Innovation, why bother?

"Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence." (Abigain Adams, 1780)

 

In 1908, the winning time for the marathon was 2 hours 55 minutes and 18 seconds by Dorando Pietri. You would think with running, there would be a limit to how much the human body could improve yet 100 years later Haile Gebrselassie won Gold with an amazing time of 2 hours, 3 minutes and 59 seconds. That's a staggering improvement in performance.

 

What is more impressive is what happened in the London marathon in 2010. 733 people beat the 1908 Gold medal time! What was once an elite time is now the province of the good club runner. The message is really clear. Today's great is tomorrow's mediocre. Whatever constitutes high performance today will be the norm tomorrow.

 

It's the same in organizations. To do nothing does not mean standing still, relative to others it means going backwards. Not only must we innovate and improve just to stay where we are we must do even more than others to stay ahead of the game.

 

The message is really clear – innovation is not an option.

 

Incremental innovation – what is it?

Innovation is the commercial exploitation of new connections and ideas with the aim of creating value through improving and or developing new products, services and processes. Incremental innovation are those linear improvements to a product, service or process where each innovation can be to some extent predicted from innovations that precede it, for example, the developments that have improved the triage process or the amount of time patients spend in hospital post operation. Incremental innovation builds on the competence of the organization.

 

Incremental innovation is about challenging the status quo. The status quo rests on a series of assumptions that underpin the way things are done. Challenging the assumptions on which a product, process or service rests is the key to beginning to think about new possibilities. In his book "Whatever you think, think the opposite" Paul Arden does this. Arden cites the decision to market the V&A Museum of Arts in London not as a 'Museum of Arts' but as (to paraphrase) 'A great café, with quite a nice museum attached' based on challenging the assumption of what was important when people came into a museum. It turns out that the first thing they want to know is 'where is the toilet' and the second is 'where is the café'. Incremental innovations are also those that are easier to get through the organizational politics and barriers to change.

 

In contrast, radical innovation, also known as discontinuous innovation produces discontinuous change that could not have arisen from what has gone before. Radical innovation requires completely new knowledge. Radical innovations often involve large technological advancements that render the existing products non-competitive or even obsolete. Radical innovation destroys the competence of an organization. Radical innovations are rare, difficult to identify and are often hard to accept.

 

Why most innovation programmes don't work.

Most innovation or creativity programmes make three fundamental mistakes:

1)      Focusing on how to generate new ideas

2)      Focusing on coming up with the big idea

3)      Innovation without focus

 

Mistake 1: Focusing on how to generate new ideas

It was Johh Maynard Keynes who said "The difficulty…lies not in developing new ideas but in escaping from the old ones." Let me illustrate what I mean, when people are asked to brainstorm, they generate loads of ideas, but almost all are constrained by the assumptions they have made either implicitly or explicitly about the way things 'have ' to be.  As Einstein said, the thinking that got you into the problem cannot be the same that get's you out. Therefore the first challenge is to escape the way you think currently. As long as you are certain about the way the world is you will be certain about the solution. True creativity emerges from lack of certainty. History illustrates that not all people learnt this lesson:

 

§  In 1949, Popular Mechanics magazine forecasted a bleak future for computers, stating that, "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." The 1943 Chairman of IBM was even more dubious, commenting, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

 

§  A Western Union internal memo in 1876 stated, "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."

 

§  It's hard for new ideas to get off the ground. "Heavier than air flying machines are impossible."--Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

 

§  "Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value."--Marchal Ferninand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre

 

We free up people's minds through the use of visual illusions that challenge what people think they see and think they understand. This challenges their perception in conjunction with an explanation of how the illusions work enables people to recognize they may be seeing issues only in one way and that there may be a great many alternative perceptions and hence possibilities.

 

Mistake 2: Focusing on coming up with the big idea

The second mistake is looking for the 'big idea'. Truly radical innovations come along once in a blue moon. Even when they emerge they can take decades to get to the point of being usable and even then can still fail. Successful radical innovations are incredibly rare. Radical innovations are not as radical as we think. They appear radical when we get to hear about them, but the journey to success was a series of incremental innovations. It is incremental innovation that affords the best returns for business.

