Innovation Still Important in Bad Times

Check out: "Managing New-Product Development and Innovation in Challenging Times"

Takeaway: It's still time to innovate, even during bad economic times. In summary, Morelli and Biggelaar suggest:

1. Commit to greater customer centricity in new-product planning
2. Develop more effective program management capabilities that break down internal silos
3. Tap into a larger idea pool
4. Leverage a new generation of open service delivery platforms

Innovative protest method (Iranian Protester Giving Finger)

Ken Robinson's entertaining talk about creativity and the Education System's role in destroying it.

"Control Illusionists" Make Innovation Dissapear

Reading up on this subject reminded me of another topic that I've been discussing lately:

Real Control (healthy variance reduction) versus the "Illusion of Control" (something quite different)...

Throughout my academic, entrepreneurial and professional career I've watched (and learned from) people who were masters of organizing and unifying a view of a million inputs and moving parts, enabling a more holistic outlook and decision making capability.

I've also watched some folks stare unproductively at self-created dashboards, lean too heavily on pre-fab decision-making frameworks and effectively divert themselves away from the tasks of a) understanding and b) actually solving critical problems. Instead, folks like these basically sell themselves and their bosses on an illusion of control, urging attention toward a neat set of reports that elude to selected management strengths/competencies and away from problems that may very well be out of control.

In a nutshell, the Control Illusionists I've met are great at creating a temporary calm and perhaps some job stability. They're also really, really bad at managing innovation. They certainly don't represent the kind of "magic" that you want to bring to your organization.

Quote of note...

"The innovator is a hypocrite if they leave unsolved problems on the table. Innovators who know of solutions or root causes will always seek to apply their knowledge."

-Howard Smith
BP Trends
http://www.bptrends.com/publicationfiles/09%2D06%2DCOL%2D%237%20PTRIZTheTroublewithPeople%2DSmith%2Epdf

TED Talk on Innovation

Five Points on the Relationship between Vision and Innovation

1.) New companies tend to work backwards from a broad vision/goal of what they want to be, what problems their solutions will address, and who their ideal customers will be.

2.) Having a vision doesn't automatically engender uniquely and substantially valuable solutions- i.e., the kinds of solutions with enough market value to support the vision.

3.) Creating substantially unique and valuable solutions is difficult and requires inventive thinking for dissolving and/or circumventing the contradictions (C) that arise when one attempts to take a problem-solving step (S). E.g., "I can make the user experience markedly better with a patented new hardware interface "S", but it will require the application of new, unstable, fault-prone technology "C" on the back-end..."

Some contradictions are insurmountable, others require better talent or other resources to enable their resolution. To ignore or deny the contradictions is to settle with a faulty, incomplete, or inadequate product or solution. A really important point, I think, is that contradictions can arise in the business model itself. These need to be addressed as well and herein lies a common challenge of hubris at the strategic management level. Oversights and denials of contradictions can add up to drag down product and financial performance.

4.) Innovation Management Methodology*Creative Talent*Insight Channels = the required mix for exploiting productive, inventive thinking and hence bringing uniquely valuable solutions to market.

5.) If an organization puts its head too far down, chasing a vision without the right Innovation mix factors, then it is not giving itself a good chance at succeeding in its quest.

When good ideas get shot down...

Ever find yourself in a situation like this?

Keeping Score on Innovation Management: How is your CEO Performing?

Innovation is now understood to be the key driver of a firm's organic growth and has become a focal point for corporate leaders, shareholders, and board members. It has taken over a distinct corner of management science and consulting- complete with its own theories, frameworks, toolkits, and even software applications for ideation and collaboration.

So, the million (or perhaps billion) dollar question: Does your CEO really get the "innovation thing?" If you answer "No" to some of the following questions, it may be time for your top brass to get serious about formulating an Enterprise Innovation Managment strategy:

• Is your corporate suggestion box more than a black hole? Does it serve a purpose beyond that of a mere psychological outlet for the common worker-bee?

• Are your senior-level innovators looped into a complete and objective stream of customer insights - including the kinds of tough criticism that can be hard to swallow - or does their dose of customer feedback consist of rosy, hand-picked marketing superlatives plucked from a narrow group of fanatical customers?


• Do non-trivial elements of your business model, marketing strategy, customer experience and product offerings evolve in synch with and at the pace of changing and growing customer needs?

• As individual creative employees build tools, short cuts, and process improvements for themselves, can they plug into a platform for transferring and systemetizing their incremental improvements across the greater enterprise?

• Is your company generally fast to anticipate and act upon compelling market opportunities ahead of its competitors?


• Is your company generally honest with itself about who or what its competition really is?


• Does HR seem to have clear marching orders and an understanding of how to recruit and retain innovative talent?


• Have the company's critical staff-level innovators been identified?

• If so, are they truly empowered, i.e., supported and entrusted with the appropriate resources and/or decision-making authority needed to execute on improvements and innovations?

• Can staff innovators in your organization count on senior-level sponsors when necessary to get down into the weeds, evaluate concepts and sell them up the ladder when appropriate?

So you answered, "No" to one or many of the above. Now what? You've just stumbled upon an innovation blockage, one which is probably not easily removed. Preventing and removing roadblocks will take the will to change your organization's core culture and innovation infrastructure. Where does your CEO begin?

Approaching innovation management can be difficult and counter intuitive for folks who don't believe innovation can be managed. Gut feelings tell us that innovation can't be taught, as Intel's Sr. IT Principal Engineer Murphy Hoye has said. “You have to create an environment for people to be creative, and you have to understand that certain kinds of people are like that…And they tend to be irritating and obnoxious, because they aren’t following the rules and they’re not proceeding down the normal path. But that’s sort of the point,” says Hoye. Hoye seems to express impatience for right-brain creative types who seem to flail or color outside of the lines, but notes their importance.

Funny thing is, "Creative types" that I know also voice impatience for left-brain, hyper-analytic gatekeeper-ism and idea tyranny. They have a point. Consider the following excerpts from the June 2009 Issue of the Harvard Business Review, Article: Innovation in Turbulent Times-

"...Psychologists at Cornell University wrote an article titled "Un-skilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." The title alone captures a pitfall for left-brainers: Unskilled at coming up with breakthrough innovations, they may nevertheless believe they are good at evaluating them. They are usually wrong...

Many companies allow left-brain analytic types to approve ideas at various stages of the innovation process. This is a cardinal error.

Uncreative people have an annoying tendency to kill good ideas, encourage bad ones, and demand multiple rounds of 'improvements.'

Any executive with half a brain knows that innovation is essential to success. The problem is that it takes both halves of a brain to make it happen - the imaginative, holistic right brain and the rational, analytic left brain..."

Making innovation a core value and advantage requires utilization of creative talent, for sure. But that in turn requires a fundamental commitment in philosophy and practice: The commitment to unlearning counter-productive, stifling habits. The will to innovate is the will to let ideas live (and die) on their own merit, to draw insight from every corner and crevice of the enterprise, and to rethink how the decision-making hierarchy interacts with its organization's soup of innovative ideas so as to balance the needs of removing unnecessary gate-keeping while conducting adequate valuation and analysis of potential initiatives.

As you keep score within your organization, recognize that your CEO has to take risks in letting innovators innovate, in funding creation of an innovation infrastructure, and in resourcing the new initiatives that emerge and show promising ROI potential. One bottleneck to watch out for: While innovation-fueled revenue growth is important in good and bad times, economic survival mode instincts are unfortunately a real threat to innovation investment, epecially now.