What are you trying to do?
Escape an environmental condition?
Fight some threatening forces?
Make (more) money ?
Find a stellar breakthrough?
What I’d like discuss with you:
• Myths related to innovation as a management practice
• Thoughts and ideas on innovation
Myths surrounding Innovation
1. The case for innovation can be made financially and from theoretical deduction.
2. There is a “clean” solution (a process/a structure/flow) to the challenge of innovation.
3. You get what you pay for, including innovation.
4. There is a (qualitative, manageable) difference between winners and losers.
5. Failure disqualifies an innovation.
Myth 1. The case for innovation
Conversation between an “Innovation Consultant” and an organization who wants to be “more innovative”
Organization : - “We are thinking about making our company more innovative. Can you tell us, however, how we can measure the value innovation creates?”
Consultant: - “Happy to do that. Can you tell me first, please, how you currently measure the value your IT, HR, Legal department, and top management creates annually?”
Organization: -… (They don’t call back.)
Myth 2. There is a “clean” solution
Staff
member(s)
submit an
idea as a
proposal.
Does initial
GC screening
panel accept
proposal?
Does extended
GC panel
accept
proposal?
Proposal is
rejected.
Test and Mature Phase:
Project team addresses
issues raised by
screening panel.
Project is
abandoned
Proposal is
rejected.
Does project
pass through
tollgate
meeting?
Does project
pass through
tollgate
meeting?
Action Lab(s)
Project is
abandoned
Does business
unit want to
commercialize
project?
Project remains
uncommercialized
Project transfers
to business unit.Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
NoNoNoNoNo
Maybe
Myth 3. Pay for innovation
• “If you put too much emphasis on financial rewards, greed takes over.” Leo Roothardt, Shell GameChanger
• “People engage in radical innovation not because they get paid for it, but because they want to.” Gene Meieran, Intel Fellow
• You know The Wright Brothers.
• Do you know Samuel Pierpont Langley ?
Myth 4. You can immediately tell a winner by looking at it
“Many innovators are wrong in 99.99% of cases but when they are right, they are really right.”
The difference between innovative and not-so-innovative people is that the successful ones try more often.
Myth 5. Failure disqualifies
Yes, There are some Bad ideas…
Theory and practice
“The distance between theory and practice is small in theory but large in practice.” (Anonymous)
.
And the answer always is….
How do organizations create value? Essentially…
• By efficient utilization of labor and resources
• By saving on market transactions
• By specializing and taking risks over time
• By sustaining institutions and social structures that make life and work (sometimes) meaningful
• By sustaining complex relationships and investments over time so that innovation can mature
• Any other way you’d like to add…?
Innovation is not enough.
• Innovation as experimentation is relatively well understood.
• Connecting innovation to core business competencies, assets, and infrastructure is not well understood (within many existing organizational contexts).
The Challenge is
GROWTH & R E N E W A L
THE ADAPTIVE CYCLE OF RENEWAL
• Continuous growth requires continuous renewal. It’s the only way to maintain continuity in a discontinuous
world.
And the fuel for renewal is innovation.
Not merely innovation at the margins but:
- deep - strategic innovation
that impacts the core of your business model.
An Innovation Culture First!
1. Is rooted in management communication
2. Is seeking to advance simplicity (this slide is too wordy!)
3. Is theoretically informed, conceptually enlightened and results-oriented with a long term view
4. Is empathetic to would-be innovators
5. Addresses the continuous flux between change, continuity (and more change) in a firm
6. Adds to every employee’s and customer’s understanding of how our firm creates value
Rdy 2 Innov8?
5 really crazy questions 5 really crazy ideas 5 ratings Translation2yourJob
EXER
CIS
E!!!
Oh
Yea
h!!
!