In my last blog post I described my checkered past, and how from graduate school to present what we now call Open Innovation has been a constant presence in my career.  I reached outside many times, and can document millions of annual profits because of it.  I ended with this comment:

 “I’ve worked as they say, both sides of the street, and now I work in the in middle, part traffic cop, part coach, part target.”

Open Innovation is something I think is very much worthwhile even if I’m constitutionally allergic to the business jargon and buzzwords that surround it these days.  I have a privileged position now, applying my experience to helping other people do this.  I get to see a lot of what goes on inside a great many companies both in the US and now from my seat in the NineSigma office in Europe.

My first observation is that in general people are not as successful at open innovation as I was or current leaders like Procter and Gamble are.  I’m not unique in making this observation. Sieg et al ( J.H. Sieg, M.W. Wallin and G. von Krogh, R&D Management 40, 3, 2010) have looked at the use of intermediaries and come to similar conclusions examining the activities of another OI intermediary.  One of the striking observations is that 7 of 8 of the clients had abandoned their relationships with that intermediary.

Investigating the causes of these failed relationships it becomes clear that project expectations were not met. But is that the whole story?  Were the project expectations reasonable?  Were in fact the project choices reasonable?  In short the answer is mostly not.  This quote is all too familiar to me-

“If I said our scientists were not very enthusiastic, you can imagine what kind of problems the scientists put up and now I exaggerate a bit [ …] they […] didn’t come up with things they think might have a good chance of being solved.”

How is it that the corporate leadership that buys these services doesn’t see this coming?  Consider the possibility that the leadership has either been oversold or all on their own ‘over bought’.  OI is surrounded by hype about easy successes due to scooping up readily waiting technology and making big immediate impacts on bottom lines, promoting growth etc.  The very projects that don’t have a good chance of being solved above are also those that are likely to have hung around gathering dust precisely because if they were solved a great benefit would come.  So a skeptical or threatened scientist puts forward these unsolvable problems as a way to get this culturally new means doing things off their plate and senior management approves them because they fit the big score expectations that they have for OI.  A winning combination. 

The expectation of easy success going outside is one of many mistaken ideas we see.  Another is the false belief that the problems chosen are uniquely recognized.  The idea that the major problems in your market and/or technology space are not recognized by your competitors has no basis in reality.  Our team may be smart, but generally so is theirs.  But following this line of thinking leads to poorly specified requests being created in an effort to hide the real purpose.

A belief that is equally perplexing, but well known to researchers is the idea that our own team isn’t smart, so we need to look outside.  Generally, this attitude develops when scientists point out to management that their pet idea has a problem.  For years consultants have made comfortable livings providing second opinions in cases like these.  Now OI is used as well when internal scientists proffer an unwanted answer.  This in turns leads to projects where the chance of finding something is low.

So what makes a good OI project?  One clue can be found in the Seig article.  In describing progress towards a goal, the authors note that while the main objective is well documented and planned “…when problems occur on the way, they are discussed with colleagues in the group or in the hallway but rarely formulated in an explicit problem statement.  The problems are ‘in the heads of the scientists’…  My experience in delivering results with OI is that those little intermediate problems are precisely where big impacts on time to delivery of the overall project can be made.  Need to blend a mixture of dissimilar size and shape pellets? Need to separate misblended mixtures?  Sure we could have done it in house…eventually.  But going outside was so much faster.  Need to understand how a competitor achieved a longer shelf life?  Sure, we could have collected samples and tried one analysis after another, but finding the right expert got the job done in days to weeks.

What doesn’t get recognized also is that many of those ‘little’ problems are already solved by the use of outside resources.  We needed to reduce coking in a reactor preheater section.  A sales rep provided us with the right feed atomization technology.  This sort of problem solving is routine and because it isn’t a big problem, isn’t captured generally when people speak of OI success.  But without that atomizer or a hundred little things like it, we couldn’t have delivered the reactor model, and without the reactor model we couldn’t have built the pilot plant and without the pilot plant we couldn’t have validated the reactor simulator, and without the reactor simulator we couldn’t have designed the new system that put the millions on the bottom line.  For the want of a nail..the kingdom was lost.  These days, when working with clients, I tell this story and I ask them, “What are YOUR nails”?

