Innovation is dead, long live innovation (Part Two) The story for bravehearts, rebels, new kids, pioneers and renegades.

A quick recap for those on part one – Innovation’s death was questioned and challenged we put a view out there that people needed to look elsewhere for results. In unpacking the challenge we felt the noise was more about the trendy catch-phrases, excuses and fluffy titles had distracted people from the reality of the hard yards of Innovation to bring the idea to life and making it happen.

The lens is different, long live Innovation  

For the bravehearts and renegades. I paraphrase it’s not a matter of doing the same stuff it’s a matter of doing it differently, it is about seeing things through different vision through another lens. Like all industries the innovation development space has changed and will continue to change. New themes are emerging, learnings are being applied and crowded industry landscapes are being consolidated. The focus of corporate innovation is moving towards nimbleness, partnering with unlikely disruptors and practical back-end implementation, amongst other things.

According to a recent research publication released by Gartner, “The Practises that Deliver the Biggest Bang for your Bimodal Buck” - 5 key practises are consistently delivering the highest improvement in digital performance.  They are also, interestingly, the least adopted. It’s by no means a new message and according to Gartner signifies the pervasive ability of organisations to factor in and execute it. In other words, to make it work. This 2016 CIO survey found that the highest correlation to improved digital performance are driven by the key practices of:

·         Crowdsourcing

·         Differentiated funding

·         Differentiated metrics

·         Working with start-ups and

·         Innovation management

Each of these is not new in themselves, but they are not commonly used across organisations and most probably will be new to you.  The practices have certainly provided business benefits to their champions. The opportunity for Innovation remains on the field with everything to play for.

The big guns are calling it out, then and now.

Back in 1997 American business writer Tom Peter coined the famous phase Innovate or die. It was true then and rings even more true now.  Adam Trisk, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Skylabs calls this out in his article published by Inc, a premier print publication for entrepreneurs, pioneers and business owners, what happens when companies stop thinking about the future.  Being a follower is a perfectly good strategy and one that makes a lot of sense when disruption is forcing an organisation to focus on keeping a sinking boat afloat. But sooner or later it will beg the question for change, for bravery and thinking about the future.  These aren't isolated cases as Steven Denning backs this up, in his Forbes article Why U.S. Firms Are Dying: Failure To Innovate, he writes about a looming innovation crisis at organisations. The message is clear, “in a world in which power in the marketplace has shifted to customers and customers insist on “better, cheaper, faster, smaller, more convenient and more personalized,” failure to give priority to innovation is an organisational death warrant”.

Innovation the reality check – those hard yards and making it happen.

We can continue with the “innovational smoke and mirrors”, proclaiming innovation to be about glamour, glitz and unattainable new technologies and advancements only stumbled upon by the few. Organisations, individuals and consultants alike can act and market as if they were endowed with a special ability to do magic, to predict the future and manage it, doing nothing more but talk and pay marketing bills. Truth is, smoke has a tendency to lift, mirrors are known to reflect reality. We should all be prepared to face the truth when it happens, to answer and take responsibility.  Innovation is not to blame, it is not the root cause of the lack of apparent results.

We can call it innovation or not, remove it from our business language, job titles and processes and remember it as a fad, - or not. We can also decide to blame it on our own inactions and lack of leadership, citing the “worlds dumbest idea” – maximisation of shareholder value as reason. We can point at people, infrastructure, metrics, technology, budgets and other stuff too if we want.

The kingdom and the fairy tale is for us to create

The future is for us to create. For us to do something courageous to get there and to drive it to deliver results. To take responsibility for victory, but it is not about putting innovation on trial.

  

So coming back to our story in part one, in the end the warrior poets and soldiers found a new way to manufacture even cooler, more effective weapons and Innovation won the day. 

Jointly written with Henra Mayer 

Innovation is dead, long live innovation (Part One) A story for bravehearts, rebels, new kids, pioneers and renegades

There once was a management fad called Innovation. It was beautiful and popular and had a certain mystique, maybe magic about it. It attributed certain revolutionary businessmen and women with the Midas touch and was the reason some pretty cool, new baby starlets were born. It certainly got a lot of dinosaurs out of their dark caves of irrelevance and ignited new fire into some old, weary dragons. It was almost like a warrior poet, called upon to save those in danger.

