A recent article on Innovation in the Harvard Business Review caught my eye as I am quite keen on the topic.
The authors believe that many (non-pharma) companies view innovation as something creative and, therefore, permissibly undisciplined. As a consequence, they are undisciplined about innovation. They argue that innovation is something that doesn’t just happen, and that you have to build it into your business cycle. They say “(W)hat organizations need is a self-regulating, evidence-based innovation pipeline. Instead of having a committee vet ideas, they need a process that operates with speed and urgency, and that helps innovators and other stakeholders to curate and prioritize problems, ideas, and technologies.” And then they begin the process they propose by having a committee vet ideas.
And this is where they lost me.
On paper, their linear-sequential approach is wonderfully logical and so seemingly sensible. The very start of the process requires a group of people to get together and brainstorm ideas. I have a few problems with this as the catalyst for innovation:
- How do you choose the group? Or do you deal with the issues of self-selection bias.
- How do you deal with the expectation of a blank page for the group? I have sat through too many team goal settings where we look at both the page and each other blankly. And then complete the process for the sake of it, rather than for the quality or integrity of the outcome. I am of the view it’s also possible, similar to the operation of Amazon’s expert recommendation engines, the preferences of the group’s past will be the preferences they unavoidably have for the future. So the group that is charged with coming up with the innovation list would just as likely be the type of group that would have suggested Henry Ford build a faster horse (which he apparently never said).
- How do you sustain the momentum through the process without a process owner? RACI models must only have one accountability per task. Even the buck stopped with Harry S Truman. Their process wouldn’t have a natural home or owner and, I suspect, will run out of puff without
- How do you allocate resources to any ideas that make it through the early hurdle? Many companies barely have an integrated capital budget allocation process that functions for things like IT upgrades, never mind innovation projects.
- How do we know it when we see it? I am old enough to remember the classic headline from Barrons about Amazon.bomb, chuckling at how the internet experiment had failed. (An archive article from the Guardian around this time makes for an interesting read about the reasons behind the article.) I am not convinced that a process is the way to surface up innovation because history suggests we aren’t good at recognising it. Otherwise, we would all have bought Amazon stock.
The authors end with “By now, most organizations have concluded that they face the threat of disruption. Some have even started to realize that because technological advantage degrades every year, standing still means falling behind. Hence the interest in innovation, complete with hip innovation labs complete with fancy coffee machines. But done right, innovation requires a rigorous process. It starts by generating ideas, but the hard work is in prioritizing, categorizing, gathering data, testing and refactoring.”
While I find the idea of a process attractive, I increasingly think we need to build in the circumstances for serendipity in the workplace as the kickstarter for innovation, not stifle ideas with process. This, for me, would need to pay cognisance to environmental, cultural, situational, and educational elements. Creating the hot-house climate for that rare creature, the innovation, to be discovered and nurtured to full-grown feels to me like more of an eco-system or a network than a linear, sequential process. I agree completely that we need to be systematic, but I am not convinced a new business process will lead us to innovative ideas.