Floor Blindenbach - Innovation management for law firms

Innovation management helps to optimize the innovation process, identify bottlenecks and increase the productivity of innovation, investment, and resources.

Floor Blindenbach is the founder of Organizing4Innovation. Trigged by a recent whitepaper, I speak with Floor to discuss her views on innovation management for law firms. We spoke about:

• the importance of treating innovation as a process
• definition for innovation'
• the role of culture in driving innovative efforts
• Innovation as a way to develop talent
• the problem of tracking/measuring innovation efforts in law firms
• best practices for innovation teams

You can find the whitepaper here: https://www.organizing4innovation.com/managing-innovation-law-firms/

Transcript below (if cut off it can be found on FringeLegal.com)

About Floor

Driven to help innovators succeed, Floor Blindenbach-Driessen, founded Organizing4innovation. She developed the T4 online training for innovators that also serves as an innovation management platform, so organizations with limited innovation infrastructure can easily manage and oversee their innovation activities. She has a Ph.D. in management from the Erasmus University in the Netherlands and has 20+ years of research and practical experience with innovating in the professional services. She has written dozens of publications, assisted hundreds of innovators, with creating thousands of awesome solutions, leading to millions of dollars in new revenues.

You can find Floor on LinkedIn

Transcript

Ab: [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to Fringe Legal. I'm so excited today to have Floor on the episode. Floor is driven to help innovators succeed, and because of this need, she founded Organization4Innovation. She developed the T4 online training for innovators that also serves as a innovation management platform, so organizations with limited innovation infrastructure can easily manage and oversee the innovation activities. She has a PhD in management from Erasmus university in the Netherlands and 20 plus years of research and practical experience with innovating in professional services. She has assisted hundreds of innovators with creating thousands of awesome solutions, leading to millions of dollars in new revenue, all fantastic achievements.

[00:01:51] And we will dig into the wealth of the knowledge that is in her brain today. So Floor, thank you so much for joining me. 

[00:01:58] Floor Blindenbach: [00:01:58] Thank you for having 

[00:01:59]Ab: [00:01:59] Yeah, I came across your work, as part of the a talk you did at the skills workshop, a presentation in January, 2021.

[00:02:08] And that was all around innovation management in law firms. As a setup to this conversation, because that's certainly tickled my interest. Would you mind just giving a  synopsis around that work, that report, and I'll certainly link to that for everyone listening/watching this so they can read it in full because it is worth reading.

[00:02:29] Floor Blindenbach: [00:02:29] Absolutely.  Let me start to say our focus is on firms that innovate and that, that aren't the Googles of this world that have billions to spend. So that's like a starting point and describes the type of teams that we work with.

[00:02:43] We have a platform for that, and we have earned a research grant to see if he could add predictive analytics to our online training platform.    We started the research out to see if we could basically vet teams better if it's like a Fitbit for innovation teams. And if we know better about teams do, can we then also provide better support?

[00:03:06] And we were so ignorant to think that we could even vet teams for law firms. We practice what we preach, and went out to do customer discovery and ask so would that'd be of benefit? So it's predictive analytics. The resounding answer that we got was no, we know which teams we want to support. So okay we have a research grant and a problem that no one wants to us to solve. Well it was a little more nuanced, but in those conversations, we also learned some things that I could not write. On the one hand, there was this where if you ask people for success later, like they were all saying, Oh, we're super successful.

[00:03:46] And also during ILTAON, we did a little poll and law firms indicated they had success rates of 80% or higher. That's very uncommon. So that would mean that in the law profession, they knew something that no one else knew, but this is like a venture capitalist have like success rates of one to 10 and even like the Procter and Gamble and Unilevers of this world, they need eight ideas for one success. So that was one thing. At the same time. If you talk with senior leadership, they were complaining, they were very skeptic about all these new technologies, because they saw so many failures. So this was really like a little bit of an indication, like something is not aligned here and last but not least I was talking to many people and then I got like an email two months, three months later which said: "Oh, I'm so sorry. I left the firm or I quit". And so I saw a huge turnover in innovation manager. So it was like, something is not, does not ryhme here. And so we're like, okay, let's use then our customer discovery and stick, step back and look into how is innovation actually managed in law firms. So that's when we started the new and talked with about 35, 36 people and did an in-depth analysis of 22 law firms to really learn how do they go about managing innovative ideas. So that's, what's like the long story to this report. 

[00:05:18] Ab: [00:05:18] Yeah. And that's really helpful context.

[00:05:20] Having that success rate of, 80, 90% for innovation efforts is remarkable if it was true. And really, as you, as you were talking, it's obviously there's a disconnect between those that are maybe doing the project, plus maybe those that are funding the project or the projects are being reported to, and it's a measurement problem as I'm sure we'll get into it a little bit time. 

[00:05:45]Innovation as a process [00:05:45]

[00:05:45]What I really liked from the report was the framing of innovation as a process. In that. Yes, of course, every firm, every business, maybe every vertical will approach it in a slightly different way, but it is not this black box that you can't put certain project type milestones in place for. It is something that's repeatable.  

[00:06:09] Do you mind expanding on that a little bit more and what you found, especially as you spoke to these these 35, 36 people  what were some of the things that started triggering in your mind around the process approach to this?

[00:06:21]

[00:06:21] Floor Blindenbach: [00:06:21] I've always seen innovation as a process, to be honest. And there's also a great Harvard Business Review article that also explains it. It's not only a process, it's even like a value chain, which starts with idea generation, then development and then implementation, and then scale. You need to be good at it, all these steps in orde...