If there is one concept that seems to bamboozle the management theorists and practitioners the world over then defining “Innovation” has to be it. I’ve sat through all manner of conferences and seminars that have approached the subject from every conceivable perspective.
My (personal) definition of innovation, in a business context, is simply applying the creative process to working through key challenges and opportunities. This may be bringing a new product to market, winning a milestone deal, mounting a successful rearguard action to stave off bankruptcy or just battening down the hatches as an economic storm approaches.
In this simplistic view, one of the great joys of running a business is that the world throws up a new set of challenges every Monday morning and most days in between. The art of management is working with your team to absorb, adapt and over-come. Something I’ve always done as a manager is to set my team a “challenge for the week”. It’s inevitably something small but fun; anything from “kill the Thomson-Infodyne deal” to “source 40 copies of Good to Great by tomorrow morning”. In general, core objectives should only be set or revisited once a quarter; the ‘challenge for the week’ keeps things interesting.
It follows that the first thing any executive must do to foster innovation is to set the starting context for their team; i.e.:
(i) Define and communicate the ‘strategic direction’ for the company (i.e. where are we all trying to get to).
(ii) Highlight the top three to four key obstacles that must be worked through to get there.
Clear understanding of the goal and the impediments allows them to apply the creative energy required to deliver!
From my perspective, 90% of the battle is firstly, getting everyone in the team to understand the strategic direction and the top areas of focus. Once that’s achieved it they must be given enough latitude to get on with the task in hand (simply put, it’s about getting out of their way).
I can’t understate the importance of getting these two things right. As an analogy, consider a company as a sports team training for the Olympics. Any innovation campaign without direction is like asking the team to train for the Olympics without telling them what event they’ll be competing in, never mind what the key challenges are or who the competition is; will it be the 100m sprint, water polo, or Sumo?
My final tip for sparking innovation is to measure key attributes of the business or product and benchmark against the competition. W. Edwards Deming said “you can expect what you inspect” so know what determines success, look for it, let creativity and innovation flourish and celebrate it when it comes!
The key characteristics to benchmark will follow from the business model and context, and so will be different from company to company. However, some general ones apply more often than not; relative growth and customer acquisition rates, cost, margin, geographical reach or key product characteristics.
When I sat down to write this post my intention was to describe an innovation system and philosophy we used very successfully in the past. We’ll post this at some point over the next few months.