InnovationasUsual

• Highlights
  • Established companies require a different kind of innovation: they need a culture in which creativity is part of the corporate ecosystem. The key to building a creative culture is not to declare war on systems, processes, and policies, but to embrace and redesign them so they support and actively enhance innovative behavior.
  • Your primary job as a leader is not to innovate; it is to become an innovation architect, creating a work environment that helps your people engage in the key innovation behaviors as part of their daily work.
  • Similarly, by promoting a mix of responsible experimentation and frequent feedback sessions, innovation architects must help people tweak their ideas and work on bringing them to life rapidly.
  • Most ideas aren’t in fact invented from scratch, but are instead examples of what University of California professor Andrew Hargadon calls recombinant innovation—that is, ideas that are pieced together by combining existing bits of knowledge in new ways. Innovation, in other words, is a bit like a puzzle whose pieces are distributed across the world.
  • In other words, managers should not try to create a perpetual state of open minds in their people; it’s just not going to happen. Instead, they should assume and accept that, most of the time, people—including themselves—will have closed minds toward new ideas. Then, they should devise an architectural solution that can help overcome closed minds.
  • Most people associate innovation with the idea of freedom: giving your employees the space and the opportunity to pursue new ideas, free of all constraints. But, in fact, if you are to make innovation happen as part of a daily work environment, you will almost always generate better results if you actively direct and limit people’s search for innovation, making sure they concentrate their creative efforts on something that matters to the business. By providing this guidance, innovation architects create the first keystone behavior: focus.
  • The third and most central idea we offer is about how to achieve that. In short, as a leader, you should not try to change the people you have; rather, you should change the environment they work in, so it becomes easier and more attractive to become an innovator. It is about paving the way for innovators, tweaking the workplace so potential innovators find it easier to take the creative path and become actual innovators. In this sense, we use the term “innovation architect” for the leader’s role: one who designs, tweaks, and engineers the social and organizational space, building the daily architecture of innovation.
  • When pursuing innovation in a regular workplace, the cardinal rule is this: focus beats freedom. Innovation architects must help their people focus their efforts on what matters.
  • Csikszentmihalyi and Getzels set out to interview hundreds of successful innovators, picking them from all areas of human endeavor. As they reviewed their findings, they came to a rather surprising conclusion: none of their subjects were particularly skilled at finding solutions to a given problem. What set them apart was something different: they had the ability to see the problem itself in a different way from everybody else. Most people, when faced with a problem, immediately start looking for a solution, just as we do in brainstorm sessions. Csikszentmihalyi and Getzel’s subjects were different. They would instead stop and ask themselves: Why is this a problem? Do we understand this issue correctly?
  • The only way to systematically change behavior is, logically, by way of changing the systems.
  • Innovation architects have to help people test and challenge their ideas constantly, exposing them to frequent feedback and promoting a culture of rapid learning and experimentation.
  • Innovation architects must help create the political space for innovation, paving the way for people to succeed.
  • Intrinsic motivation is great for getting things started. Extrinsic motivation may matter a lot more for getting things finished.
  • Second, our approach focuses on making innovation happen as an integrated part of the daily work flow.
  • First, it emphasizes that being an innovation leader is different from being an innovator yourself.
  • Innovation architects must engineer the decision environment of the people who evaluate ideas.
  • Effectively, this means that you must have your people do two things: Reframe the problem. Have your people define, analyze, and challenge their understanding of the problem or need they are addressing. Test the solution. Have people test and prototype their ideas quickly and repeatedly, doing real-world experiments whenever possible.
  • Ideas are not born perfect. Quite the contrary, first ideas are flawed, and usually, the better the ultimate innovation, the more it will have been modified between the first idea and the final implementation. The way to do this is through tweaking, i.e. a rapid-fire mix of testing and analysis.
  • Instead of generally saying “give us your ideas,” we need to preselect the issues we want the organization to focus on. What is an important strategic problem we are facing? Let’s ask people to look for solutions there.
