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THE INNOVATION FAMINE

Todd Dewett, Ph.D.

Most companies love to talk smack.  Innovation this, innovation that.  Of course, the proof is in the pudding.  Think about your current and former employers – what was the evidence supporting a genuine love of innovation?  Be honest.  I’ve spent a lot of time inside organizations speaking with leaders and the reality is not nearly as interesting as the hype.  We are hungry for innovation, yet the famine persists.  There is no shortage of reasons why, but a few are particularly important.  Here are three that you and your team need to start talking about immediately.

Too much incremental innovation, not enough audacious innovation.

For a variety of reasons we cling to what we did yesterday as the primary foundation of what we’ll do tomorrow.  Not bad logic.  The results are often quite good.  Having said that, do we really need several hundred flavors of coffee or thousands of flavors of toothpaste?  I understand the need to protect and build the brand, but don’t stop dreaming.  Here’s why.  Incremental improvements, line extensions, etc., will never help you develop the new ways of thinking, new methods and processes, or the new relationships and partnerships required for breakthrough innovation – innovation that cements your role as a leader in the market.  It’s simple.  Without an occasional audacious goal, your likelihood of achieving audacious results is very low.

No top dog to coordinate innovation efforts.

What is your corporate ROI on innovation dollars?  Which ideas, processes, or technologies need to be cross fertilized across groups or units?  Unfortunately there are usually knowable answers to questions such as these – but they go unanswered.  The reason?  The age old “silo” mentality still dominates organizational life.  Well meaning unit or functional leaders pursue their own goals in a myopic misadventure resulting in lost potential for the overall organization.  The answer?  If you truly value innovation, put someone in charge of innovation organization-wide.  They need experience, credibility and the power to act.  Otherwise you’re wasting your time.  First, this person is in charge of collecting relevant innovation project data for top line reporting and the measurement of some type of ROI.  Next, they must disseminate what has been learned down through the ranks and across unit lines.  Finally, they bridge internal and external boundaries to find best practices and create new relationships.  Ultimately, this person keeps an innovation scorecard that anyone in the organization can use to see where innovative dollars are going and how innovation is being advanced throughout the entire organization.

Typical lower and midlevel leaders’ behaviors simply don’t match the innovation rhetoric.

Bottom line.  When a mid-level leader sees the not so pretty results of some new product experiment (or attempted process tweak, name your flavor of innovation), how do they react, on average?  The most common response to mediocre or poor outcomes resulting from attempts to experiment and innovate is to negatively evaluate the people responsible.  This is one of the biggest fundamental problems with creating innovation.  All innovation – every last innovative outcome ever achieved by any organization ever – is the product of a process:  a process of fits and starts, trials and errors, time spent experimenting and learning.  All great outcomes start out as half baked ideas.  World class organizations see messy results for what they are – awesome learning moments that allow us to move one step closer to cool innovative outcomes, not mistakes to be punished.

Let me challenge you:  if your organization gave innovation efforts half the respect it gives to the onerous HR policy book, imagine the breakthroughs you would experience!