A few weeks ago I spoke to a high level manager in a financial institution. We talked about his (truly) impressive activities in the field of innovation, and then he surprised me somewhat by saying: “In 2009 we plan to freeze innovation activities.”
Since the company is not a client of ours, I wasn’t directly affected by this decision, but still, I was curious to understand what stood behind it. Another victim of “the Situation”, I said to myself, but to my surprise he went on to explain: “We have so many good ideas now that we need to pause with innovation and focus on implementation.”
This approach is, in my eyes, a symptom of one of the biggest and most common misconceptions in the field; that innovation is all about coming up with ideas of what to do (products, services, whatever it is you do). The corollary is, obviously, that once you have these ideas you don’t need to be bothered with innovation any longer, all you need is to “just” implement.
In reality, the situation is nearly the opposite. The level of innovation invested in implementation is not lower, and very often higher, than required for coming up with the ideas in the first place. But this is hardly news for anyone, such as the manager mentioned above, who is involved in the day-to-day of innovation.
So why is the mistake so common? It is due, I think, to the fact that people tend to see innovation as a type of activity rather than a quality of performing activities; people see innovation as an answer to the question “what are you doing?” while in fact it is the answer to “how are you doing, whatever it is that you are engaged in?”
In September, I was talking to a lady who is a director-level manager in a large company. “The last thing I need now is innovation,” she said, ” We’ve just finished a successful innovation project, resulting in an amazing new product idea, which I’ve been trying to convince my VP for the past 3 months to OK, but with no success. What’s the use of innovating if they are going to kill your ideas anyway?”
To me, it sounded like what she most needed was innovation. From our point of view, this was a classical case of an urgent need for some problem solving, the problem obviously being the need to convince a stubborn VP. And examples of this type are abundant: a VP who doesn’t need innovation, because he “just” needs to get his division organized since they keep failing at implementing the great ideas in their pipeline; and of course, the innumerable CEOs who can’t talk about innovation now, because due to “the Situation” they see a decrease in sales, profits disappearing, and immediate danger to cash flow.
My conclusion: all those people who are too _______ [busy, overworked, full of ideas, engaged in a huge project] to innovate, are precisely those who are most in need of a change in the way they are handling whichever “too” they are immersed in, i.e. they are in dire need of innovation.
Thanks Amnon for giving this “reality check” to us.
I heartfully agree with you. Innovation should be applied in all stages of the aforementioned pipeline, including feeding back to the original situation.
Ideally, we should think, feel, say (communicate) and do (implement) everything in an aligned (and hopefully innovative) fashion, so there is a lot of innovation to apply to those 4 activities. Our mission would be to increase awareness of this need to our valuenets, and help them achieve their related objectives.
Cheers,
Fabian
Great Website (SITsite), and I love the Blog.
The problem that many companies face is limited time, and limited resources.
If they accept your definition of Innovation, then they may continue to “innovate” while dropping the serach for new product ideas.
This is dangerous. Companies often GROW OUT OF RECESSION on the back of new products. If they stop the launches, they may lose their growth impetus.
The challenge is: how to keep the new product impetus alive while struggling to keep the business alive in tough times.
Make the tools of Innovation easier to use, and encourage to use them on their “own time”, while making a commitment to reward effective innovation. Those are my solutions.
Well, maybe the issue is that the term innovation is too well known for something very specific (somewhere between brain storming to bunch of good ideas). Maybe we have to rethink our own terminology? Otherwise, we either have to educate everybody what we mean when we use this term - innovation, or we could try to term differently this much broader approach/ability to more accurately express Amnon’s practical definition.
i agree both with Tamar and with Dr. Bubb - terminology can be crucial, and can be used as an excuse to refrain from innovating. There is, indeed, a seeming contradiction: if you define innovation too narrowly (as is often the case) you avoid innovating on the grounds that you are too busy with all the rest, but if you define it too widely (a risk of my definition) you can avoid any serious innovation pointing to small changes as evidence that you are innovating. This raises for me several thoughts: 1) interesting how valuable it is for people to avoid innovating. 2) Fascinating to contemplate this combination - on one hand innovation is so frightening you’ll do almost anything to not innovate, and on the other hand it is so obviously something you “should” be in favor of, that people will be extremely innovative in their efforts to show that they are doing it although they are not. 3) the importance of words and names. so yes, its important to make the tools easy and accessible, but as in many areas positioning and communication matter just as much, so we need to see what people are telling themselves while they are using the tools and assessing the resutls of applying them.
I truly enjoy this blog!
I wold like to point two things to contemplate to help move forward:
A. Innovation is neither the goal nor center of gravity, but the means to achieve a goal. It should be positioned accordingly: Innovation for xyz…
I use “product innovation”, “process innovation” and “business innovation” to reflect this relationship. Even more application-specific terms are: systematic innovation for product improvement… for new product design… for business process improvement etc. (systematic as a qualifier).
B.Innovation as ability to think and act differently relates to a human capacity that drives organization capability. Lets consider innovation (verb) as a process: it starts with grerat ideas or inventions and results in innovation (noun). The fuzzy front end of this pipeline is attributed to capacities such as creativty or inventiveness, but many would attribute the “conversion process” of turning this ideas into results as “implementation that requires “execution skills”. Therefore innovation method should be portrayed as “instrumental”, A tool to think and do things better. This would be perceived of higher need than than a mere “capacity” in these times.
Agree with you, Amir. I think the “innovation fetish” of these times makes us forget sometimes that there is nothing inherently good about innovating. there is something good, though, and even crucial, about the ability to innovate, meaning the fact that you should not be doomed to keep doing the same just because no reasonable alternative has occured to you.
Innovation is a process not an event. It has to be ongoing.