What Kills Innovation
June, 2017
innovate |ˈinəˌvāt|
make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products:
innovat- ‘renewed, altered,’
verb innovare, from in- ‘into’ + novare ‘make new’ (from novus ‘new’).
Innovation can be defined as new ideas that create impact - ideas that take the form of a solution that is new, not to the whole world but to the context of the problem it is solving.
Innovation is about creating a solution that is better, that brings some improvement to the existing problem, and a solution that creates certain value for the organisation, whether monetary or otherwise. Innovation is generative by nature. Innovation is about changing the existing.
When we look at innovation from the lens of this definition, it can be applied in a wide range of situations to solve a wide range of problems. Innovation doesn’t have to always be associated with something bombastic or revolutionary. (In fact, all innovations are incremental in nature, as there are certain inevitable steps that build up to the final outcome - but more on that in another article.)
In simple words, innovation is about new ideas. New ideas are the seeds of innovation. So what kills innovation or new ideas in organisations? Every time this question is posed, we get different answers. Invariably, these answers, or innovation killers, can be broadly categorised under three categories - Myopia, Monkey Mind and Inertia.
Myopia is near-sightedness. It is the inability to see beyond the line of our sight. It is the lack of foresight. It is the lack of imagination.
Monkey Mind is the propensity of our mind to jump into solutions. This is inevitable as the human mind is wired to make sense of the world through pattern matching. We are wired to match any incoming information with patterns that already exist in our heads. These existing patterns are a result of our education, knowledge and experiences. When presented with a problem, we tend to find solutions by matching it with what we already know. Our brain is instinctively lazy, or in other words, our brain is instinctively efficient. It automatically tries to fill gaps of missing information with what it knows.
In organisations, this tendency of pattern matching is manifested as group think or expert think – "if most people in the room think this way, it must be true" or "if the boss or subject matter expert thinks this way, it must be true". One monkey jumps and the rest follow. This nips new ideas in the bud. For sure!
Inertia is our propensity not to act on an idea or solution that we may already have. Inertia is another potent killer, putting new ideas on the chopping block. You may have a new idea or a new solution, but get bogged down by doubt or the risk of failure.
It is not just individuals or smaller organisations that are affected by these three innovation killers. Even large organisations that have wherewithal and talent suffer from this malady.
We will explain this with a couple of examples. Do you remember the very first generation of mobile phones? I call them brick-phones. There used to be Ericsson and Siemens phones that I can remember. These first generation of mobile phones solved the ‘utility’ part of the service equation - they served the purpose of ‘communicating while walking’. However, they were clunky and not very comfortable to carry around. They didn’t have a user-friendly interface (it was just one small strip of a screen on which you had to scroll horizontally to read text).
Thus, these brick-phones served just the ‘utility’ purpose. Unlike a landline phone, you didn’t have to stand next to it throughout the length of a call. With brick-phones, you could carry the phone out of your house or into your car and still continue to talk.
But Ericsson and Siemens missed the very important factor of ‘usability’ - that the phone should be comfortable to carry around, and have an easy-to-understand user interface with simple and intuitive navigation. Nokia filled that gap.
But Nokia again missed the behaviour change in people. Desktops were quickly being replaced by laptops. People had this emergent need to check their emails while on the go. What Nokia missed, Blackberry understood. It created a product around this behaviour. Blackberry was an email device through which users could also talk!
Yet again, both Nokia and Blackberry missed another unarticulated need, namely the need of convergence - the need to not just carry your computer but your camera with you, so that you could instantly capture and share moments that you relished. Apple did! This was a behavioural shift towards instant gratification that Apple built its phones upon.
In the above cases, innovation killers are on ample display. Near-sightedness makes you fail to see beyond your current markets or customers. You miss micro-trends, changing behaviours, unarticulated needs, emergent and unripened technologies.
There is another insight here. Innovation is not a one-time thing. Even if you have been able to defy these three killers once (we also refer to these killers as maladies), it doesn’t ensure your continued success. Defying these maladies has to become part of your process, your culture and your day-to-day work.
Monkey mind is also on display in these cases, as organisational thought was governed by only one idea - utility in case of brick-phones, usability of current services such as call and SMS in case of Nokia phones, and utility again in the case of Blackberry. It was groupthink! (“Why should I stick my head out?”)
Inertia was on abundant display as well. Do you think the Nokia R&D team had not figured out how to add email to a phone? Or how to make a touchscreen keypad easy to use? Or have a high quality camera in their phones? I am sure they had – but inertia was at play! Risk of failure, approvals, market research, financial implications of not succeeding… all must have played their own small and sweet part in the impending implosion that we all witnessed! We don’t want to change the existing. We don’t like to change what is working today, until the time it doesn't, which is invariably too late.
But all is not doom and gloom. If we recognise and identify the innovation killers in our respective contexts, catch early signals and address them in a systematic way, we can very well remain on the innovation track, and relive and ride multiple cycles of change through innovation.
How do we do it? How do we fight innovation killers?
Here are three simple ways.
To tackle myopia, we need to look at things differently. To tackle monkey mind, we need to think about solutions differently. And, to fight inertia, we need to learn to make things differently!