  • We call this the creative choice, and in a sense, it is the smallest possible building block of innovation: the act of deviating from the norm, stepping away from business as usual for a brief moment.
  • The cardinal rule here is, creativity is a choice.
  • Any leader, via her personal presence, can make people engage in the five keystone behaviors once or twice. But the ultimate challenge is to make people persist in those behaviors, making the behaviors an ingrained part of what people do, even on the days when you are not there to guide and direct their efforts.
  • But the aim of an innovation architect is not just to generate a great new idea or two: it is to create systemic and sustainable innovation, to embed creativity in the DNA of the workplace.
  • When you force people to decide what the tagline on their website should say, using seven words or less—that’s when the conversation starts to become real. Prototyping forces innovators to become super clear on what their product is—and the second you have a prototype, you can show it to potential customers and partners, and start moving forward.
  • “People may fail to be radically creative not because they lack the knowledge but rather because they lack the desire to experience the kind of rejection that radical creativity often brings with it.”
  • The problem is that at the moment when they need their listening skills, they are captives of a stronger, more powerful logic, namely, the one that resides in the architecture of their workplace.
  • To succeed with innovation, you need to adopt a true outside-in perspective, and that starts with getting a detailed, in-depth understanding of what consumers actually do with the 1,440 minutes that their days are comprised of. Without that, you are innovating with a barn-sized blind spot.
  • The great persuader is personal experience. If you want people to change their minds about an idea, often the single best thing you can do is to make them experience it themselves.
  • If they fail to do so and focus exclusively on implementing the first version of their ideas, they can quickly end up running down the wrong path, investing ever more effort in perfecting a solution that targets a wrong or nonexistent problem.
  • Often it is awful, though, because as creativity researchers have found, absent a specific, focused problem statement, people don’t tend to come up with very original or interesting ideas.
  • Second, even with minor tweaks to the workplace, make sure to explain to people why you’re doing it, or better yet, ask them to find ways to do it.
  • Your first step should be to change the way projects are started. One of the best tips is to make sure all projects are launched with a kill switch of some kind, that is, tangible metrics and milestones defining when the project should be put on probation and ultimately shut down.
  • Successful innovations, in other words, are not found; they are developed. One part of this development process is the ongoing improvement of the actual product, service, or process that people are creating. But, crucially, it is not just the solution that tends to develop. What will also change is the understanding of the problem or need that people aim to address with their innovation.
  • By immersing yourself in somebody else’s world, walking in their shoes, and feeling their pain, you start seeing the important nuances of their lives.
  • Have people look for ideas in areas they know and love. Within that, have people look for ideas with potential value to the business.
  • One of the most powerful levers for helping people persist in pursuing an idea is to form a small, close-knit team around it.
  • For the total system to work, you also need to build new organizational routines, processes, and incentive systems around the software platform.
  • There is a big difference between creativity and innovation: because of the need for implementation, innovation tends to involve more hard work.
  • It’s not about implementing the ideas you collect; it is about making sure that the ideas you collect are worth implementing.
  • Expansive values programs are initiated, training programs are run, and hordes of hapless employees are sent to change management courses to “let go of their fear of change.”
  • One of the most underrated creativity tools is the simple act of having more cross-functional meetings.
  • The cardinal rule here is, insight comes from the outside.
  • To expose people to these building blocks of innovation, leaders must help their people connect to outside input.
  • First, explain what reframing is.
  • “I Only Want Ideas That …”
  • Constantinos Markides’s Game-Changing Strategies.
  • By and large, customers will not provide you with original ideas.
  • The only way to determine whether the problem you have been given is the real problem is to dig deeper, ask questions, and get the facts. A little skepticism early on in the problem-solving process could save you a lot of frustration further down the road.
  • The reality is that innovation can be personally rewarding in many ways, but a daylong feel-good joyride it is not. Quite the contrary, every successful innovation project we have been involved in has featured not just fun, but also criticism, confrontation, frustration, and occasional verbal fights.