Just recently, Stefan Lindegaard released his new book, The Open Innovation Revolution.  I just finished reading it, and must say that I am glad to finally see such a practical and applicable piece of work hit the bookstore shelves.  Stefan took a non-academic approach, and loaded the book with real-life stories and quotes from those actually in the open innovation trenches, living and breathing this stuff.  And since he spent time talking with those in the trenches he was able to shed light on something that has been all too often ignored – the soft side.  By soft side, I am referring to the human element.  You know – the effects of change on culture, the importance of communication, human roadblocks, and the like.  Why am I so passionate about the soft side of open innovation?  It’s simple – I have seen too many companies try open innovation without paying attention to these things, only to end up abandoning their OI efforts without reaching their end goals. 

Another great point brought out in the book was the importance of finding the right open innovation champions and ‘intrapreneurs’.  These people are not your typical R&D managers.  Rather, they need to possess a unique set of skills ranging from diverse technical competencies to keen networking skills.  They are the face of a company’s open innovation effort and will need to represent this function both internally and externally.  These people are bridge builders, spanning the proverbial gap between marketing and R&D, and working across various business units to educate people and to entice them to use open innovation where and when it is most likely to demonstrate success.  With each success, this person communicates the results and continues to build momentum behind the cause.

These are key concepts addressed in The Open Innovation Revolution that should be strongly considered by every company embarking on a new open innovation journey.  The book gets right to the heart of what really matters, and should be read by anyone in the planning phase of open innovation, or anyone looking for ways to improve an already existing program.

NineSigma is, in contemporary parlance an “Open Innovation Intermediary”.  I like to keep it simpler.  We help people with problems make connections with people who might help them solve the problem.  It doesn’t sound as glamorous or hip when presented that way does it?  Or if you look at all the buzz around open innovation, you see a lot of repackaging of old wine in new bottles.  Since I am some of the older wine, I thought I’d share my experience in implementing OI in a SME and what I’ve learned that applies to today’s environment.

Of course, long before someone (Chesbrough, 2003) got the idea of calling getting something from outside your own fences “Open Innovation”,  people were doing just that.  We tend to overlook the roles of suppliers, academic consultants, and consulting firms and technology vendors, development alliances, organized networking and government programs that have been a constant feature of our global industrial civilization.  This means we also overlook the roles of the purchasing departments and corporate policies that engaged these traditional means of obtaining solutions from outside the fences.  The focus on web-centric communication mechanisms, the popularity of terms like “crowd-sourcing” and “innovation ecosystems” tend to promote unrealistic expectations of effortless and cost-free profitability and diminish the perceived value of established innovation infrastructures.  An unfortunate side effect of this kind of promotional language is that it can inspire resistance to OI mechanisms from the very people they can help the most:  The people responsible for delivering new technologies, products and business methods.  People who actually do the hard work of making innovation happen may well regard stories of great, effortless success with raised eyebrows.  The skepticism of working innovators to the management theory du jour or as a colleague puts it “Management by Bestseller” is something acquired easily in an industrial career.  When skepticism is replaced by cynicism, then the game is truly lost.

Before I started my industrial career, I, like all the other NineSigma program managers, was in graduate school.  My graduate advisor had a number of industrial research projects going on his group.  Ziegler-Natta catalyst studies is one such project that a friend of mine worked on.  One alumnus of the group brought in projects dealing with the applications of brassylic acid for macrocycle synthesis.  These are just two, never mind the spinoffs and ventures coming out of the group’s research that led to numerous successful companies and profits.

When I took my first industrial job at Air Products,  it seemed rather natural to cast around for academic groups that would be better places to park some of my research ideas than working on them myself, and I was encouraged to do so.  Air Products was no novice at building alliances and acquiring technology from the outside.  My first assignment (as part of a team) was to evaluate a technology proposal that was coming in from the outside.  Closely attached to the corporate R&D group was a commercial development fellow whose job was technology scouting.   He would visit universities and startup companies around the world, looking at the latest developments that might fit our business objectives.  I remember wanting his job someday.  I like to think my work with NineSigma gives me some of the best parts, seeing the innovations needs of our clients and the amazing range of solution components offered by people around the world.

