Reactive vs. Proactive Innovation

Over on the Innovate On Purpose blog, Jeffrey Phillips offers definitions of Reactive and Proactive Innovation with suggestions of when each is appropriate.  While this is a constructive way of organizing thought about innovation, Jeffrey’s characterization of the approaches is problematic.

Jeffrey characterizes proactive innovation as “creating a few well-defined problems, challenges or opportunities and creating a brainstorm or other method to submit ideas based on these defined challenges.”  This is contrasted to reactive innovation described as a situation where a company “expects ideas to be sent in and then reacts to those it considers good ideas” (i.e. an employee suggestion box).

The problem with these definitions is that they focus on specific practice of implementation and fail to recognize the key element of organizational intent.  There are positive and negative connotations associated with the terms proactive and reactive, and the definitions don’t seem to align well with these connotations.  A company that pulls together an ad hoc team to address the fact that the CEO read about their loss of market share in the Wall Street Journal can take comfort in the fact that they are a proactive innovator.  The company that opens it walls to ideas from outside the enterprise via a global open innovation initiative is labeled reactive.  This doesn’t make sense.  A different, organizational intent based, definition seems to be in order.

A Reactive Innovation organization is one where innovation is not recognized as value driving asset in the organization.  The organization does not anticipate the need to evolve its products and service through innovation in a planned way, but instead waits for the evidence of the market to tell it, after the fact, where they need to adapt.  Acting under the pressure of responding to a business challenge, the organization gravitates toward the quick fix rather than considering the true nature of the problem.  These organizations often experience atrophy of their innovation capability as they get trapped in what Senge would call a classic shifting the burden architype.

In contrast, the Proactive Innovation organization is one where innovation is viewed as a key discipline that must be fostered.  In these organizations, innovation best practices have been identified and are in active deployment.  The company actively manages its innovation agenda, looking for new opportunities, understanding the intersection of its capabilities with the objectives of its current and future customers, and provisioning its knowledge workers with the tools and systems to accelerate and focus ideation efforts in support of a common innovation vision.  These companies are in either the repeatable or high-performance phase of there innovation practice evolution.  These are the companies that take control of their destiny rather that waiting for their competitors to define their role for them.

Hopefully, these different definitions capture an important distinction.  There are many specific where-the-rubber-meets-the-road innovation practices that may be part of any organization’s processes.  As Jeffrey points out, there are many factors that may indicate the appropriateness of any one practice for a given organization.  However, it is the intent and degree of purposefulness with which these innovation practices are embraced and pursued that will define the successful innovation leaders from the also-rans.

Comments

[Jeffrey Phillips]

Hi James.

I think you've captured, perhaps more eloquently than I, what I meant by reactive versus proactive. The real challenge is a mindset and attitude. I think the firms that understand how to harness the creative energy of their employees, customers and value chains, and do so with INTENT, make much better innovators and will have much greater success, than those that leave innovation to chance or treat it as something they should react to. My post may have left the impression that all that matters is the "flow" of the idea, rather, it is the intent and purpose of the firm that matters most.