  • When working in an organization, there is no avoiding the reality of corporate politics; like it or not, stealthstorming rules. * A remarkably large chunk of an innovator’s time is spent dealing with various stakeholders, employing a mix of charm and organizational savvy to make ideas happen.
  • “Success depends on persuading hundreds or thousands of groups and individuals to change the way they work, a transformation people will accept only if they can be persuaded to think differently about their jobs. In effect, CEOs must alter the mind-sets of their employees—no easy task.
  • The role of the innovation architect is not to find these pieces, but to create an architecture of insight—that is, an infrastructure of spaces, places, and connections—that enables people to encounter them. You need, in brief, to build creative spaces into the weave of the workplace.
  • Also, research by Tanya Menon and Jeffrey Pfeffer suggests that as individuals, managers are often biased against using internal ideas, among other reasons, because learning from their own people confers less status on the managers, compared to sourcing new ideas from the outside.
  • Processes like the Five Whys and root cause analysis can be useful tools for exploring and reframing a problem. Remember though that the point is not necessarily to find one true root cause; rather, make people use the tools to develop alternative perspectives.
  • Especially in the early stages, when the innovation will be rough and undefined, buying into the idea is equally an emotional choice and a social choice. Leaders need to make people work on the narrative of their idea. This is where the power of storytelling comes in.
  • In short, this book is about getting to what you could call innovation as usual: a state where your regular employees, in regular jobs like finance, marketing, sales, or operations, make innovation happen as a part of what they do every day.
  • First of all, people are not looking for ideas; they are looking for problems. By listening to the frustrations of clients and, more importantly, examining the way they do things, the shortcuts they take and the pain points they encounter, your people will start to notice new opportunities.
  • This means that, as an innovation architect, you must figure out if your company has such a pipeline or escape hatch for disruptive ideas, and if your people know it is there. In case you don’t have a pipeline for disruptive ideas, creating one can be very simple.
  • J. P. Guilford unofficially launched the field of creativity studies in a famous 1950 lecture, research into creative processes has repeatedly established that you often get better and more original ideas if you put some kind of constraints or limitations on people’s ideas, instead of giving them complete freedom.
  • As Glenn Rogers’s story highlights, when leaders direct the search for innovation to new areas, it can create extraordinary results. This is something innovation architects can do deliberately. The choice of focus area for innovation can be thought of as a searchlight that the leader decides where to point.
  • Push people to find sponsors early in the process.
  • Prehype’s most remarkable trait is its core offering: it helps clients create new start-ups in a few months, using the client’s own people and ideas. What Prehype adds to that mix are the structures, processes, and support systems necessary to innovate rapidly and successfully, including the strong emphasis on prototyping.
  • To the person who gets them, all ideas are divine in their perfection. But the dispassionate and somewhat unpleasant reality is that most ideas are bad ideas, and that makes it necessary for companies to master the discipline of filtering ideas, selecting which to invest in and which to discard.
  • Finally, focus should not be confused with putting all your bets in a single area. By having different focus areas for different groups, leaders can create a small portfolio of bets, spreading the risk and increasing the likelihood of success.
  • In all that time, there was literally nothing that prevented the researchers at Lonza from identifying the opportunity. Nothing, that is, except the lack of a leader with a clear strategy for what he wanted his people to achieve—and the understanding that when it comes to innovation, focus often beats freedom.
  • Clarify the objective: what are we trying to achieve? Define the sandbox: what are the limits of the search?
  • The choice architecture, as we use the term here, is all the external, systemic factors that influence people’s behavior at work: things like systems and structures, processes and places, strategies and policies, and even shared habits and routines.
  • What’s more fascinating is that studies of human behavior have shown that people often are simply fundamentally unaware of the real reasons for their actions, yet if asked, they will still fabricate a reason (and believe in it).
  • It solved a consumer pain point that had been poorly served for years, if not decades; it did so by using the world’s oldest technology, the wheel, and it helped its creator make a killing in the market.
  • Simply put, if people don’t know where to start or what to aim for, chances are they won’t start at all, but will instead turn their attention to something more tangible, such as doing business as usual.