My second industrial job was with a much smaller firm, Nepera Inc.  At the time we were owned by Schering AG.  What I discovered on arriving was a catalyst development program working together with Union Carbide, a consulting Professor in Munich and  Sude Chemie.  Clearly, this historic German firm was open to outside innovations.  I had a role in taking that project to commercialization 9 months after I started.   As a successor project, I initiated an outside effort for gas phase reaction modeling.  I learned some of the downsides of outside contracting when the supplier turned out to have significantly over-promised and then held out his hand for more money.

Looking outside however really went into high gear when Cambrex acquired Nepera. Cy Baldwin and the late Art Mendolia were old veterans of chemical industry.  Cy had lead marketing efforts at ARCO and Oxirane while Art lead research at Dupont and was later an Undersecretary of Defense.  When they set out on their own, they brought this experience in front of us and dropped it on the table during our first quarterly R&D review meeting. “Don’t think we’re going to spend a lot of money on R&D here,” they said. “We spent lots of money at DuPont and didn’t get a lot to show for it”.  This was rapidly followed with “Why are you doing that?  Couldn’t someone outside do it better/faster/cheaper?”

At our next review meeting we proudly described where we had engaged outside resources only to be questioned again, “What about the intellectual property here; shouldn’t you be doing this yourself?”  We got it right the third meeting, and thereafter, described a carefully thought through balance of internal and externally focused efforts.  Cy and Art did a significant part of their management of Nepera through those R&D review meetings, holding us accountable for all aspects of the project in relationship to our business objectives.  If we didn’t know something about another department’s activities we were chastised with the rhetorical question, “You’re a small company; don’t you guys talk to each other?” 

In between then and now, I worked for other small companies, as a technology consultant and as an entrepreneur trying to sell innovation into large companies.  I’ve worked as they say, both sides of the street, and now I work in the in middle, part traffic cop, part coach, part target.

As Anne Morrow Lindbergh was quoted as saying, “Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.”

We are seeing just this type of communication on Open Innovation. Our clients typically have formal internal communication processes that include company newsletters, websites, cross-business meetings and the like. Open Innovation is fast becoming a topic of choice as companies strive to educate and inform their employees on the impact and potential of Open Innovation. Companies are more openly talking about successes they’ve experienced and the challenges they’ve faced as they work at embedding Open Innovation across the enterprise.  

A long-time client, 3M, recently used Open Innovation in its ‘cover story’ for the company’s internal newspaper. The article discussed 3M’s pursuit of a new platform technology:  “The incubator lab team collaborated with [Robert] Finocchiaro to initiate a global technology search. Together, they enlisted NineSigma, an open innovation service provider, to solicit solutions from researchers worldwide. ‘We got more than 40 responses,” [Rick] Neby noted, and one was from a company based in Switzerland that was coating 1.15 refractive index materials for improving ink reception on inkjet paper. Their material had some very desirable optical properties that could ultimately affect products in several divisions.’” The article went on to describe how the company’s incubator lab was sparking new innovation in ways they didn’t think possible.

Siemens recently referenced their Open Innovation work in the company’s magazine, Pictures of the Future. “Siemens is making use of OI methods in research as well. When faced with particularly tricky problems, Siemens researchers sometimes turn to “e-brokers,” who team up with external problem-solvers. In such cases, developers publicly describe their problem on an e-broker website, such as NineSigma or yet2com, and offer a cash reward for the best solution. And that solution can come from a large IT company in India or from an amateur developer in Germany. Approximately half of the problems are successfully solved in this way. So it’s not surprising that large companies like BASF, Novartis, and Nestlé are likewise using this method of finding solutions.”

Open Innovation will continue to be a hot topic within our client organizations, particularly as OI leaders are able to share big wins and lessons learned through the process.  This will further stimulate creativity among employees and help to get them thinking about the infinite possibilities Open Innovation can create for even the most sophisticated companies.

An Israeli investor in the medical devices industry recently complained “Israel has too many start-ups. Israeli companies are great at taking an innovative idea through the alpha stage, but then the start-up goes under because we lack companies with the expertise to fund through beta and scale to manufacturing”.  “Aagh”, as my Jewish grandmother would say, “we should only have such problems”.

With the jobless rate for newly minted college graduates at historical highs of 7.5%, Thomas Friedman bemoans policy makers’ lack of focus on what the U.S. needs to create good jobs for the future.  “We need three things: start-ups, start-ups and more start-ups,” recommends Mr. Friedman.  

