Strategy is not what it used to be – or what it could be. Innovation is distancing itself from being thought of as just invention. Strategy for many becomes tactics. Innovation becomes adding more products. Strategy is nothing without innovation; innovation is just product development without strategy; the two are strange bedfellows.
We hear the words Strategy and Innovation casually thrown around a lot, “We need an innovation strategy.” Or perhaps, “We need a more innovative strategy” which, of course, is a different animal. But we don’t hear people asking exactly what we mean when we say these things. It’s as if we all agree already on what we mean by strategy and innovation, and that they just fit together automatically.
Only few organizations understand what it means, let alone what it takes to develop a culture of innovation and how to systematically and effectively bring ideas to life in a strategic manner. Many of them don't have the right tool kit or processes. Many just use a standard stage-gate approach borrowed from product development, there are simply too many limitations for stage-gate.
How to win the battle over where to look for ideas, how to link innovation to customer and business value, manage development risks, drive company-wide innovation initiatives and sustain efforts over the long haul are battles that challenge even the most adept leaders. It is pretty complex and not easy to make sense of it. That's why sensemaking is key to innovation. It is the process of moving from situational awareness (both individuals as well as in groups) to share awareness and understanding to collaborative decision-making. It is a socio-cognitive activity directly impacted by the social nature of the exchange and vice-versa. Call it "social-strategy making" Will talk more on this tomorrow.
A lot of design firms are quick to say that design can help solve many types of problem. How? By designing more products? Or designing better products? That's not enough. This is a simplistic way of seeing things. Although designers are better at understanding the relationship between business and user contexts, and finding patterns in seemingly chaotic situations, they lack a system views of all relationships in organizational context.
Innovation is where MFA meets MBA. Innovation brings the intelligence of nature, together with a human's technological and production capabilities, to create products and services that in turn create economic value. . It would be easy to think that innovation is ‘just-add-creativity’ without understanding that we’ve trained generations of MBAs to operate in a command-and-control mode. We have to rethink how organizations discard decades of management orthodoxy, and how to balance traditional management discipline with practical experimentation to produce new, innovative management models.
Business schools are set up as functional silos because they are focused on producing leading research that gets published in academic journals. They delve deeper and deeper into narrow silos. There is little collaborative research across disciplines; integrative creativity simply does not exist. Innovation is the result of taking lots of existing ideas and putting them together in new ways, and generating unexpected results. It’s the “Where else would it work?”
We don’t need more products or more brands. When people think innovation immediately they think about new products. Innovation is about solving bigger problems and driving transformation. How do we make sense of all these complexities? Tomorrow I will be participating “My Half Time Pep Talk for 2009,” a collection of posts about innovation on a variety of blogs, as part of the Board of Innovation’s 24 Hours of Innovation event from 3 am tomorrow. I will write about the three secret weapons of innovation which we use at Idea Couture. You don't hear a lot about this nor they teach them in business schools. Check back tomorrow at 5.25pm EST
24 Hours of Innovation. If you have a topic or additional things you want me to write about, please let me know.
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