Innovating To Win

Can Structured Innovation Really Work?

Of course, many of us (me included) believe there is better way than stumbling around in the dark groping for that next good idea.  However, this way of thinking runs counter to the innovation mythology that we are all taught.  So it is no surprise that despite the urgent need businesses feel to leverage innovation, there are many skeptics.  The sentiments expressed in Geoff Ficke’s article “Is TRIZ the Magic Bullet Entrepreneurs Have Been Seeking?” are not uncommon.  Yet, there are still many waving the banner of sustainable innovation practice.  So, what is the reality?

From my own observations, it is quite clear that structured innovation is real and that it works.  But before delving too deeply, let’s clarify a key point.  Innovation and entrepreneurship are not the same thing.  Without getting too hung up on semantics, innovation is the process of arriving at a new solution to a need; entrepreneurship is the practice of delivering a new solution to a market.

The quest for a predictable way to drive innovation is not new.  It is driven by a new sense of urgency created by increasingly difficult competitive environments resulting from transformations of the global economic ecosystem.  The good news for companies, large and small, is that answers do exist.  Many companies have already begun building repeatable innovation practices and enjoying excellent returns on their innovation investments.

TRIZ is one of many tools that are available to organizations that wish to systematize their innovation practice.  It has a small but loyal following, but the size of its following should not be confused with its utility.  Unfortunately, it has been my observation that at times the TRIZ practitioners are the greatest obstacle to its proliferation.  Don’t get me wrong, there are very good TRIZ practitioners out there, for example Ellen Domb, editor of The TRIZ Journal and author of TRIZ for the Real World.  But the fact is many TRIZ practitioners discourage the admission of new blood into their community.  At TRIZCON 2005, I heard a very prominent member of the U.S. TRIZ community state “TRIZ was hard for me to learn, so it should be hard for others too.”  Fortunately, this has not prevented some companies from being wildly successful at building innovation competence.

Samsung, widely respected in their industry as being among the most innovative of companies, has followed a steady path in its evolution to what I like to call a high performance innovation organization.  Samsung embarked on this journey in 2001 by identifying two initial projects in the areas of semiconductors and printing to experiment with structured innovation practice.  The result of this experiment was 12 new patents and an annual savings of $10 million.

Spurred on by that initial success, Samsung then expanded the program by establishing four teams of innovation specialist and a training program to develop the skills for repeatable innovation.  These teams successfully lead 23 innovation projects in 2002.  Today, Samsung has integrated innovation skills training into their Six Sigma program ensuring the continued development of skilled and leveragable internal innovation experts.  An internal innovation knowledge port helps to disseminate captured organizational innovation wisdom.  This continued focus on organizational innovation competence has resulted in a dependable return on innovation.

This is of course the promise of a properly deployed high performance innovation practice.  These benefits can, and have been, seen by other organizations that make the commitment to becoming a high performance innovation organization.  The attributes of such an organization can be summarized as:

• Sustainable corporate program for innovation best practices is established
• Innovation is integrated into culture
• Hierarchy of innovation practitioners defined to maximize leverage of key skills
• Innovation skill is widely deployed
• Corporate knowledge assets are leveraged to support innovation

In summary, I would answer Geoff Ficke’s question, “Can a Structured System Be Taught That Results in Innovative Success?,” with a resounding “YES!”  There are enough proof points of the success of such initiatives to make that clear.  Organizations that have embraced sustainable innovation practice are enjoying the benefits of that commitment today.

Practicing For Successful Innovation

Preparing to write this first post, I was reviewing many recent posts in other innovation blogs.  This is a very rich and fertile area of discussion; but the seed for this initial post comes from Innovate on Purpose, a blog by Jeffery Phillips. In his post “Swinging for the fences,” Jeffery considers the question of whether focusing on the next big thing or incremental innovation is the better strategy.

This is unfortunately a question that doesn’t get asked often enough.  It is not asked because in most organizations innovation is synonymous with the next big thing.  The concept of innovation as a force behind incremental improvement is not understood.  This is at the very heart of why so many organizations have such poor return on innovation.  For innovation to become a value driving core competency within an organization, it must be first and foremost integrated with the cultural fabric, not something dragged out on that odd occasion when the search is on for the next big thing.

Organizations that understand this develop innovation skills at all levels, and because they have the foundation of consistent practice, they enjoy greater success in conquering their innovation challenges.  The leading companies of the future will be those that foster innovation excellence as a key core competency.