To create a dynamic economy, I question if a country needs to excel at every link in the innovation value chain.  If Adam Smith could speak to me from my Economics 101 textbook, he would ask, “Why can’t my economic theory of the “invisible hand “be applied to create a free trade approach to global innovation?”  

Here’s a free trade innovation model to consider: American industry jointly funds technology incubators that sponsor foreign-grown start-ups.  By nurturing and co-investing in early stage technologies, American companies gain two advantages.  First, they share the risk of failure (which should be high! That’s what makes these start-ups), and second, they nurture technologies that match their applications and needs.

Adam Smith could not have known in 1776 how “innovative” his theory could be in 2010…

I recently spoke at a number of conferences throughout South Africa on the topic of open innovation.  Knowing that open innovation was practiced primarily by large enterprises in the US, Asia and Europe, I was curious to see how a region populated mainly with small and medium sized enterprises would react to my talks.  Not only was I surprised by their warm reception to open innovation, but also by their deep knowledge and decisive action they were taking in this area.  In order to remain competitive in this dynamic world of rapid innovation, industry and science parks are picking up momentum in South Africa, and other parts of the world where small and medium sized enterprises are grouping together, both physically and collaboratively, to share costs, resources and ideas.   

The concept of the science park is a worldwide phenomenon, mainly seen in developing regions. The concept is based on cooperation between academia, industry and government operating in close proximity to strengthen the region’s innovation output.  In South Africa, which has a developing economy, the science park concept offers a means of becoming competitive with those fully developed regions that host major companies, universities and other key sources of innovation and knowledge.  Knowing the power wielded by large enterprises through their vast pool of resources and far-reaching supplier networks, these science parks are finding new ways to mimic this capability through collaboration and co-location.  Open innovation is an integral part of the science park concept.  What a company does not have in terms of innovation resources, may be found within one of the partnering companies.  And if still not found, members of the park will soon begin to share open innovation resources, for example, the NineSigma office that is being established at the South African Innovation Hub in Pretoria, which will be managed by our local partner in the region, RIIS.

It’s fascinating to see open innovation take root in areas like Sub-Saharan Africa.  The innovation efforts taking place today in such regions will soon begin to offer great insights and ideas for small and medium sized enterprises throughout the rest of the world.  We see such companies in Asia, North America and Europe struggle because of their limited resources – especially in today’s tough economy.  So perhaps the emerging science park model could offer a next chapter in open innovation and provide a means to accelerate innovation in this underserved market sector.

This post is by guest blogger Bruna Martinuzzi. This post originally appeared on AMEX Open Forum blog; reposted here with permission. 

I once worked for a technology company that encouraged employees to practice what they called “Intelligent Disobedience.” The concept originates from seeing-eye dogs: while dogs must learn to obey the commands of a blind person, they must also know when they need to disobey commands that can put the owner in harm’s way, such as when a car is approaching.

Intelligent disobedience is not about setting out to be disagreeable or arbitrarily disobeying rules for its own sake. Rather, it is about using your judgment to decide when, for example, an established rule actually hinders your organization, rather than helps it. The antonym of intelligent disobedience is blind conformity.  Conformity smooths our day’s journey at work.  Conformity, however, can have its downsides. It saps creativity for one, and it is, in John F. Kennedy’s parlance, “the enemy of growth.”

Here are some ideas to inspire you and others in your team to establish a culture that values intelligent disobedience:

1. Consider the benefits of decentralizing some of the decision-making in your unit.If you are used to making all the decisions, allow those closest to the customer the flexibility to make appropriate decisions on the spot. This places the value where it should be—on customer satisfaction rather than on lockstep adherence to the process—but it also places value on team members by giving them the authority to bend the rules when necessary.

2. Don’t surround yourself with yes-men.Ponder the words of Barry Rand of Xerox, quoted in Colin Powell’s A Leadership Primer: “…if you have a yes-man working for you, one of you is redundant.”

3. Beware of naysayers. Consider the source of those who vigorously advise you against a change initiative. Sharpen your social and organizational awareness skills by carefully analyzing what their self-interest might be. In this regard, take a page from Guy Kawasaki’s Rules for Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services: “The status quo will always try to shoot down a good idea, especially if it threatens their position.”

