Learning Innovation

In “How Fit Is Your Innovation Practice?”, the stages of the Innovation Practice Maturity Model (IPMM) were outlined.  Now, Lauchlan Mackinnon has outlined “The 4 Stages of Learning in Organisations” in his Think Differently!! blog.  The synergy in the discussed models is very strong.

In the Accidental Innovation stage of the IPMM, organizations exhibit unconscious incompetence.  They are unaware of how poor their innovation practices are because they do not yet appreciate the possibilities that exist for improving the status quo.

In the Situational Innovation stage, as organizations begin to understand that there is better way to drive their success at innovation (conscious incompetence), they begin dabbling with and learning about innovation best practices.  Organizations have mixed success with their early forays into structured innovation—typically seeing strong ROI, but failing to achieve much traction of the methodologies.

As companies evolve to the Repeatable Innovation stage, the organizations benefit from learned innovation practices that are applied on demand.  The organization now has the ability to target their innovation expertise on high value opportunities.  The culture of sustainable innovation has not been established yet, so the continuance of good innovation practice requires a specific effort (conscious competence).

Organizations that achieve unconscious competence in their innovation practice have become High-Performance Innovation organizations.  In these companies, innovation has become part of the cultural fabric of the organization, and the infrastructure and support systems have been put in place to ensure that innovation practices are self-sustaining.

Lauchlan goes on to point out the connection between the progress through different stages of learning and the resistance to change.  Citing a chart from Luc Galoppin’s blog (shown above), it is noted that the resistance to change grows as the organization moves through the conscious incompetence (Situational Innovation) phase and continues through the conscious competence (Repeatable Innovation) phase.  This is very interesting and important to understand for innovation practitioners interested in moving toward a High-Performance Innovation environment.

In the Situational Innovation phase, many individuals will be uncertain about the path forward.  They are asked to do things which are unfamiliar.  Even worse, they are asked to accept that they have not been performing optimally because they have not been using reliable methods of sustainable innovation practice.  The introduction of the new practices is therefore met with skepticism and sometimes viewed as vaguely threatening.

It is vital to the success of any innovation practices deployment to consider the individuals that will be expected to employ the new methods and supporting technologies.  Innovation disciplines must be presented as enhancing their value to the organization.  By focusing individuals on the real benefits to them personally and addressing their concerns early in the process, it is possible to shift the balance in the resistance to change equation.  This shift will help convert the innovation practices deployment from a push dynamic to a pull dynamic where individuals want to participate in the program.

[Chart reproduced from Luc's Thoughts on Organizational Change: "Learning and Resistance"]

Comments

[Lauchlan Mackinnon]

Hi James,

Thanks for commenting on my post on the 4 stages of learning.

I think discussing innovation maturity is important, and I have been playing around with using an approach along the lines of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model that has been used for software development, engineering, etc.

I published an article recently on the 7 dimensions of innovation http://lauchlanmackinnon.blogspot.com/2007/05/7-dimensions-of-innovation.html and made the stage of innovation maturity the 7th dimension if you are interested in that as well.

Kind regards

Lauchlan Mackinnon