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An Interview with Lance Pressl, Co-Founder of InnovateNow

Lance Pressl is president of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce Foundation and one of the co-founders of InnovateNow, a public-private partnership that brings together business, labor, government, academia and private citizens to promote innovation in the city of Chicago and the surrounding region. Formed in 2006, InnovateNow has become a leader in promoting innovation for regional economies. Last year, for example, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez acknowledged the initiative at the 2008 National Summit on American Competitiveness.

Naturally, InnovateNow uses innovative communication tools to spread its messages and to facilitate its charge. It has a presence on social networking sites Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, Ammado, and GrowthCluster. It posts podcasts on its Web site, and it recently successfully used InnoCentive, an open innovation marketplace of more than 180,000 Internet users, to solicit ideas for ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from autos by increasing public transportation ridership in Chicago (making Chicago the first major metropolitan area to post a challenge in InnoCentive's eight-year history). Still, even with all those tools, effectively promoting innovation is no easy job.

Pressl recently sat down with Perspectives to talk about the challenges of talking up innovation.

Perspectives: What is the purpose of InnovateNow and why is it important to the regional economy?

Pressl: The ultimate goal of InnovateNow is to transform the Chicago region – essentially from Madison, Wis., east to South Bend, Ind., and south to Champaign/Urbana, Ill. – into a global center of innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity. We see this as the only way to build a sustainable growth economy, and our region definitely needs that.

For Chicago and much of the Midwest, economic development used to be about chasing after smoke stacks – enticing manufacturing plants to build and stay here. That isn't going to do it for us anymore. We're now in a new knowledge economy that is all about developing and retaining the best talent in the world. We are going to compete in the global marketplace on our ideas, not on the widgets we produce. Yet, while several of our schools and universities (including the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the Illinois Math and Science Academy) educate some of the brightest talent in the world, many of these individuals leave the area after earning their degrees. In some cases, international students are required to return to their home countries, but in many others, the Midwest is simply losing talent to the East Coast or the West Coast. They are looking for greater opportunities to turn their ideas into real business innovations and solutions, and they don't believe they can find the critical mass here.

Many area business and government leaders understand the need for talent in driving innovation, but we also still have a long way to go to change the mindset of some people.

Perspectives: Where did the idea for InnovateNow originate?

Pressl: Initially, the state of Illinois was pursuing a regional innovation and workforce development grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to develop a comprehensive plan for regional economic growth. So we began studying innovation ideas from around the world and talking to area business leaders about the importance of innovation. We didn't get the grant, but after all of our research and discussions, we knew we had to develop the plan anyway. That brought together the Chamber of Commerce, World Business Chicago and the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, and InnovateNow was launched at the Chicagoland Innovation Summit in October 2006.

Perspectives: What do you see as the measure for whether an idea is truly innovative?

Pressl: Innovation is an evolving discipline, but one constant is that an innovative idea has to produce value.

Perspectives: What do you think are the keys to communicating or marketing innovative ideas? Or do they basically sell themselves?

Pressl: No matter what kind of innovation you’re communicating, the first question to consider is "Who is the audience?" Then you must tailor your communication approach to appeal to that audience.

For InnovateNow, a key audience is the business community, and an important part of what we are communicating is that companies – both within and across industries – must collaborate in a new way and fully leverage existing assets to create the most innovative solutions to solve their business problems and remain competitive. That is not the traditional approach most business executives have been accustomed to, so in that sense, the very idea of what we're trying to do is innovative itself. One key to communicating this is simply addressing the inherent challenges.

For instance, we're challenged by the word "innovation" itself. It has been used so much that it has lost some meaning. It also has been so closely associated with high tech that people think only technology companies can innovate. We realized from the outset that if a food company like Kraft or other non-tech Chicago-area companies can't be seen as innovative, we're in trouble. So our approach is to use the word and then define it. We see innovation as not just developing and implementing new ideas for business models, processes, products and services, but also filtering out the best ideas to create customer value and drive revenue growth.

For communicating the ideas of InnovateNow, another key – which is a learning from a National Governors Association report on communicating the importance of innovation – is to not use negative or dire language. Rather than positioning our messages in terms of the region falling behind or lagging other areas, we talk about the possibilities so people can visualize them. Our partnerships with other organizations that are known for innovation, such as Wired NextFest, also communicate to various communities that we are serious about innovation.

Finally, an especially significant key to communicating innovation is to show rather than tell. For instance, we've engaged Second City, Chicago's famed improvisational theater, to show companies how performance can spur innovation. And when the Chamber used InnoCentive to solicit ideas to help the city's public transportation achieve one billion rides per year, we received numerous ideas from around the world. That demonstrated the power of crowdsourcing and open innovation, key ideas that InnovateNow is trying to promote.