4. Don’t take expert opinion as the final word. If your own experience or knowledge tells you otherwise, don’t automatically silence your inner voice because it is drowned by the din of the expert crowd. Above all, spend the time to glean the experts from the quasi-experts in your field.

5. Catch yourself if you habitually insist on “going by the book.” Ask yourself: Is this necessary for every issue? Might you enhance your team’s productivity if you paid more attention to the restraining effect that this could have on the people involved? What would happen if you built some elasticity in your rules, if you allowed others to apply standard procedures more flexibly?

6. Become aware of your mental scripts.In Everyday Survival: Why Smart People do Stupid Things, Laurence Gonzales talks about the dumb mistakes we make when we work from a mental script that does not match the requirements of the real-world situation. Mental scripts are our conditioned responses to various situations. Mental scripts push us, for example, to stubbornly cling to the notion that “this is how we have always done it” and to refuse to accept the realities of a new situation.  So we find ourselves mistakenly generalizing into the future whatever worked in the past—this is a slippery path.

7. Help your people distinguish between fact and conjecture. Conjecture can be influenced by mental scripts which don’t have a bearing on current reality. Be the voice in the room that calls attention to this possibility and help everyone pause so that they can analyze inferences and conjectures that may or may not be valid.

8. Examine your reaction when confronted with new ideas. Seth Godin compiled a list of responses to actual good ideas.  If any of these describe some of your habitual responses, consider how you might practice being more receptive to others’ notions. Defending the status quo is a sure-fire way to extinguish the spark of new ideas in your group.

9. Establish a culture that values common sense over bureaucracy. Encourage everyone on your team to cast a critical eye on all procedures, practices and policies in their area. Which ones are no longer relevant? Which ones impede or delay the flow of critical information? Which ones cause make-shift work? Which ones are plain dumb? Which traditions have petrified?

10. Get comfortable saying no. Intelligent disobedience also involves having the ability to say no. If you struggle with this, read The Power of a Positive No: Save the Deal, Save the Relationship and Still Say No.  In the book, William Ury, outlines how to master the art of delivering what he calls “a positive No.”  This is a powerful three-step process of marrying a No with a Yes:

a) Yes! (Becoming conscious of the positive foundation for your No—for example, core interests or values)

b) No. (Respectfully explaining your No, linking it to your positive foundation)

c) Yes? (Having a plan B—that is, another positive outcome for the other party)

11. Make it safe for people to push back.This provides a platform from which people can rise and develop, and is also the mark of a confident leader who has the maturity to know that he or she cannot possibly have all the right answers. Allow others to connect the dots their own way.

12. Be aware of mind traps that lead to blind conformity. Mind traps act as mental straight-jackets, preventing you from thinking creatively and rationally.  These include, for example, the “herd instinct”, i.e. relying on the fact that “everybody else is doing it.” Here is a compiled list of the ten most common thinking traps.

13. Question the blind assumptions that can hurt your business. In

Rules to Break and Laws to Follow: How Your Business Can Beat the Crisis of Short-Termism (Microsoft Executive Leadership Series), the authors expose three false assumptions about how a business creates value—these are, among the rules to consider breaking:

a) The best measure of success for your business is current sales and profit

b) With the right sales and marketing effort, you can always get more customers

c) Company value is created by offering differentiated products and services

14. Reconsider your need for harmony at the expense of progress. We are often reticent to challenge the process for fear of disquieting others who resist change. A component of emotional intelligence is the ability to be a change catalyst: to build the courage to champion change despite opposition.

15. Become aware of your three most rigidly-held beliefs. Write them down. Explore what cognitive shifts you can make to soften your position on these. Think of the emotions that drive these beliefs. Could some of them be motivated by fear? What might these unbendable beliefs prevent you from achieving?

The well-beaten path may be comfortable because it allows us to move along, without having to exert much effort, but it is the path that ultimately leads to mediocrity.  As Emerson said, long ago, “Do not follow where the path may lead.  Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.”  If you are a leader in charge of others, allow space for them to leave their own footprints.

a) Yes! (Becoming conscious of the positive foundation for your No—for example, core interests or values)

b) No. (Respectfully explaining your No, linking it to your positive foundation)

c) Yes? (Having a plan B—that is, another positive outcome for the other party)

Bruna Martinuzzi is the President of Clarion Enterprises Ltd., Clarion Enterprises Ltd. a firm that specializes in emotional intelligence, leadership and presentation skills training. Her latest book, The Leader as a Mensch, explains how you can become the kind of person others want to follow.

