What is innovation?
Why do you care?
People often talk about innovation as thinking “outside the box”. There’s some truth to that. Innovation is very topical right now in the business world.
If you Google “Innovation Questions” the first two hits will be an article from Forbes and an article from Harvard Business Review. I didn’t find either of these two articles particularly compelling but it should tell you something about the people who are Googling innovation. The target market of both these organizations is executives who are tasked with running businesses.
Why are these movers and shakers, at once the drivers of change and the protectors of the corporate status quo interested in innovation? There are two big reasons I can think of. First, innovation is an incredibly high value-add activity in an organization if you can do it right. Innovation changes the rules and gives company’s massive competitive advantages.
Second, because they are scared. They hear the winds of change swirling at the corner office windows and want to figure out how to either harness the power of innovation or mitigate its risk. In the Fortune 500 you need to proactively see what coming down the highway or you’ll end up flat in the sidewalk.
One conclusion I’d take away is that there’s a dynamic tension here between the perceived need for innovation and the ability to understand, apply and execute it in the executive suite. One of the key starting points for great innovations ironically is finding these points of dynamic tension and creating a product or service to solve them. I just gave you a billion dollar business idea. You’re welcome.
Why do companies find it so hard to innovate? Why do they think primarily inside the box? Mostly, I think because it’s easier and perceived as less risky to work inside the box. There are precedents. There are methodologies. There are others with case studies that you can model. If you follow the well-worn path you can always point to it if someone questions your direction.
The innovators don’t have that luxury. The well-worn dilemma is that “destruction is part of creation”. When you follow the innovators path you are alone and you don’t know where it will end. People have to be very well convinced in your leadership skills to get behind you on that path. Cultures that have grown up around the tenets of protecting the current business and not taking risks have a hard time gathering behind the leader who wants to wander into the unknown.
Seth Godin has said that innovation is “connecting the dots” versus “collecting the dots”. Connecting the dots isn’t obvious. It involves flipping the problem or situation on its head and looking at it from a new angle. This takes an open mind and an open culture.
“Is there some combination of forces from disparate disciplines that yields something entirely new?” In order to answer that question you need a broad portfolio of knowledge and disciplines. Our current education paths tend to drive practitioners deeper into specific specialties. It is difficult to see the broad spectrum of possibilities when you are blinded by the specificity of your knowledge.
How do we design people and companies and careers to innovate?
Like most things it is best started by asking questions. Better questions. Different types of questions.
One that I am fond of is “How do we flip this on its head?”, but there are a myriad of directions your questions can come from. You could come from your customer’s point of view and ask “What makes our customers smile?” or “What makes our customers really angry?” Both of those should lead you to some dynamic tension that you can innovate into.
Another I’m quite fond of is “How can we eliminate this entire process?” How can I take this section of the process and automate or eliminate it? That’s typically an innovation.
A simple question is “What is missing?” Some of us have had the pleasure of working for an owner or board or CEO who would wait for the meeting topic to run its natural course around the inside of the box then lean back in their chair and ask that type of question. “How could we do twice as much?” “Why do our customers care?”
How do you ease your company or your life into the innovation game? Here are some ideas for you to try on for size.
- Try a hopeless, intractable problem first.
We all have them. There’s that product or team that no matter what we’ve tried they are stuck. No amount of traditional management theory is going to change the facts. For whatever reason you are trapped. Trapped inside the box. Why? Because you are playing by existing rules and those rules prevent you from winning, or maybe even moving.
These stinky problems are usually things that continue to suck resources and energy. They are immune to your efforts. Perhaps, counter-intuitively, they are also a great opportunity for innovation because you aren’t going to make them worse. You may kill them off, but they’re heading in that direction anyhow. It’s actually low risk.
Take one of these debilitating black sheep situations and ask the question, “What can we do to flip it on its head?” How can we break the rules? How can we choose a new ground to compete on that will change the industry and force everyone else to come to us?
- Take a lot of ‘at bats’.
Nothing says you have to bet the company on your first innovation efforts. The opposite is true. If you look at companies with successful innovation cultures they tend to have a large crop of ideas in the incubator at any time. The key with innovation is to start wide. Always have the mouth of the innovation pipeline filled with good and goofy ideas.
- Focus the winners.
At some point in the innovation’s life cycle you’ll need to take it out of the nursery and focus on it. Bringing the innovations to market or to fruition is where you focus your process. Don’t lose focus and try to do too many innovations at once. Narrow your portfolio of maturing innovations to those that we think will make the biggest difference and make those work.
Some well-known innovation companies will set up a new entity specifically for that innovation as it emerges into the light, thus guaranteeing the innovation doesn’t’ get lost in the existing corporate silos. Some have well defined vetting and gate processes to ensure the focusing is enabled. But it is always a challenge to not kill the infant innovations in their cradles. We need to balance the process to be selective but not preventative.
- Seed your organization with people of difference.
A bigger challenge to innovation in a company is people not process. It’s hard to force innovation through a long-tenure culture of homogeneity. The savvy leader will strategically introduce different thinkers into the mix. Either through hiring or consulting these players will be outsiders who can ask innovative questions.
Innovation is about changing the rules, not following them. In your business, in your life where are the big, intractable problems that you could change the rules on? Where is the dynamic tension that cries out for innovation?
How can you flip it on its head?