Fear, Faith and Innovation

One of the silent killers of innovation efforts may be fear. With the uncertainty in every stage of the innovation process, fear can easily seep in and disable the innovator, especially since the innovator is typically working against the odds. 

One of the most obvious fears associated with doing something new, and against the odds, is the fear of failure. (This fear has an interesting cousin called the fear of success—e.g., the jealousy for resources that a ‘prodigal’ sibling innovation may appear to steal from the ‘elder’ and established sibling business.) However, there are likely other types of fears that become particularly acute during certain stages of the innovation process. For example, the fear of rejection can keep an idea generator from voicing an idea that could lead to a breakthrough.

Innovation efforts involve working through four fundamental challenges—discovering something new, inventing something useful, incarnating this invention into a practical context and tangible value, and finally introducing the invention to the market and/or organization.  Might not each of these challenges have its own “demon” for the innovator; in other words, its own dominant type of fear? For instance, the fear of “unlearning” (i.e., appearing “naïve”) may be the demon against which innovators fight in the discovery stage of an innovation effort.  For the invention stage, it may be the fear of rejection. For the reduction-to-practice stage, it may be the fear of failure. And for the introduction and integration stage, it may be the fear of insignificance (e.g., realizing that while valuable, the innovation might not be the “be all and end all”).

“Drive out fear” was one of Edward Deming’s fourteen timeless principles which became popular during the total quality era a few years ago. Deming’s principle has a timeless relevance to innovation management as well. But how do you do that?

For a couple of years now we’ve been toying with a hypothesis regarding the role faith plays in the innovation process. While successful innovations are difficult to predict and diverse in their character and circumstances, the accounts of how successful innovations have developed have at least one theme in common—an overcoming of the odds. When overcoming the odds is a part of the plot line, both Hollywood and the world’s spiritual traditions know that the story involves a little bit of faith on the part of the innovator. If innovation is about overcoming the odds and their associated fears, then faith may play a larger role in innovation than is often conceded. As many of the world’s spiritual traditions have known for a long time, one of the most effective antidotes to fear is faith.

Justifying innovation investments, especially financially, continues to be a perennial management challenge. Net Present Value, options valuation methods, scorecards, and other attempts have not been able to completely satisfy those who are searching for a defensive rationale. Given the general dissatisfaction with any clear and definitive financial criteria for innovation investments, it is fascinating that so many companies continue to invest—sometimes significant portions of their resources—in the pursuit of growth-enabling innovations. So what is it that sustains this motivation if it is not the numbers? Might it be faith? [Faith as defined by one spiritual tradition as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.”]

Aside from all this philosophical hypothesizing, there may even be practical management implications in all this as well. Faith teaches us to face our ears, whether with the child-like awe required of the learner to unlearn what he thought he knew, or with the confidence required of the idea generator to expect and anticipate rejection, or with the persistence required of the inventor whose 99% perspiration results from repeated trials and errors, or with the humility required of the introducer/integrator to stand aside and let the light shine on the innovation itself. Awe, confidence, persistence and humility…aren’t these all synonyms for faith?

We would appreciate your thoughts, experiences and connections with any or all parts of this hypothesis—the role faith has played in your innovation efforts. The dialogue itself should help us each with more, better and even faster, innovations that work®.

This article by Lanny Vincent originally appeared in Innovating Perspectives in September 2003. Subsequently Lanny wrote the book Prisoners of Hope: How Innovators and Others Get Lift for Innovating (published by Westbow Press in 2011), which expands and elaborates on the subject of this article. For more information, please go to http://www.innovationsthatwork.com/books-poh.html

For other back issues of our newsletter, please visit www.innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.  

© 2013 Vincent & Associates, Ltd. 

Feel the Temperature of Change

You probably heard the story about the two frogs. One frog is dropped into a pot of boiling water and immediately jumps out. A second frog is dropped into a pot of lukewarm water, the water temperature is gradually increased, the frog stays put and eventually boils to death.

The difference between the two frogs can be instructive to those of us at risk of becoming victims of our own success. Of the two frogs, the one at greater risk is obviously the one who was unaware of the threatening, albeit gradual, changes occurring in his immediate environment. The frog who survived was the one who had enough “feel” for his environment to allow him to respond appropriately.

How sensitive a corporation is to its environment can be crucial to its long-term success. For example, how well does your company or division update its understanding of the immediate business environment? And, how well does your team “sense” the subtle and gradual changes in that environment, especially those that signal lasting change?

Sensitivity, more than precision or accuracy, may be what is most important. The frog that survived did not calibrate the exact temperature of the water. He leapt out because it was too hot. That was all he needed to know. When conditions are turbulent or in a period of rapid change, it may be more useful to get a general feel for the major factors than to worry about the precision of the environment analysis.

The president of Specialized Bicycle Components, Inc., Michael Sinyard, sensed the water boiling in the late 1970s. He began to notice how some enthusiasts were rigging up their bicycles to ride on mountain trails in Marin County, California, and Boulder, Colorado. In the subtle changes, he saw an opportunity, and was the first to capitalize on the mountain bike craze. He changed what as once a parts distribution company into the first and leading mountain bike company in the world. Being alert to the significance of subtle and early changes, and having a willingness to act even with an imprecise understanding, must be counted as essential factors that led to his success.

