Innovating To Win

Why Companies Need Pervasive Innovation

It’s hard to keep up with all the articles on innovation these days.  There are so many outlets now where people are volunteering their experience and advice.  A lot of the advice is quiet good.  But, every now and then an article appears that assaults the senses like fingernails against a blackboard.  Such is the case with “Why Companies Need Less Innovation,” by Pat Lencioni which appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek.  I feel sorry for any company that takes this advice seriously.

In this article, the author begins with a very reasonable observation.  Many companies do a great job of talking up innovation, and then disenfranchise workers by not doing what is needed to establish a productive and sustainable innovation culture.  This is a horrible mistake that many executives make.  Simply proclaiming that your company is building an innovation culture doesn’t make it so.

Unfortunately, the article takes a very wrong turn.  Lencioni suggests that if workers are innovating, the result will be chaos.  What tripe!  Does Lencioni really misunderstand innovation so much as to equate innovation with workers gone wild abandoning their mission and acting on impulse?  One hopes not, yet this is the message that comes through.  Lencioni goes on to suggest that innovation should be the sole domain of the leadership team.

It is well understood that the ivory tower approach to innovation is a failed model.  The leadership team doesn’t have the full perspective to be the sole contributors to the process.  Yes, the leadership does have the best understanding of the company’s business needs and objectives.  And their position gives them a perspective that the rank and file employees can’t share.  But there are too many proof points that teach us that executives acting in such an insular manor are detached from the practical realities that the workers see every day.  There are equally many examples of companies benefiting greatly from worker led innovation.

The leadership needs to play an active role in the innovation process, and as Lencioni rightly points out, they need to set the innovation agenda and ensure alignment and execution.  However, it is a grave mistake to exclude the workforce from the innovation process.

Worried that innovating workers will cause disruption?  Don’t be.  Innovating doesn’t mean doing whatever strikes your fancy.  For rank and file workers, it means thinking about your job as you do it.  Asking yourself questions about what’s working and what’s not working.  If something’s not working, what could be done to correct it?  If something is working, could it be better?  These thoughts and analysis must then be given a path through the company’s innovation process so that positive change can be initiated.

Will every worker contribute a ton of ideas?  No.  But, building a constructive process to tap into the collective wisdom of the organization will yield strong benefits and fuel innovation.  It will not erode execution. Quite the contrary, it will lead to higher levels of execution.  As a senior manager, I will choose thinking workers over mindless robots every time.

Bottom line… Execution, passion, and focus are not in conflict with innovation.  Successful innovation requires brilliant innovation; winning business execution requires continuous innovation.

In Defense of Improvement

A colleague pointed out a post by Patrick Lefler that appeared on Chuck Frey’s Innovation Tools site this week.  In this article, Patrick proclaims that improvement is not innovation.  Of course, in the purest sense, the author is correct.  While all innovation seeks to deliver an improvement, not all improvements are innovative.  But, there is a very important aspect of improvement that, in his fervor to make his point, Patrick has ignored.

Coincidentally, I presented a webinar just yesterday on the topic of harnessing innovation creativity to drive corporate value.  One of the key points I touched on was the importance of incremental innovation.  Yes, incremental innovation is a good and necessary part of building a sustainable culture and environment for continuous innovation.

Breakthrough innovation, incremental innovation, minor improvement—these are all points on a continuum of value creating solution generation.  Incremental innovation is very beneficial to an organization trying to develop the core competence needed to support a high-performance innovation system.  Specifically, incremental innovation delivers both short and long term benefits.  In the short term, immediate business benefits can be realized—extended revenue life of a product, increased market share, better contribution to margin, etc.  In the long term, incremental innovation provides a low risk platform to hone the basic innovation skills needed for successful, repeatable breakthrough innovation practice.

This last point, honing basic innovation skills, is too often overlooked.  Most organizations lack these basic skills and the knowledge of innovation best practices.  These skills must be developed and practiced constantly.  Even seasoned innovation workers should take a page from Basketball legend Larry Bird’s play book.  Larry was well known for his work ethic and diligence in maintaining his skills.  He would arrive for a game hours before anyone else and warm up by taking hundreds of practice shots.

Efforts to improve, even modest ones, are opportunities to practice innovation thinking and skills.  The adept application of innovation practices can move a change further along the continuum of novelty and value creation so that what might have been a minor improvement becomes an incremental innovation that creates strong competitive differentiation.

