Innovating To Win

Know Your Innovation Course

Flying was huge part of my father’s life.  He was the mechanic and navigator on a good will flight from New York to Bogota in the early days of flight.  That’s him on the left in the photo of the two man crew just before leaving on the trip.  Later, he toured South America demonstrating the latest fighter planes for the Curtiss Hawk company, and was a flight instructor to the Colombian air force.  He even wrote a book on air navigation.

So, it was no surprise that when I was eleven I found myself attending flight school and learning to fly sailplanes.  Among many things I learned in flight school was the importance of planning your flight and understanding how to monitor and make corrections to your course.  Whether you are operating under visual flight rules or instruments, you always need to know where you are, where are you going, and what path you intend to take.

Years later, after moving to Boston, I decide to learn to sail.  I trundled down to India Wharf and joined the Boston Harbor Sailing Club.  There I learned to handle ships of different sizes both in the protected harbor and on the open waters of the Atlantic.  I’ll never forget my final exam for the Club’s sailing certification course.  I found myself handling a 36 foot boat by myself in the middle of a raging thunder storm.  I’ll also never forget the time and attention spent on learning the rules of navigation on the open sea.

I find these lessons of flying and sailing are also very applicable to the world of innovation.  Too many practitioners approach innovation as if just thinking about it will yield big results.  But this is never the case.  High value innovation requires diligent planning and crisp execution.  This is true for both the every day incremental innovations that sustain the value of existing products and the breakthrough innovations that open up new revenue channels for the enterprise.

Some people argue that innovation isn’t predictable and therefore attempts to manage it are futile.  Fortunately, these individuals are simply mistaken.  It is certainly true that when we embark on the path of innovation, there are many unknowns and as consequence it’s difficult to be sure of the outcome.  But it is important that we not confuse uncertainty of outcome with predictability in the path of innovation.  That is to say, irrespective of the outcome there are well understood best practices of innovation that will reliably get you to the optimal conclusion more rapidly.  Sometimes this conclusion will mean canceling a project sooner because you have been able to identify quickly the flaws in the program and thereby avoid wasted costs.  Other times this will mean opening up a market sooner and with a higher value proposition.

When during the course of an innovation project you run across the unexpected rut in the road, having a well structured approach to innovation allows you to quickly analyze the issue and adjust your bearing.  Knowing how to systematically identify and select alternative paths to value spells out the difference between the winning execution that leads to high value creation and the being just another victim of the accidental school of innovation.

Remember, you can’t make course corrections if you don’t know what course you’re on.  Repeatable, sustainable innovation practice gives you the tools to plot the course to value creation and make the mid-course adjustments that are part of innovation.

Reasons To Block Innovation

“Keep your friends close, and keep your enemies closer.” – Sun-Tzu

The momentum behind innovation continues to build at companies around the globe.  Everywhere I go, I hear and see great things about new initiatives and executive commitment to innovation as organizations chart their course through the choppy waters of global economic turmoil to the smooth waters of success.

Yet despite this trend, you don’t have to look far to find individuals who are not on board with the program.  These are the innovation detractors—people who are more focused on their own agenda and don’t care if the corporate innovation and business goals are casualties along the way.  These individuals are usually lurking in the background working quietly to undermine the change in the wind in order to protect their private interests.  But occasionally, they step out and reveal their true nature.

Leveraging knowledge to drive the identification and synthesis of new solutions to innovation challenges is fundamental to a strong innovation program.  Yet there are those who would limit the company’s vision in order to protect their own.  I recently had a Director of Knowledge Management request that we not show our innovation technology to his company's engineers because it was setting expectation with his knowledge workers that he was not able to meet with his current solutions.

There are identifiable innovation skills and best practices.  Equip your workers with these skills, and your innovation workers will become more productive.  But I have heard R&D managers asking to short cut training on innovation skills so as to not take too much time away from engineers.  If you don’t invest in your people, you can’t expect them to deliver to their maximum potential.

One challenge many companies must grapple with is ensuring their freedom to operate once they have selected an innovation path.  At times, a company may run into a competitive piece of IP just as they are ready to go to market.  What then?  We equip our clients with a specific technique for patent busting that allows them to find alternative, non-infringing methods to achieve their objective.  Following this method also provides them with documentation to substantiate the non-infringing nature of their solution.  Sounds pretty useful, eh?  Well, I have heard internal corporate IP attorneys state they didn’t want their engineers to have access to this method.

These are some examples of resistance to innovation that I have seen at some organizations.  What have you seen?  Do you know who are the enemies of innovation in your organization?

Leveraging Institutional Wisdom Poll Closing Soon

One of the biggest worries I hear from different organizations is the concern over the loss of institutional memory as we continue through the largest generational turnover our businesses have every experienced.  Across the globe, companies are faced with the prospect of their most senior contributors retiring and taking valuable implicit knowledge with them.

It is this trend and its implications for innovation capability that led to our current Innovating To Win poll question.  What initiatives are your organization using to manage the outflow of corporate knowledge cause by generational turnover?

If you haven’t weighed in on this very strategic topic, please take a moment to do so now using the poll widget in the lefthand sidebar.  This poll closes this Friday, July 10th.