Innovation is one of those widely admired characteristics that’s also widely misunderstood.
The admiration is deserved. According to an I-sure-wish-I-could-track-it-down-so-I-wouldn’t-have-to-rely-on-my-memory essay published in The Economist more than a decade ago, quite literally all economic growth throughout history has been the result of technological innovation.
I’m in favor, but the vote is hardly unanimous. George Will, for example, takes the other side of the debate, asserting, “Most improvements make matters worse because most new ideas are regrettable …” If you agree with Mr. Will on this point you might as well skip the rest of this column.
For everyone else:
Innovation is widely misunderstood. The preponderance of what’s written on the subject focuses on a company’s products, the usual point being that companies that fail to innovate end up selling either low-margin commodities or not selling products that have become obsolete as their competitors take advantage of their complacency.
All of which is on target. (Except, of course, for companies that sell products to customers who want actual commodities. When I buy lentils, for example, I don’t want innovation. Just beans.)
It also leaves a lot of opportunity on the table, because every product every company sells depends on a whole lot of work that is, while less visible, every bit as essential to the company’s success.
Which is to say, most businesses have a lot of moving parts, and every one is a potential opportunity to do things better … a potential target for innovation. The question is how to encourage employees to find the opportunities, and, even more important, how not to discourage them once they have.
Jon Lee wrote to suggest this subject and provided a number of worthwhile thoughts on how to encourage new ideas no matter what you’re responsible for managing. Here they are, interspersed with my own, with no attempt to untangle the two:
- New ideas are sketches, not blueprints: Evaluate them based on their promise and potential … and for heaven’s sake, their value … not on whether they have every detail nailed down, and certainly not on what they might end up costing.
- No time, no innovation: The men and women who report to you have full-time jobs already … a point already explored in “Epiphany Half Life,” (KJR, 9/7/2010, so I won’t re-explore it here).
- Proofs of concept aren’t: Proofs, that is. By all means, test new ideas cheaply before investing in them heavily. Just don’t rely too heavily on the results. Proofs of concept should be called “disproofs of concept” because that’s what they’re for. If a proof of concept doesn’t work, the full-tilt boogey almost certainly won’t work either. If it does … proofs of concept take on the simple stuff, which limits your confidence to what’s simple.
- Don’t confuse poor execution with invalid concepts: One of the best ways to kill an idea is to point out that it’s already been tried (“How to kill an idea,” KJR, 8/7/2000). If it didn’t work, it might have been a good idea badly executed. Keep in mind that in the early days of rocketry, NASA had a lot of blow-ups on the launch pad. Concluding that rockets can’t get off the ground would have been a false inference.
- Avoid the AND Gate of Death: Organizations with approval chains use AND logic. It kills even highly promising ideas, because a single “No” is all that’s required. The solution: Bypass the approval chain until it’s too late. Then replace the chain with an approval meeting, to replace the AND Gate of Death with a consensus check.
- Give the proposer a chance at it: But don’t insist. Sometimes, the proposer loves the idea and wants to run with it. Other times they’re just doing you a favor by suggesting a way to solve a problem.
Finally, remember the political dimension.
Niccolo Machiavelli famously stated, “… there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.”
For your average business improvement, “enemy” is too histrionic a term. Even “politics” overdramatizes the role relationship-building plays in plowing your company’s social field to allow new ideas to germinate.
Agricultural metaphors and excessive drama notwithstanding, businesses are communities, and innovations do disrupt the social fabric.
Anticipate the resistance, and plan accordingly.
important technicality: “All progress comes from innovation” and “most new ideas are regrettable” are not contradictory. Both are probably true. Presence of bad ideas is no excuse not to adopt the good ones. The importance of good ideas is no excuse to adopt all new ideas uncritically.
I suggest you are mistaken in saying, “When I buy lentils, for example, I don’t want innovation. Just beans.”
While you may not want innovation itself, you do want some of things which innovation may bring. You may want lower prices(because new strains have better yields or greater resistance to pests and suboptimal climate), longer useful shelf life, higher nutrition content (thanks to new varieties), faster cooking, etc..
These are things you probably don’t expect, and may not even always notice. If you do notice, you will almost certainly appreciate the improvements; further, all else being equal, you will by the “innovation enhanced” version over the “traditional” version.
You’re probably right with respect to the principle. With respect to the sorts of agricultural innovations we mostly experience, we get less flavor in exchange for better shelf-life, transportability, ease of harvesting and so on.
Which I suppose means that in this case, most innovation is regrettable … oh, let’s forget the whole thing.
I agree with Jim Ehrich’s comment, above, that the two positions do not contradict. It’s kind of like evoluation. Mutation is 99.9% bad, but the 0.1% that’s good drives evolution. Partly this is because the bad mutations generally only kill the one organism that inherits the mutation, but the good mutations can transform a whole species.
