Innovation & Creativity Model ©2006 Dave Pollard & Meeting of Minds
(see explanation at end of this article)
The Doblin Group, whose model of the Ten Types of Innovation I've described before, has written an interesting article on eight ways innovation programs can go off the rails. They are:
- No shared understanding of what innovation is, how it works, how to achieve it.
- No clear innovation process, or at least none that works routinely and reliably.
- No clear diagnosis of where and how to find innovation opportunities, and how best to leverage existing strengths.
- No stated innovation mission that will open up new possibilities and inspire talented teams.
- No promising innovation projects -- specific high potential initiatives that seem like winners.
- Limited experience or expertise in running innovation projects.
- Few deep insights about unmet customer needs, especially of the kind innovators can use.
- Difficulty choosing the right concepts and the right number of concepts for development.
This
is a very wise list -- I have seen companies' innovation programs fail
for all of these reasons. When we advise clients on innovation, we
first come to agreement on what innovation is (or, in some cases, show
them what innovation is, by taking them to visit a highly innovative
company), and lay out and teach them an innovation process that they
can make a continuous part of their organization's way of operating.
Probably
the hardest step is showing clients where and how to find innovation
opportunities. A combination of (existing and potential) customer
visits (using 'cultural anthropology'
observation techniques), visits to companies in other industries that
have initiated innovations that might be applied to our client by
analogy, and secondary (online) research including a continuous environmental scan, can be helpful in surfacing such opportunities, and the "where to look" checklists
of Drucker, Porter and Christensen are also useful. Nevertheless, it
takes a certain kind of mind to be able to perceive truly innovative
possibilities from such a broad range of data. Perhaps this is why
innovation consultants often end up doing 'double duty' as subject
matter experts as well -- actually coming up with many of the
opportunities for their clients themselves, despite having vainly tried
to teach their clients how to do so for themselves.
In my
experience, only two factors will normally cause organizations to
establish a compelling and well-articulated innovation mission: an
urgent need to do so (financial difficulty or a serious competitive
threat), or exceptionally visionary leadership (a CEO who sees the
value of continuous innovation even though the company is already doing
well).
A lack of good innovation projects can reflect either a lack of skill (or effort) identifying opportunities, or a lack of skill qualifying
those opportunities. Qualifying opportunities requires a combination of
creative and critical skills to explore, evolve and think through each
opportunity -- separating the most promising from the rest, combining
several opportunities into one or two that really create a novel and
valuable customer experience, and getting past incremental thinking and
premature 'black-hat' thinking to identify prospects that are truly
bold and innovative.
Obstacles 6 & 8 on the list above are
often connected. Innovation takes a significant time investment, and
also requires a willingness to tackle resistance in the organization --
from those who are threatened by innovation, those who see innovation
projects as detracting from incremental continuous improvement efforts
and day-to-day process improvement and problem-solving activities, and
those who see innovation projects cannibalizing R&D budgets that
could otherwise be spent enhancing existing products and services. This
is why innovation often needs to be carried out by a separate incubator
or entity of the organization, free from turf and budget wars. And once
the opportunities have been identified and fleshed out, there needs to
be a rigorous process to assess the economics, feasibility, and
strategic and cultural fit of each idea, and then to test, pilot and
scale each idea, so that ideas that are not viable or suitable are
'failed' early and inexpensively.
A lack of insights about unmet
customer needs (needs of both existing and potential customers)
suggests that the organization is either not spending enough 'face
time' out with customers (over-relying instead on secondary, in-office
customer information like help line data and surveys), or not paying
attention (observing, interviewing and listening) when they do spend
that 'face time' (and in the process, assuming, usually incorrectly,
that they know what customers need). If the organization is already
struggling when it initiates its innovation program, this shortage of
'face time' can be hard to overcome, since employees may be so busy
'fighting fires' that they just don't have time to spend identifying
unmet customer needs. Or, at the opposite extreme, they may be so
customer focused that customers come to see them solely as providers of
what they currently do well, to the point that both they and their
customers become 'blind' to unmet needs that the organization might be
able to address with a bit of innovative effort.
It's important
for companies embarking on innovation programs, and their advisors, to
be aware of and alert for these eight innovation 'traps', and how to
deal with them when they arise.
A note on the charts above:
Over the past couple of years on this weblog I've introduced several
models of innovation, reflecting my experience and evolving thinking on
the subject. I thought it was time for me to integrate them into a
single model, which I've done above. The top part, the organizational
innovation model, shows the six steps in any organization's innovation
process, and within the 'honeycomb' the activities that go on
continuously throughout all six steps of the process (including
activities such as environmental scanning). It also shows the
importance of outreach to customers (especially the most perceptive,
'pathfinder' customers), co-workers and communities (i.e. everyone
affected by, and worth involving in, the process) at each of the six
steps (including involving them in 'thinking ahead' programs, cultural
anthropology and tapping 'the wisdom of crowds as appropriate). It's a
generic model that can apply to organizations large or small, public or
private, innovating in separate 'incubators' or as part of integrated
operations. I'll be writing more on this model in the weeks to come,
especially as it relates to innovation programs in small,
entrepreneurial organizations.
The lower part of the chart, the
personal creativity, is likewise a synthesis of several articles and
models I've presented recently. I thank Bengt
Järrehult and the authors of Presence, whose personal creativity cycle and U-model
respectively got me thinking about this subject and how it interrelates
with group innovation. The above model also incorporates my twenty
learning/discovery capacities of re-becoming indigenous,
because it occurred to me that those capacities are substantially about
enabling personal creativity, something indigenous creatures seem to
have in abundance. This process also breaks down into six steps, with
the centering activity of self-awareness prevailing throughout the six
steps, and another set of activities (shown on the periphery of the
lower part of the chart) representing the activities each individual
undertakes to involve others in each step of the personal creativity
process. To the extent these 'others' are also the customers,
co-workers and communities of the organizations in which we work, this
model I think elegantly dovetails with the organizational innovation
model above it. More on this, as well, in the weeks to come. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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