So while Patrick is correct in the assertion that simple improvements are not innovations, one should not eschew incremental achievements.  In fact sometimes the road to breakthrough innovations is paved a brick at a time.  In my own research team where we are constantly pushing the limits and redefining the concept of the possible in the area of applied computational linguistics, we often use the expression “step by step” to describe the path to innovation success.

Of course, it’s important to remember that you must be constantly trying to reach further up the novelty-value ladder in order to find the breakthroughs that will provide you optimal market position.  But don’t forget to embrace incremental innovation, too.  It’s a good thing.

Prepare Your Innovation Elevator Pitch

Yesterday, an article appeared on Blogging Innovation by Roy Luebke titled “What to Tell the CEO About Innovation.”  Roy goes on to posit what he would say to a CEO about innovation if given just a few moments of the CEO’s attention.

I suspect that Roy’s CEO will be taking a nap about 10 seconds into Roy’s monologue.   Like a lot of innovation practitioners, Roy has not adequately considered how to deliver that initial innovation message to the CEO. 

It strikes me as odd that this is such a common issue.  After all, you wouldn’t dream of introducing a new innovation to the market without understanding the opportunity space.  What is it that your customer actually wants and needs?  How will they feel the impact of your innovation?  Why will they choose your answer to their needs over other available options?  How do you communicate the value of your solution to the client in a way that will resonate with them?  Etc., etc., etc.

Yet time and time again, innovation champions forget that the CEO is an internal customer of innovation.  In the same way that they need to understand the customers who will use innovations, they need to understand the internal customers of innovation.  What’s important to the CEO?  What business imperatives are top of mind?  What are the corporate goals around attainment of revenue growth, market share, and profitability?  What board directives does he need to satisfy?  From where does the CEO perceive the greatest threats on the horizon to be coming?  Which markets look like they are waxing or waning? Etc., etc., etc.

Roy’s message will fail because it is too ethereal and the CEO isn’t going to make a connection to it.  Don’t squander your opportunity to make the innovation elevator pitch.  Plan for it.  Do you homework and understand what’s going to strike a chord with your CEO.  Frame your pitch around the CEO’s agenda and make clear and compelling statements that make it evident that innovation is a vital part of the solution the company needs. 

Even a pro-innovation CEO may not receive your message well if you fail to do this.  After all, the planning and execution of an innovation initiative requires time and money—the two most scarce and valuable resources the CEO has to work with.  You are competing for these resources, and it’s up to you to deliver the compelling value proposition that will allow the CEO to choose innovation over the other available strategies.

Innovation Roadblocks

I was talking to a senior level contributor in a company well known for its innovation capabilities.  He’s responsible for looking at ways to identify where knowledge exists within the human capital of the organization and figuring out ways to leverage that knowledge map for the benefit of the company.  His charter really sounds like a good way to take a strong innovation culture to the next level of performance.

As we were talking, he told me that he had struggled finding adopters of his findings in the company.  The people he talked to felt they already knew how to innovate and therefore weren’t that interested in exploring his ideas.  He was understandably frustrated.

As we talked, I explained to him some of the things my team had done recently in the areas of enabling the democratization of innovation and leveraging tribal knowledge through automatic expertise identification and personnel profile mapping.  Of course, this was right in the midst of his area of interest.  He said he wished he had access to this technology for his work.  Yet, when I asked if there some way we could partner to bring a powerful innovation accelerator to his company, the conversation took on a very different tone.

It wasn’t long before the truth emerged.  His interest wasn’t actually in bringing higher performance innovation to his organization at all.  He explained that if he was successful in deploying a combined solution in his company, it would be less likely that the company would allow him to start his own venture based on the work he had done while working at the company.

This was an interesting exchange in that it reveals the complexity that can underlie innovation barriers.  While this person had initially attributed the lack of interest in organization take up of his research findings to corporate hubris, it was clear that his own personal agenda was the major factor.  He didn’t actually want to succeed on the job because he perceived an opportunity for personal gain if he didn’t.  Yes, he had hit some internal resistance, but how motivated was he to actually overcome this obstacle?

This raises some interesting points for managers and innovation practitioners alike.  For the manager, it is important to ensure that employees who bring forward ideas feel their ideas are given real consideration.  Also, never create systems that incent employees to withhold the value of their work from the company.

For practitioners, a key lesson is to be aware that some people will have agendas that are not aligned with the organization’s goals.  Be on the lookout for these individual as they may be silent opponents of innovation.  Also, look in the mirror.  Are your motives aligned with the company’s objectives?  If not, why not?  If you can’t get aligned, you may be in the wrong position.