 

Mistake 3: Innovation without focus

Too many workshops hope that by teaching the abstract principles of creativity, delegates will somehow know how to do it for their own issues. In part this is true, however, if the focus is a business issue around which people are expected to innovate not only does it help transfer of learning, it also ensure the workshop delivers a return on investment.

 

The Epiphanies cost effective innovation workshop

This is a one day programme. It can either be used as a 'one-off' programme to help solve a particular business issue or rolled out across a business to drive in an innovative culture into a business.

 

Too often, there is the assumption that a great learning experience can only be delivered in a small group format. This can be an prohibitively expensive way of educating large groups of the workforce. Through the use of excellent presenters and a skilled presentation team the conference format can ensure the lessons are learnt and provide a richer learning experience through bringing together a group of speakers that in a smaller format would be prohibitively expensive.

 

Our solution is to run sessions of up to 200 people in a room. We deliver success through a team approach. A lead presenter delivers the key messages and descriptions of the exercises to everyone. During the small group activity sessions, a team of facilitators work with the smaller groups to help ensure they understand what's expected and to deal with any questions they may have. The facilitators can also identify great examples to be shared with everyone at the conference.

 

There are a number of benefits to this approach:

§          This design brings together the best of small group sessions with the impactful (and cost effective) arena of a large conference.

 

§          Run in this way, savings of 25% or more can be made over 'traditional' small group sessions.

 

§          All the delegates hear the same message and not a version of the same message delivered separately to many smaller groups.

 

§          It is possible to train a many more people in a much shorter space of time.

 

(Of course we can do small group sessions as well.)

 

All of these benefits are an aside to the key return on investment benefit outlined below.

 

The programme journey

The programme journey then is as follows:

 

1)   We begin by having some fun challenging the way people think.

 

2)   Having created instability of thought, we then explain the different types of innovation and why we are focusing on incremental innovation.

 

3)   We then help people understand 'Neophobia'. This is the explanation as to why when people are asked what they want they will tell you radical, different and unusual, but when they choose what to have, they tend to choose what they are familiar and comfortable with. The best example is food flavours. Consumers will tell you they want unusual and interesting flavor combinations . For example, unusual ice cream flavours but what they choose time and time again will be vanilla or chocolate. By understanding neophobia, much can be done to make an innovation easier to implement both within the business and for consumers.

 

4)   With this foundation knowledge banked, we then undertake three innovation exercises. These exercises are beyond simple brainstorming techniques which we assume are known by almost everyone. They are structured exercises that will liberate a wide range of ideas.

 

5)   Using assessment criteria, we help delegates assess which ideas are the best to take forward.

 

6)   Finally we help delegates work out what the next steps are to ensure the ideas generated in the workshop make it back into the workplace.

 

R.O.I.

We believe passionately in delivering a return on investment. We achieve this by doing three things:

 

We ensure we have the right focus. Our programme is more than just about teaching people how to innovate.

 

§  We take a business issue and use this as the focus for innovation. This could be a focus on a specific product for a target market, or it could be on an internal process. We will work with you to make sure we have the right focus. Because we are using a business issue as the medium for learning how to innovate, this drives motivation and understanding.

 

§  We will work out with you beforehand the right assessment criteria for the ideas developed. For example this could be: a) "It must be deliverable within 3 months"; "it cannot cost more than X to implement", "it must use existing technologies". These criteria will enable the best ideas to be taken forward.

 

§  We help people work out the very first steps they need to take to move the idea on from concept developed during the workshop to an operational activity. This helps people make developing the idea part of business as usual and hence more than 'just a nice idea developed during a programme.

 

In running the programme in this way we have helped manufacturers working in the juice and dairy sector develop new market propositions. We have helped senior managers improve the way they are managing projects. We have helped a company improve the quality of their customer seminars.

 

But there's more. Our programmes are highly interactive. We believe people learn best by doing. So we get people to do 'innovation'. In experiencing how to do it during the workshop people realize innovation is simply a business skill that if practiced can become an exceptionally useful tool.