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Are you responsible for innovation project oversight? Don’t be too dazzled by devices, the real changes taking place in innovation are in mindsets rather than hardware. Sure, technologies are changing the ways we do things, but more importantly the changing ways we do things are altering the innovations that we will come to rely upon. Here are eight telltale signals to be on the lookout for to ensure that your organization’s innovation mindset is keeping up with the times:
- Outside-In not Inside-Out: Everything that matters starts outside of your organization. Be it new ideas, or new competitors, future trends, etc. they all are external to the organization of which you are a part. If the projects that you are working on are not appropriate for where your industry is on its evolving S-curve trajectories, you run the risk of making bad innovation bets. Here’s a hint: if your industry S-curve is not presently somewhere in the middle of its life-cycle, avoid projects which are promising “efficiency” and “productivity”… it’s probably too late for them, and they will doom you to focusing on the present, when you should be looking at the future.
- Experiences not Solutions, Almost all customers, B2C or B2B are judging the entire experience of engaging with you, the solution, or service, or device producer. Their impression of you goes well beyond the purchase decision and forms the basis for whatever comes next in their customer journey. In the future, their expectations will be more about co-creation than “here is what we are offering.” How well do their present experiences working with you predict a future where they see you as a good co-creating partner?
- Daring has returned … how big are your dreams? Space-X, Amazon, The Boring Company, flying cars, life-extension, 5G, these are all about big dreams! The innovative leaders we can all name are no longer modest about the future. It’s the Age of Edison, again. How big are your dreams? Can they carry you and your organization into the future? Can they inspire your colleagues to take chances, think differently? After all, as the great musical innovator Oscar Hammerstein once put it (thanks to @APassion4Jazz) : "You gotta have a dream. If you don't have a dream, how you gonna make a dream come true?"
- Arenas not Industries ..…… Industries are asset-defined, we all know what we mean if we speak about “the steel industry,” or “the automobile industry.” They have well-defined asset patterns; make similar products, in similar ways. Rita McGrath has been a lone voice in the wilderness calling our attention to fact that when customer experience prevails, and business models are the leading form of innovation, then industries are no longer good ways to think about competition. In a world of customer experience primacy, if you are benchmarking against traditional industry peers, you are looking in the wrong place for surprise! When An Conghui of Geely speaks of “The automobile of the future is an intelligent spatial mobility terminal with a high degree of online–offline integration,” he is no longer speaking of the auto industry as we knew it. If you are a hostage to a legacy view of industry, you are making yourself vulnerable to disruptive surprise.
- Experimental: Learning > Knowing and exploring > confirming .. As S-curves shorten, and ruptures take up more of our time than business as usual does, it is important to recognize that learning becomes more important than knowing. How well prepared is your organization, and your colleagues, to learn rather than know? How often does your firm’s expertise slow-down receptivity to change? Or, as Hal Gregersen asks, When was the last time your people were uncomfortable in a professional setting? Is it because they are not putting themselves in positions to encounter new ideas?
- Are your teams fit for purpose? … do your teams fit the context? Polite teams get polite results, which is fine when you are not trying to jump an S-curve. But, when big change is in the offing, politeness is not to your advantage, you need challenge and learning. The next time that you look at a team, judge it by its capacity to do something radically different, and then ask where you are contextually on your arena’s S-curve? Are you prepared to jump, or not? We know a lot more about how teams work today than you see in their corporate application. In particular, Michael Nielsen has pointed out that there is evidence that interdisciplinary work appears to be viewed as more valuable after the fact, but less valuable before. The nature of teams is changing significantly faster than our managerial abilities to deal with them. Teaming ain’t what it used to be! How sophisticated is your organization’s explanation of its team development and deployment?
- Data-driven not Artisanal … no more wizards! Finance entrepreneur Markus Lampinen makes the case that “Unless you are building on real data, you do not know anything.” This is good advice for any type of innovation. Where is the data? All too often, when there is no data, there is also no appetite for experimentation. This is dangerous. Not having data is not sufficient to excuse its absence. Pretotyping and prototyping are made just for this, and should be a normal part of an organization’s work style. Even while we may be revisiting “the age of Edison” when we consider today’s big-dream innovators, this should not be seen as a return to the age of wizards; we need innovation to be demystified, not remain occult.
- Together not Alone … from partnering to ecosystems Because the world is much too complicated for any one organization to have sufficient range of expertise domains, co-creating with others is no longer an option, it is a necessity. To do this, to take down the walls around an organization and let others in, is a leadership challenge, but that is why we need leaders who are explorers. MIT biologist Chris Kaiser illustrated this well when he spoke of the Noble-prize winning molecular biology research of Har Gobind Khorana: “Like the great explorers Frances Drake & Ernest Shackleton who were my heroes growing up, Khorana had the vision & leadership to convince a team to follow him to an unknown place, & he had the supreme confidence that he would know what to do once he got there.” Innovation needs leaders who thrive in the unknown, rather than spend their time searching for confirmation of things that they already know.
Innovation is a more profoundly social phenomenon that we typically recognize. These eight simple questions about how well-prepared your organization's innovation mindset is, turn out not to be about technology at all. They are about how well you can read the competitive situation that you find yourself in, and how suitable your organizational response to that situation is. Leadership is a key attribute to successful innovation, whether our leaders recognize it or not. Simple questions can yield important results in what we innovate on, and how we go about doing it.