Here we are in 2010, some seven years after Henry Chesbrough published the book Open Innovation and we are still seeing a wide disparity in results from open innovation initiatives. In addition, there are many companies that are still trying to determine if they should even try or pilot an open innovation program. What does organizational culture have to do with the success of open innovation?

Hill and Jones defined organization culture in their book Strategic Management (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) as “the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization.”

If we break this definition down (at a very high level) and apply it to open innovation can we glean any insights?

First, let’s explore the phrase “collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization.” If an organization has always relied on internal resources for innovation and all of the major successes have originated internally, then it will by default be hard to convince this group of people to suddenly change the way they have innovated in the past to look broadly outside of the organization for co-development partners. On the other hand, if there have been innovation successes that have originated through supplier or university partnerships in the past, then this group of people will be much more receptive to changing to be more open to new innovations that originate from outside the firm.

The phrase “control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization” lends insight as well. Here “interact with stakeholders outside the organization” is insightful. Many times we have seen an organization overcome the hurdle of reaching broadly outside the organization to search for new co-development partners only to hit a wall when having to assess what they find from outside the organization and build agreements for co-development and sharing of intellectual property.

One of the lessons I have learned over the years is that you cannot directly change culture. You can change individual behaviors and through this process slowly change culture. In looking at organizations that have benefited from open innovation, what I have seen is an emphasis on changing behaviors through training, rewards, recognition and managers that constantly ask – Have you looked outside? What did you find? How did you use what you found?

Over the past month the headlines have been dominated by the BP oil-spill crisis.  Unfortunately, much of this noise is filled with individuals and organizations that are leveraging the crisis as a cheap PR opportunity.  They try to force half-baked solutions on BP, and when BP does not adopt these solutions, they are accused of “coming up empty,” and “ignoring help” that is being presented to them.  The reality of this type of situation is typically more complicated than it appears, and players in the open innovation space should have the experience to recognize this. 

One of our Program Managers brought to my attention a similar story that occurred back in the early days of WWI where the English tried to use a pre-Internet form of “crowdsourcing” to quickly remedy the unexpected sinking of many ships in the English Channel by German U-Boots.  This was a new phenomenon that was causing great losses to the British fleet, yet nobody knew how to deal with the situation when it began.  So they placed ads in all major newspapers asking the public to send in ideas on how to defend against these unexpected stealth intruders, and within a short period of time they were flooded with proposals ranging from human swimmers to trained seals.  Despite the massive response, none of the outside ideas provided a viable solution to the crisis.  The practical solution ended up coming from those scientists working directly with the military, who understood all of the details and parameters of the situation.

The lesson that we can take from this story is clear.  Unsolicited solutions do not work without first coordinating with those directly responsible for the crisis.  Without a full understanding of the situation, the resources already allocated, and the actual environment of the crisis, unsolicited responses are as effective as an armchair quarterback. 

I would be interested to hear the opinions and insights of others who are involved in the open innovation space.

I was running late, and I couldn’t find my car keys.  I looked in all the usual places: top of the kitchen counter, inside my purse, refrigerator (OK, that’s not a usual place for my keys, but I was getting desperate). As the minutes ticked by, I found myself becoming more frustrated, until I knew that I wasn’t going to find the keys.

My husband, no longer able to ignore my huffing and puffing and pacing all over the house, came to my rescue.

“What’s your problem?”

“I can’t find my keys!”

“Did you look in your purse?”

(Insert silent glare here).

“Here they are”, he said as he picked them up and tossed them to me. They were, of course, right in front of me.

The moral of the story:  Sometimes, all it takes to find something is a fresh pair of eyes.

That’s how I describe my work with the NineSigma Intelligence Team. Our clients are often already the leaders and experts in their fields, so why do they come to us to find solutions? I think, in part, they come to us because we can see into their space without any bias or preconceived ideas. We look at the information we compile with a fresh perspective that allows us to extract meaning that they might not recognize on their own. In other words, we are the fresh pair of eyes that can find things whether they are deeply buried, or hidden in plain sight.