Then one day Innovation went too far. Expected too much. Innovation wanted people to create their own stories too.  It became more and more difficult to sustain the happily ever afters - because according to the Kingdom, that was not the deal. The dinosaurs longed for their familiar caves, the knights blamed innovation for their injuries at war as their new weaponry were not delivering its promised deadly blows and the people of the Kingdom, well they eventually grew tired of the rock stars’ same old, noisy hits accompanied by the usual marketing gimmicks and smoke and mirrors. And so the story became endangered. It received a price on its head. Accusations were thrown. Innovation was blamed, gossiped about and eventually captured. The kingdom arranged a huge fest to give it a fitting farewell. Eulogies were recited, the “Eureka” moments remembered and many soldiers gathered around the round table were huge battle losses were mourned. All agreed, the magic was gone, the battlefield littered and the reality of survival far too pressing to waste any more time on Innovation.

Logic, experience and sanity needed to prevail. The musketeers were sent with word to gather the legal wizards and formulate a defence against the die-hard mutineers. Innovation was put on trial once again.

Get to the heart of it

So here we are – trying to make sense of the arguments by industry experts and respected research publications that we came to trust on the matter. Are we for or against innovation as the industry that we are passionate about, believe in and spent countless hours on building and supporting, is professed to be dying? It has become littered with corpses and phrases that we cannot stomach anymore – like endless write-ups on the “over-use “of the word and deliberate efforts to ban any term innovation related from general business language. It accuses of the fuzziness of innovation output, the strategic difficulty of its execution, the inherent risk, the ever increasing almost spinning speed of change and the sheer hopeless, uncontrollable reality of it all.

Soldiers take responsibility for victory

As a team that has dedicated more than 20 passionate years to the subject matter we feel like warriors. We fight with weaponry that has not delivered the deadly blow, but we know winning is worth fighting for and that it requires taking responsibility for the victory sought. This may make us biased on the topic, as you cannot work in an industry for this amount of time if you do not passionately believe in its ability to deliver.

As soldiers in the industry, this is part one of our observation of the innovation battlefield as we run to the frontline, ready to take responsibility for creating the future of economic growth, sustainability and business longevity, alongside other like-minded bravehearts. 

Innovation is dead

Much has been said about innovation as a management discipline lying on its death bed. Strong opinions and lauded experts are taking turns to point out the challenges with innovation and advise people to look elsewhere for results. One such opinion piece was recently published by one of our learned friends.  One cannot be in the industry and not view many of the arguments made as valid. We have lived it, seen it and have been frustrated by it. There is truth in many statements. About organisations talking the talk but not walking the walk, damage done by me-too, unimaginative fly-by-nights and (respected large consulting houses) – proclaiming expertise and weaving innovation magic wands while making unrealistic promises. Add to this overworked and uninterested employees who cannot handle another item on the to-do list and the throwing around of trendy terms and job titles by managers who hope they can turn a blind eye and don’t have to take responsibility for owning it. Luckily, through it all leadership is busy with more pressing issues, like organisational survival.

The battle in making it happen

Innovation is not about trendy catch-phrases or excuses, it’s about making it happen. Committing to the hard yards, and making sure that you have left nothing on the field. We believe - and judging from what we have seen from renegade entrepreneurs - that it is about 3 things that cannot be separated. The elements of the new, implementation and delivering value – whatever that value means in your context. Innovation is not only about creativity or the process in isolation. It’s about a lot more, like teams and ROI and business cases, about supportive software and results. Steve Jobs defined it once as creativity that ships.

Some have described Innovation Management Systems (IMS’s) as being a systematic gatherer of silly ideas that still gets ignored by management. Maybe we are not brave enough, courageous enough or maybe stability in economic downturns trumps planning for the future. Maybe we became irrelevant to the innovation industry. Can it be that short term gains are still the only lens justifying our work output and that we are too risk averse, reputation proud and overall, too scared to live a life that holds more promise by being part of something great? Or is this perhaps the other challenge with innovation. We talk too much. We are doing it wrong. Are we over complicating innovation instead of just getting on with it?

Innovation Live

All the great stories of history have many chapters and for the bravehearts and renegades amongst you look out for Innovation’s rebirth in the next post, Part 2 of the story, Innovation is dead, long live innovation. We have a view on that!  

Jointly written with Henra Mayer