By Jane Gannon, Associate
The occasion of our 20th anniversary offered us a chance to review our past annual reports and their record of the lessons we have learned with you over the years. Client assignments have been our primary instructors throughout the past two decades, and these experiences confirm that innovating is demanding and not for the faint of heart.
We thought we would share some of the key lessons we have learned as a result of our collaborations with you:
• Success is the enemy of innovation.
• Knowledge-creation sustains innovation systems. “Innovation is learning applied to creating value.”
• An innovation develops best in the field, even more than in the lab.
• Even within companies serious about innovation, persistent and pesky allergies to “the new” remain.
• Nothing happens except out of relationships. Trust is the currency of relationships.
• Play is the tuition required to grow adaptive capability.
• Successful entrepreneurial action is as much about having the courage to do the most with what you have as it is about being more creative than the next guy.
• Managing interpersonal relationships (soft systems) can often be the hardest part of managing for innovation.
• A company’s inventive intellectual capital can be aimed to prospectively invent in areas that both exploit the expertise of a company and address anticipated paths of development.
• Combining insights discovered from external investigations with insights from internal lessons learned can be a powerful approach for transforming intelligence into innovation.
• Story-making and storytelling are essential to perceiving both threats and opportunities on the horizon.
• Content precedes process, just as form follows function. Innovating is a process driven by the innovator's clarity and conviction in an entrepreneurial opportunity.
• Pay attention to subtle surprises in the market, the development lab, and in the market of your existing products or your competitors products. These are often the most reliable signposts and sources of where to innovate next.
• Leaving room for experimentation in your strategic plan acknowledges the potential in the unanticipated and reflects an appropriate humility regarding the inescapable uncertainties of the future.
• Role definition, clarification and improvisation can reduce chaos that comes with change-induced uncertainty.
• Success in overcoming the not-invented-here syndrome comes in part from innovators ability to step back and share both the credit and the authorship.
• Give yourself permission to fail so that real learning can occur.
• Manage like a (tough) loving parent, neither too permissive nor dogmatic about early performance.
• Instead of people looking for a formula for how-to do innovation, we need innovators who are inspired by necessity.
After all, as the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.
This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in July 2010. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.
We thought we would share some of the key lessons we have learned as a result of our collaborations with you:
• Success is the enemy of innovation.
• Knowledge-creation sustains innovation systems. “Innovation is learning applied to creating value.”
• An innovation develops best in the field, even more than in the lab.
• Even within companies serious about innovation, persistent and pesky allergies to “the new” remain.
• Nothing happens except out of relationships. Trust is the currency of relationships.
• Play is the tuition required to grow adaptive capability.
• Successful entrepreneurial action is as much about having the courage to do the most with what you have as it is about being more creative than the next guy.
• Managing interpersonal relationships (soft systems) can often be the hardest part of managing for innovation.
• A company’s inventive intellectual capital can be aimed to prospectively invent in areas that both exploit the expertise of a company and address anticipated paths of development.
• Combining insights discovered from external investigations with insights from internal lessons learned can be a powerful approach for transforming intelligence into innovation.
• Story-making and storytelling are essential to perceiving both threats and opportunities on the horizon.
• Content precedes process, just as form follows function. Innovating is a process driven by the innovator's clarity and conviction in an entrepreneurial opportunity.
• Pay attention to subtle surprises in the market, the development lab, and in the market of your existing products or your competitors products. These are often the most reliable signposts and sources of where to innovate next.
• Leaving room for experimentation in your strategic plan acknowledges the potential in the unanticipated and reflects an appropriate humility regarding the inescapable uncertainties of the future.
• Role definition, clarification and improvisation can reduce chaos that comes with change-induced uncertainty.
• Success in overcoming the not-invented-here syndrome comes in part from innovators ability to step back and share both the credit and the authorship.
• Give yourself permission to fail so that real learning can occur.
• Manage like a (tough) loving parent, neither too permissive nor dogmatic about early performance.
• Instead of people looking for a formula for how-to do innovation, we need innovators who are inspired by necessity.
After all, as the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.
This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in July 2010. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.
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