Karl Weick, in his book Sensemaking in Organizations, relates the story of a young Hungarian lieutenant who sends his men into the Swiss Alps on a reconnaissance mission. Shortly after they left, it began to snow and soon turned into a blizzard. The lieutenant feared he had sent his men into the icy wilderness to die. Three days later, however, the men returned. Relieved, the lieutenant asked where they had been and how they made their way back. They said they considered themselves lost and waited for their death. Then one of them found a map in his pocket, which calmed them down. They pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm, and then, with the map, they discovered their bearings and here they were. The lieutenant asked to see the map and had a good look at it. He discovered to his astonishment that it was not a map of the Alps at all. Instead, it was a map of the Pyrenees! Weick concludes, “This incident raises the intriguing possibility that when you are lost, any old map will do!”

Understanding the environment with precise accuracy was not necessary, but the decision to get moving was.

This article by Lanny Vincent originally appeared in Innovating Perspectives in June 1996. For other issues of our newsletter, please go to www.innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.  

© 2013 Vincent & Associates, Ltd. 

Discovery Channels

It is generally understood that an innovation effort, along with the innovator, in an established company needs protection. How that protection is provided is another thing.

How protection is provided to innovations may be similar to the dilemma parents face in their attempts to regulate how much, and when, their kids are exposed to the various realities of life. Too much protection can leave a child dependent and ill prepared. Too little protection can push a child beyond what they can handle emotionally and psychologically.

The same can be said for nascent innovations. On one hand, under exposure to the external circumstances and realities of the intended user can stunt the development of the innovation.  On the other hand, over or premature exposure to these realities risks a “failure” so visible that few have the persistence or courage to learn from it.

Our society’s increasing propensity to give its children antibiotics at the first sign of a cold or flu was the topic of a recent conversation I had with a veteran innovation sponsor and “midwife.”  Both of us were wondering outloud whether we are, in effect, weakening the next generation’s resistance to disease. It is a difficult dilemma for parents these days.  With all the pharmacological options available to us—even anti-bacterial soaps—are we, in effect, contributing to a quietly developing longer term problem to address a short term fear for our children’s health?  Might many of us as innovators be guilty of something similar with innovations brewing in the labs and internal development efforts of our companies?

Gaining and maintaining the right amount of exposure at the right time for the iterative nurture and development most innovations is an art, requiring the experienced counsel of innovation veterans.  Over exposure to internal influences and under exposure to external realities can kill an innovation before it has the time to see the light of day.  However, over exposure to external realities and under exposure to internal influences can stimulate the “not-invent-here syndrome” and various other “autoimmune” responses. So how do you find the right balance? 

One of our clients in the consumer food business looks to what they refer to as “discovery channels” to provide the right balance of hard external realities and sheltered nurture for their not-quite-ready-for-prime-time innovations.  In this case the “discovery channel” is a retailer whose requirement for “turns” is modest enough and who is willing to allow the manufacturer direct contact with their customers and floor personnel to enable unmediated access to feedback.

One of the advantages of such a “discovery channel” is that the feedback is real, not simulated. Another advantage is that a “natural” demand can be more realistically estimated at least for the early stages of a new product’s introduction, as consumers discover the product more or less on their own.  In other words, “discovery channels” can provide the innovating company a better signal-to-noise ratio, while avoiding the distorting influences of the typically promotional atmosphere of the mass marketplaces.

While the form of the “discovery channel” this consumer business uses may be more applicable to consumer package goods businesses, the principles are potentially applicable in other types of industries as well. Software companies use so-called “beta-sites” to test their programs in use.  Equipment manufacturers use “pilot” projects to gain experience that can be trusted.  Whatever the particular form of “discovery channel,” finding such a venue for each innovation can provide the innovation with sufficient experience in establishing its own identity; it can then hold its own in the inevitable sibling rivalry for resources within the company’s established businesses.

This article by Lanny Vincent originally appeared in Innovating Perspectives in November 2003. For other issues of our newsletter, please go to www.innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.  

© 2013 Vincent & Associates, Ltd. 

Open Innovation Requires Some Homework First

By James P. O’Shaughnessy

Jim O’Shaughnessy, former chief patent counsel of Rockwell International, sent us this article in the form of an email as he was preparing for a meeting with a prospective client. He agreed to share his thoughts on the homework required before taking an “open” innovation approach.

When a company is just beginning to ask itself some basic “first principles” kinds of questions about its own innovation agenda, there are two primary directions it can take, depending on the nature of the innovation. The one path is dominated by strategic innovation; the other by opportunistic innovation. Both paths have embedded business and legal issues that need to be addressed.

Strategic innovation is business plan-driven. The company will have adopted a strategic way forward in pursuit of certain corporate objectives. In accomplishing those goals, innovation becomes a key element.

