Innovation’s Slow, Painful Death
by Buckley Brinkman
Innovation is dying a slow, painful death in many companies, precisely at the time it is becoming most critical to the success of our organizations. The concept is being starved by the pressure of a difficult economy and the desire of many companies to “hunker down” and wait out this difficult time.
The solution involves creating a system that fosters and develops individual ideas and works them systematically through a system designed to create breakthrough innovation. It starts by defining the innovation you want, encouraging individual participation, and organizing in order to create focus, generate practical initiatives, and unleash the latent energy within the organization. The result will be the innovation necessary to create competitive advantage.
Innovation Defined
Jim Andrew of the Boston Consulting Group defines a continuum with three separate types of innovation: Breakthrough, Expansion, and Maintenance. Breakthrough anchors one end of the continuum, Maintenance the other. Breakthrough innovation involves radical change that creates an entirely new technology or industry. Maintenance innovation uses incremental improvements to create predictable change. In between comes Expansion innovation, an approach that looks to create a new approach to an existing industry.
Start the innovation effort by defining what type of innovation your resources and risk profile can support. Breakthrough innovation is terrific, but risky. The reality is that these efforts fail over 90% of the time. Maintenance innovation is safe, but not likely to create the necessary impact. There are many great definition frameworks. Find one that’s comfortable and use it to align innovation risk and reward.
Build Individual Participation
Innovation is a participation game where smart, energized, and skilled people create great ideas. It’s critical to build the culture and individual skills necessary for innovation to flourish in the organization. Everyone must play.
If everyone must play, then everyone must improve their individual skills. Innovation is hard work and requires constant and continuous improvement. Part of that improvement depends on each member of the organization developing the skills to facilitate the process.
One of the best models for understanding and developing those skills is the framework in Sarah Miller Caldicott’s book, Innovate Like Edison. She explores Edison’s life and his five competencies of innovation: solution-centered mindset, kaleidoscopic thinking, full-spectrum engagement, mastermind collaboration, and super-value creation. These are the five skills Edison used to transform the world. Caldicott explores each of these concepts in some detail and then provides the framework to individually develop each of these skills. The combination of the description and focused practice provide a path to developing individual skills.
Making the process work requires an appreciation for the unusual and unusual talents. One of those talents is the “Free Radical.”
Free Radicals in chemical reactions are extra electrons that facilitate bonding in molecules. When captured in a molecule, they perform a useful function. When left unbound, they can cause damage to healthy cells. Free Radicals in organizations are people with boundless energy, willing to try anything, at almost any cost. They are usually their own worst enemy and, left to their own devices, can cause serious damage.
Then, why are Free Radicals valuable when innovating? They are sources of limitless enthusiasm and have the capacity to energize every player to try near impossible tasks. The organization needs this energy and encouragement to try new ideas and make great things happen.
Ideas also require institutional support in order to reach critical mass. Creating passion without breaking the bank takes a bit of leadership creativity and flexibility. It requires finding simple and inexpensive ways to support passionate ideas, providing seed money, time, and talent to pursue opportunities. The result of these efforts will be a variety of promising initiatives with energetic support.
Organizing for Success
Handled correctly, individual efforts will begin to create viable business opportunities, ready for more extensive pursuit. These opportunities need an organized structure to flourish and grow. Innovation teams provide that structure. The two most critical elements to the organizing that structure are:
- Putting the right people on the innovation effort, including non-traditional roles and personalities that catalyze the effort; and
- Creating a safety zone where ideas can be explored and creative failures are accepted.
Both are essential to creating a successful innovation effort. Most organizations understand the need for cross-functional teams to make breakthroughs possible, but very few understand the personalities required to make great things happen.
Cross functional teams are essential to bring the right talent together in order to effectively create meaningful innovation. Each major constituency – both staff and line – should be represented with people who can make decisions and commit their organizations to immediate action. We have understood the benefits and dynamics of cross functional teams for decades: put smart people on the team and set them up for action.
The new wrinkle with innovation teams is the need for two new roles: Free Radicals and Super Synthesizers. Free Radicals play the same energizing role on innovation teams as they do in the organization. Their enthusiasm and fearlessness infect the team and cause it to aggressively explore new possibilities.
One of the experts on organizing for innovation, Bill Burnett, speaks of the need for Super Synthesizers. These are people who are able to combine different elements of issues and come up with unique solutions. Burnett contends that these people are very difficult to find within the normal corporation. They do not follow the usual rules and are not concerned with individual credit. Instead, they look to find the best solutions and answers – not your usual corporate minion, but critical to the process.
Putting the right members on the team is only half the battle. These teams must also operate in an environment where ideas are freely exchanged and the team can make and learn from mistakes. That means leadership must create a safety zone where these activities can take place without penalty. The team should search for the truth – a solution to a difficult problem. In its quest, the team will make mistakes as it engages everyone’s creativity in new ways. A safety zone makes it possible for that to happen.
Most innovation is not the result of happy accidents. It usually occurs because of a focused effort resulting from talented and energized people generating creative ideas, supported by smart and flexible investments. The best ideas enter a more structured team process that supports and develops those ideas into true innovation that creates sustainable competitive advantage. It’s a formula more companies could use to come out of this recession in a stronger position.
