Innovation, this time it's personal

ooooh curvey!

I’ve been thinking about innovation today. It’s a hot potato for some people and a “tick-in-the-box-next!” question for others. Most of the procurements I see still have some demand for you to illustrate and even enumerate your approach to innovation and what they can expect for their innovation dollars. But what do we mean when se say innovation? How does it help us and our clients?

"An important distinction is normally made between invention and innovation. Invention is the first occurrence of an idea for a new product or process, while innovation is the first attempt to carry it out into practice" Fagerberg, Jan; (2004). "Innovation: A Guide to the Literature”

This quote outlines the academic view that innovation happens when someone uses an idea, an invention or a discovery to change how they view the world, how their business and processes work and how they organise their businesses and lives. In this view innovation occurs whether or not the act of innovating succeeds in generating value for its enthusiasts and can be summarised as the act of moving an idea from the theoretical to the practical. I don’t like this view, whilst I recognise the abstract worth of pure innovation and the sheer fun/excitement of innovation for innovations sake (all change is good said Marshall McLuhan) , I consider innovation to be about  value and as such I’d try to focus effort and planning onto the leveraging of invention to generate value for our clients (or ourselves, or even me) in new ways.

"Innovation is distinct from improvement in that it permeates society and can cause reorganization. It is distinct from problem solving and may cause problems. Thus, in this view, innovation occurs whether it has positive or negative results” Fagerberg, Jan; (2004). "Innovation: A Guide to the Literature”

Also I do not take the view that improvement, problem solving and innovation are distinct efforts. In the context of delivering benefit, I’d aim to leverage innovation to drive improvement and solve problems (simples no?).  

So if it's this easy, why does innovation fail and why do potentially valuable new ideas fizzle out?

The answer isn’t as complex as many people would make out, basically there is a potentially disruptive impact of innovation driven change which you must deal with. Somehow you must develop plans strategies to mitigate the impact of the change and to make sure you get at the value, all of it.

In his latest book, Running the Gauntlet (2011), Jeffrey Hayzlett states that “You think you will have a tough time changing? You’re right… you will fail and things won’t work. It will be messy. Change is easy to say but hard to do”

I think it helps if you stay focused on what it is you are doing. 

What is innovation? 

Innovation is the translation of ideas and discovery into value.

But from that, why do we innovate and why do we innovate hardest in IT? We seem to innovate as direct function of our nature, beyond the cellular level change we share with all life,  from the moment we started to use tools we could innovate. When we learned how to communicate we started to innovate faster. To balance this, potentially damaging innovation is held in check by small-c conservative forces which appear to be a function of the amount of spare capacity in a society, i.e. innovation is risky and dangerous in simple agrarian societies as they have so little spare capacity to absorb failure, it's an investment function. Simply put unless it’s patently obvious to all, the innovation will be ignored unless their is capacity and investment to support it. As we build more capacity and speed up our communications channels we innovate more and faster. 

Innovation is investment plus communications.

Once we have the ability to simulate the effects of innovation, i.e. “what if” then we put the innovation cycle into overdrive. Where we are now is driven by information technology. Information technology has been described as the purest arena for innovation, combining huge flexibility, massive user base, easy access to tools, knowledge and rapid means of propagation. Whilst driving the translation of ideas into value this also creates a great deal of “noise” as thousands of ideas clamour for attention and investment.

How do you recognise value or an “idea whose time has come?”

Well you could use the old hype cycle thingy from Gartner and the like if you like your innovation second hand and second guessed by whose marketing department can really show an analyst a good time or you could wait until things are mainstream and just buy off the shelf, if you like your innovation cold and like playing catch up.

I’d like to think that we’d all be prepared to explore something more agile, something more controlled and something more personal to our needs.

Perhaps you already have a CTO team who are looking at this, perhaps they already have ideas portals and ideas markets and perhaps you have a few wins under your belt and are now hungry for more. But why did the innovations you chose succeed and why did a few fail?

In my opinion, innovation requires ownership and accountability to succeed yet it also needs an environment where failure isn’t terminal and where failing innovations can be quietly put out of their misery whilst lessons are learned from them. I think you learn more from the failures than from your innovative successes and I think the innovations that drive the most value aren’t the ones you set out to test. So I’ll leave you with my final thought for the day, toodle pip!

Innovation is controlled failure in an environment of open, fearless and honest accountability