Posts

The Discipline of Innovation – Choosing an Approach

/0 Comments/in /by

There was the following question on Quora today:

Many Innovation strategies could prove effective, including Producer Innovation, Open Innovation, [Lead] End-User Innovation, Employee-Driven Innovation, Combinatorial Innovation, Accidental Innovation, and even Imitation. How does one optimize the innovation mix?

Here was my response:

Indeed there are many approaches to Innovation such as you have listed here, but I can safely say, that they were not all successful for those who tried them (the failures are never documented), and there is no mention of the context in which they were successful.

If you are looking to develop an Innovation Strategy, I would suggest you spend considerable time and energy on understanding your own context well. I will not elaborate here on what understanding your context means, other than looking at internal and external factors that prevail and determine your strategic priorities.

What is the nature of innovation that is appropriate for you? Do you need to consider Business Model Innovation, Service/Product Innovation or, Process Innovation – which aspect of your enterprise are you focused on or needs attention. I am assuming you are not looking to create conditions and wait for emergent innovation to happen, but a deliberate approach to addressing strategic priorities.

Innovative Capability and Cognitive Excellence

/0 Comments/in /by

Innovation is on everyone’s mind these days, and there are just as many opinions on how to become innovative. I was just reading an article on the Technology Review Blog – Four Principles for crafting your Innovation Strategy.

The four principles attributed to Joseph Schumpeter, author of the concept of Creative Destruction, are:

“Think big, start small, fail quickly, scale fast”,

The article goes on to describe the experience of the Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings, about how he experimented with a number of business models early on, killing those that were not effective, always guided by a ‘grand vision’ of what he envisages was possible. The article also comments that enterprises do not have a good process to emulate what Hastings did.

That comment got me thinking, easier said than done. What exactly is the capability that can discern what is a worthwhile trail to follow, and, when it does conduct experiments, which of those to ‘nip in the bud’ and which ones to encourage.

The example of Hastings as an innovator, while remarkable, is still the story of one brilliant mind. A lot has been written about the attributes of an individual innovator – the curiosity, the vision, the ability to take risk, the persistence and so on. Most of these processes in an enterprise are collectively managed. The challenge enterprises face is to replicate these very capabilities as a collective entity. And, it is there I believe that it falters.

On the one hand, the enterprise needs a well-honed ability to quickly spot important emerging trends and in particular the confluence of trends that will likely have a significant and interesting impact on its own business models and trajectory. Such an ability would in some cases lead to the ‘grand vision’ that Hastings enjoyed. If it is shared widely enough, it could become the conviction and generate the commitment to provide consistent guidance in the course of its experimentation and initial faltering steps. I see this competence as “Cognitive Excellence”.

Of course, we know that it is not enough to have insight and vision, but an organization then needs the ‘character’, the gumption to take risks and the persistence to work on the idea till it can make it work, and once again, ‘cognitive excellence’, to recognize when a pursuit needs to be abandoned.

So while we admire the abilities of people like Hastings, the urgent work in front of us as enterprises, is to practice and develop a keen sense to identify the big opportunity and to spot early when ones experiments are not on track to lead to the vision.

MIT and the art of innovation

/0 Comments/in /by

March 8, 2013

The title of my post takes from an articlein the Economist. When I saw the post in my Facebook newsfeed, I thought I was going to get some insight into what MIT had discovered were the secrets to innovation. The article begins with this quote by Susan Hockfield, the president of MIT.

“You start with some very bright people, let them hang out with other very bright people and allow their imaginations to roam,”

You might think you are going to be given some insight into the processes which have given the institution such a remarkable track record. As it turns out the article is primarily about an exhibition at the MIT museum that is part of the Institute’s 150th anniversary celebrations. You do not really get any insight into what MIT has discovered about innovation.

Perhaps the one major point I would take away was that MIT was involved or tasked with some real problems, in the process of addressing which its engineers and scientists came up with some interesting and often transformational innovations.

In that same context, it does help to be connected locally, such as MIT being connected with the city of Boston, which gave it some interesting challenges to work with. Perhaps I will go check out the exhibition as well.

Does that perhaps imply, that being local and what that brings in terms of relationships with people might contribute in some way to being able to take on and solve big problems?