I would also add that I disagree that ALL economic growth is though technological innovation. I would say that all economic growth is through innovation, and almost all is through technology, but there must be some non-technological innovation that creates growth. For example, I wouldn’t call Deming’s quality innovations technological, but they certainly led to economic growth. And I wouldn’t call Ford’s creation of the assembly line technological innovation, but it was innovation.
Bob I agree with most everything you wrote, excellent column. But I wonder a bit about the details.
While we want to encourage innovation, we also need ways to say “no” but still encourage it.
An example that happened to me just yesterday. An employee wanted to quit printing a pile of paper and mailing it out. She was doing this a few times a week and could replace it with a DVD of images.
Her idea made perfect sense. The problem is the idea only impacted her, and the cost to implement the idea was far more expensive that just continuing the manual process (plus we already have a large queue of other requests waiting).
Saying “no” may shut this person down from offering other ideas. Many people view things from their own job/world.
So to me that is one of the big challenges of keeping innovation alive.
— and the cost to implement the idea was far more expensive that just continuing the manual process (plus we already have a large queue of other requests waiting).–
The cost factor makes sense. The way to keep that from shutting her down is to explain, without talking down to her or implying that she has a narrow point of view is to explain to her why it would cost more to implement her idea than keep the current process.
On the other hand, I doubt it really makes a difference. An environment in which a large queue of waiting requests gets a sensible idea booted is not one that fosters innovation – in fact I would say that the situation you describe is quite hostile to innovation. Think about it. What would it take to get her idea into the queue and then move it along? Under those circumstances what’s going to wind up in the queue are not innovative ideas, but things that people despise or need to get their jobs done, with about as much innovation as repairing or replacing a broken printer.
Bob — with regard to the unfortunate Mr. Will — he epitomizes the old saying that,”A true conservative is someone who believes that nothing should ever be done for the first time.”
I’m a big fan — your column is always a highlight of my week.
Rob
I disagree Kayza. The large queue is full of ideas that have been vetted and are essential to the business. Like many companies, we have limited resources for the ideas, so we work hard to filter ideas based on Bob’s categories (reduce costs, increase revenues/profits, or reduce risk).
The queue size is intentionally limited — it makes no sense to queue two years of work when you know other items will eventually move items down the queue.
Businesses also need to focus on strategic innovation. Innovation that helps the core vision (or struggles) should float to the top.
So I stand by my original point/question. Not all innovation can be considered, but not all employees understand penny wise dollar foolish.
George Will is a brilliant thinker — I’d like to see his comment in its full context. But I suspect that he is correct: most new ideas are indeed regrettable. Having been through more than two decades of corporate brainstorms such as Six Sigma and “maximizing shareholder value” (all good ideas in theory, debacles in practice), I see Will’s point. This does not mean that all new ideas are regrettable; indeed the few good new ideas do drive all progress.
To Dave:
Yo are missing my point. When you say that an idea shouldn’t go forward because it really costs a lot more than is first apparent, or will not save as much as it seems or some combination, I get that. Real cost is one of the things that always needs to be looked at. And I also understand that there is no point in planning things for years down the road.
However, the fact that the queue is already full should not be a real factor, unless an idea is rather marginal. Essentially what you said is “Even if she had come up with a really money / time saving idea, we wouldn’t consider it because the queue is full.”
Odds are that if you told the employee “we have a full queue anyway”, she went away thinking something along the lines of “I bet this would not cost as much as Dave thinks, but he isn’t really interested in checking it out because the queue is full. I could be saving them millions and it wouldn’t make a difference.”
Are you sure that you really looked at all of the factors, and that it really wouldn’t bring the improvements she thinks? If your staff have reason to think that the answer is no, then you’ve gone a long way to killing the interest in innovation.
Another question that you need to look at: What would you have done had you looked at her proposal and seen that you would actually save a lot more money that she realized or that you would have a real impact on the bottom line in some other way? Would the fact that the queue is full have killed the idea, regardless of the benefit? Or would you have seriously looked at the idea and then had a discussion with the other “keepers of the queue” to see whether it is an idea that should bump something else off? Obviously even if that discussion had happened, it would not necessarily mean that you would do that- it could be that everything in the hopper is really a much better bet. The point though, is that there is a real difference between an idea losing out to a better idea rather than losing out “procedure”.
The fact that the items in the queue will really benefit the company doesn’t mean that they are really innovative. Making sure that staff have adequate equipment or making sure that you are in compliance with regulations benefits the company (unless you think that avoiding fines or prosecutions doesn’t really benefit the company) but you can hardly call it innovation. I’m not saying that that’s what is in your queue. I’m just trying to point out that not all good ideas are innovative. So, while it is definitely a good idea that your queue is full of good ideas, it doesn’t mean it’s full of innovative ideas.