industry: safety monitoring.

Today, Blackline Safety is developing and manufacturing world-leading lone worker safety monitoring solutions, utilizing technology that blends communications, location technology plus automatic incident detection features with manual safety triggers.

In the mid-90s, Clayton M. Christensen coined the term, “disruptive innovation.” More than 20 years later, the Harvard Business School professor’s theory is among the most popular business strategy terms searched. However, he laments that disruptive innovation theory has been misunderstood, overused and frequently misused.

In his 2015 article, Christensen notes that disruptive innovation relies on “a process whereby a smaller company, with fewer resources, is able to successfully challenge established incumbent businesses.”

Most of what we misinterpret as disruption, however, is what Christensen calls “sustaining innovation.” This is when an established company strives to make continual improvements on an existing product in direct response to changing needs of the customer. He uses the examples of “a fifth blade in a razor” or a “clearer TV picture.”

The result is that as established companies look at further innovating their products for their increasingly demanding customers, they focus on the higher end of the value chain and overlook the lower-end market segments, opening a door of opportunity for potential disruptors to service that overlooked segment. Disruptive innovations, Christensen argues, “are initially considered inferior by most of an incumbent’s customers. Typically, customers are not willing to switch to the new offering merely because it is less expensive. Instead, they wait until its quality rises enough to satisfy them.” ⁸

That anything-is-possible attitude has been a common trait throughout history for Canadians. That’s why Canada is known as the “land of innovators”, a moniker earned for creating many of the globe’s best innovations.

The list of noteworthy Canadian inventions includes:

• Birch bark canoe
  
• Snowshoe
• Baby Pablum
• Ski-Doo
• Insulin
• Telephone
• Java programming language
• BlackBerry
• Basketball
• Electric wheelchair
• Garbage bag
• Paint roller
• Peanut butter
• Wonder Bra

In honour of Canada’s 150th birthday, former Governor General David Johnston and National Research Council (NRC)Chairman Tom Jenkins co-authored a book highlighting brilliant Canadian innovations whose widespread adoption has made the world a better place.

Two Canadians are also responsible for inventing the light bulb. Medical electrician Henry Woodward and his colleague Matthew Evans filed a patent in 1874. Five years later, after unsuccessfully commercializing their patent, they sold it to Thomas Edison who was obviously much more successful achieving what the Canadians could not.

Not as well known, but author Ian Fleming’s dashing spy, James Bond is said to be inspired by Winnipegger Sir William Stephenson, a quiet World War II spy code-named Intrepid who had a penchant for martinis – shaken, not stirred.