MWV: A Eureka! Journey, Part One

What happens when you gather 50 people from eight countries into one room on Centennial Campus for a three-day idea generation session? When members of the MWV (MeadWestvaco) Personal Care Strategic Business Unit met for an ideation session in mid-October, they got more than 300 great ideas to choose from to energize their business: more ideas in less time than they had ever produced before.

MWV's experience continues a strong tradition of innovative activities centered on Centennial Campus. MWV located an Innovation Center on Centennial Campus in 2006, and has enjoyed their close proximity to university technical and economic research resources. Cindy James, MWV Managing Director of Process Excellence and one of the driving forces behind the recent idea session, said, "This experience illustrates the value of our location here on Centennial Campus and the terrific partnerships we've developed."

One of the partners in innovation that James found on Centennial Campus is N.C. State's Industrial Extension Service. The oldest engineering extension program in the nation, IES first contacted James before she moved from her previous MeadWestvaco office in Alabama. Since moving onto Centennial Campus a half-mile from the IES home office, James has become a champion for the business-building and problem-solving services IES provides. She joined the IES Advisory Board in 2007.

James attended IES's October 2007 Conference for Excellence, at which keynote speaker Doug Hall – author of “Jump Start Your Business Brain” and founder of Eureka! Ranch – explained his signature idea generation process. The ideation method Hall presented was so powerful that James jumped at the chance to participate in a follow-on session when Gene Fornaro, IES Director of Business Development, invited her to a national Manufacturing Extension Partnership meeting where the Eureka! program would be showcased.

James was one of only two client representatives at that January 2008 meeting, but it convinced her that applying the Eureka! method would pay off for MWV. She returned to her Centennial Campus office to find a business unit that wanted to try it, and Nick Mysore, MWV Senior Director of Strategic Marketing, volunteered the Personal Care Strategic Business Unit. He saw it as an opportunity to shorten their innovation cycle.

James called IES to get the project started. Joe Sauve and Doug Hummer of IES met with Mysore to discuss his needs, and decided that MWV's event would be big enough that the Eureka! Ranch should facilitate it. But very quickly the event grew even bigger and Eureka! Ranch asked IES to provide facilitators as well. In the end, four experts from Eureka! Ranch led the session, assisted by four IES staff members: Fornaro, Sauve, Hummer and Jan Pridgen. Dr. Steve Markham of the NCSU College of Management also participated, and delivered a lecture to the participants at the end of the first day.

MWV's idea generation session took place in the Park Alumni Center over three long, exciting days. Participants learned to present ideas in terms of their overt benefit, the reason to believe the benefit will materialize, and the dramatic difference the idea will make, and then worked through a series of strategic thinking exercises and "idea engineering cycles." The cycles used a variety of stimuli, including some derived from market research, to provoke thought and focus the idea creation. Participants worked through the cycles first as individuals, then in pairs, and finally in small groups that constantly shifted to ensure everyone was exposed to different viewpoints.

By the end of day two, the participants had generated more than 300 new ideas: some involved improvements to existing products, others described potential extensions of existing product lines to new uses, and some were for entirely new products. The sheer volume of ideas surprised everyone, including the Eureka! Ranch facilitators. It turned out they hadn't brought enough materials to capture that many ideas, but a quick run to the IES office solved that problem.

Through each successive phase of the idea generation process, the big stack of ideas was winnowed down to the "best" ideas, so that by the end of day two the 300-plus ideas featured 32 that had risen to the top. The Eureka! Ranch experts worked on MWV's 36 ideas overnight and, based on their experience conducting similar sessions since the early 1990s, added an additional 36 ideas that the group would evaluate further on day three.

In the "idea optimization" phase on day three, the group used the "walk the halls" method to take a deeper look at the 72 ideas: participants worked ideas they were passionate about in small groups, and gradually produced those ideas MWV would consider the real winners. By lunch on day three, 28 ideas had made the cut, and they were subsequently rank-ordered and the top eleven were selected for further development. After the session, a "core team" of MWV specialists reviewed the original 300-plus ideas and picked out three more that they thought deserved a second look.

MWV submitted those 14 ideas to Eureka! Ranch, plus other pre-existing ideas, to be tested in their computer-based Merwyn probability tool, which will estimate their likelihood of success based on the three idea criteria: overt benefit, reason to believe, and dramatic difference. Once they receive the results, MWV will be able to choose which ones to pursue: which ones they will champion in order to make them into reality.

After the event, MWV participants and IES guest facilitators were convinced of the power of these techniques to create new ideas and to evaluate and refine them in record time. Nick Mysore remarked how good it was "to see participation from such a diverse, cross-sectional, global team," and expressed his confidence that the results from this session will "create multiple platforms for growth," and Joe Sauve estimated that MWV could cut the time for developing business cases based on these ideas from over 6 months to more like 6 weeks. Cindy James, whose initial curiosity led to the tremendous results, simply said, "I'm already looking forward to the next one!"

TO BE CONTINUED ...