Twenty-five years ago I was lucky enough to find myself under the tutelage of a veteran innovator. His small group at Kimberly-Clark Corporation was called at the time “Exploratory Projects”—a name befitting the open-endedness of our charter. Shortly after I signed on, the name of the group was changed to Innovation Management.
The group's reaction to the name change was mixed. Some of us felt vindicated. With a new name like Innovation Management, we now we had corporate legitimacy (instead of being “legitimate crazies,” as some were fond of calling us). Others felt an impending loss. The Innovation Management label threatened to erode the group's anonymity-born freedom to explore the next new profit source for Kimberly-Clark. All of us, however, saw the boldness of the assumption inherent in combining the two words—that innovation could be managed.
Many believe that it is an oxymoron to put the words “innovation” and “management” together. Like “jumbo shrimp” or “the lonely crowd,” innovation management brings two worlds together and holds them together in creative tension. Whether understood as an economic noun (an innovation), an entrepreneurial verb (innovating) or as an organizational adjective (innovative), innovation has to do with bringing something new into reality. Management, however, typically has to do with increasing the productivity of what is already in place through planning, organizing, controlling, evaluating and improving. While the two words are not opposites, they do not naturally go together.
Thinking that innovation—a developmental “process” quite unlike more operational processes—can be managed in a similar way as other areas of the corporate enterprise, is a presumption that only the uninitiated make. Most veteran innovators recognize that when it comes to managing the new, we have to stretch the muscles normally associated with the more operational assumptions about acts of management.
Through a stimulating conversation at this April’s Innovation Practitioners Network conference, what became clear is that after all these years of working under the conceptual framework of management, we are now convinced that a better word is parenting. It is parenting innovation, not managing innovation. This is more than merely a semantic issue. While parenting includes managerial acts, what is involved in parenting in not adequately captured in the notions of management. There is something more and different going on, quite a bit more, actually.
Additionally, an article in the Journal of Business Venturing (February 2005) called “A Tale of Passion: New Insights Into Entrepreneurship from a Parenthood Metaphor” and discussions with Dr. Stuart Brown from the National Institute for Play suggest that intersection of nurture and nature is the source of driving forces shaping the development of any innovation, just as it for the development of a child. This intersection between heredity (technological/market “genes”) and environment (context) provides so much of the stuff that innovators must deal with as they parent the innovation. This intersection may be a new way of understanding the context of the innovator as an innovation parent.
To some extent parenting innovations can be systematic in balancing play and discipline to help the innovation grow and develop to its fullest potential. Drucker, Christensen, McGrath, etc., have written about these principles and practices and suggest systematic approaches. However, parenting innovations is not likely to ever become completely routine or systematized. Like children, each innovation is different from the next.
What may clear to many aspiring innovators is that at various points in the development of an innovation, the innovators (parents) need to be more “playful” in their parenting. Like a child, the innovation has a need to grow and develop, to play. Do we inadvertently deprive our innovations of the developmental benefits of play by prematurely requiring certain levels of performance from them? It's a bit like requiring too much too soon from our children.
Perhaps we need to think more carefully, at least in the early stages of development, about playmates for our innovations (flanking versions of the innovation); playgrounds for our innovations (protected spaces for thought and actual experimentation); and playthings for our innovations (toys with which the innovation can interact).
Please let us know your thoughts about parenting innovations and the importance of play.
This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in July 2005. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 460-1313.
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