In a previous era, a company would likely have adopted a “closed” innovation model. Behaving in accordance with the normative wisdom of the times, the company would have created all the technology it required to meet its innovation objectives. Today, most companies employ an “open” innovation model, the innovation analog to “make versus buy.” (See Henry Chesbrough’s book, Open Innovation.) Using this open approach, the company may choose to create certain technologies and acquire others where the acquisition may be along a development continuum from ideation to final production and delivery.

Even without realizing it, many companies are adopting a more modern open innovation model, developing internally those technologies important or essential to the organization and acquiring others complementary to them. There are several critical aspects to the effective use of such an approach.

One needs first to determine which technologies to make and which to buy. Making entails questions of core competencies, resource allocation and time to market.  Buying tees up its own set of questions, such as the form of the relationship with the contracting party and control of the resultant or acquired technology.

Opportunistic innovations are driven by external circumstances or events. They arise outside a demonstrable business or strategic technology development plan in at least one of two sense, where both involve opportunities to extract latent value from a given innovation or technology.  For example, technology purposefully developed for one reason important to the company may be adaptable to other implementations or uses outside the scope of the company’s principal interests.

Such a technology may have significant intrinsic value to the company within its scope of interest, but only latent value outside it. It takes focused programs to understand which innovations have this latent value capable of conversion into something tangible and then to identify who might be interested in taking the innovation into an appropriate market to realize that potential.

On the other hand, it sometimes happens that a potentially valuable innovation arises serendipitously, independent of any specific technology or business plan devoted in whole or in part to its creation. It once again takes focused programs to identify such an occurrence and then to harvest its value.

In both cases, a common factor in the exploitation of opportunistic innovations tends to be the company’s lack of complementary assets necessary for the conversion of the technology into a product or service to be delivered to some allied or adjacent market. Thus, realization of the opportunity afforded by this class of innovation relies on the identification of parties possessing such assets and effectively transacting with them, unless of course the company itself is willing o invest in the creation or acquisition of those complementary assets necessary to become vertically integrated.

Whether an organization is interested in pursuing a strategic innovation path, an opportunistic innovation path, or traversing both, understanding a few fundamental factors is essential at the outset.  One should have a clear vision of the role of technology in the organization, how and to what extent it will be funded, and the work it s expected to do in accomplishing important corporate objectives. These factors line up closely with strategic innovation.

On the other side of this ledger, a company rarely if ever sets out specifically to create options for opportunistic innovation; else wise it would not seem all that opportunistic. Nevertheless, the organization needs to evaluate its level of commitment to funding the sometimes costly process of eliciting those opportunistic innovations from the portfolio as well as their staying power in seeing through programs to capture the latent value of these wasting assets. Either way, as Seneca put it: “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.” Doing the right homework should fill the sails of the intrepid innovator.

About the Author:  Jim O’Shaughnessy is currently consulting with companies at the intersection of innovation and intellectual capital (property) management. He can be reached at jim@jposhaughnessy.com.

This article by Jim O'Shaughnessy originally appeared in Innovating Perspectives in January 2005. For other issues of our newsletter, please go to www.innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.  

© 2013 Vincent & Associates, Ltd. 

Improvement Prophets and Innovation Heretics

“Innovations that entail a shift in strategy are successful because they are deliberately subversive.  New wealth is created not by prophets but by heretics. They are the ones who not only challenge the way an existing business runs, but offer an entirely new way of thinking about an industry. Not satisfied with something better, they want something different.” Gary Hamel, who wrote this in the Wall Street Journal, captured an important and often overlooked distinction: prophets and heretics.

Some say prophets, and their modern equivalents—management consultants—constitute the “second oldest profession.” There is ample evidence, as far back as the 8^th Century BC, of an established class of paid advisers who many contend were a part of a king’s court. These advisers were called prophets, and they were paid to prognosticate on behalf of the king.

Ancient wisdom is seasoned with warnings about false prophets. The only reliable test of a prophet and his or her prophecy was the test of hindsight—whether the prophecy of what was to come turned out to be true or not. The purpose of the prophet’s message, however, was to stimulate change—repentance or a change of mind.

Therefore, ironically, if the prophet was successful in provoking a change in the way the king and his court were thinking, then the prophecy of what was to come may not happen, leaving the prophet exposed to criticism and false prophecy. The dilemma for the prophet is that if he is successful in getting the king to change his mind, then the prophet risks ruining his own credibility and career.  Unless, of course, he has an understanding and grateful king.

The perennial presence of prophets in today’s world of corporate and governmental “kingdoms” is a testament to their usefulness. At the very least, prophets can help us see the error of our ways and how the arrogance of success sows the seeds of its own failure. However, Hamel has made a very useful distinction: most prophets and their modern equivalents tend to be more interested in making things better; e.g., continuous improvement. While these efforts are absolutely necessary for most corporations, a growing number of companies appear to be awakening to the fact that making things better, while necessary, is not sufficient. Corporate renewal requires “something different,” and that is more likely to come from a heretic than a prophet.

Hence the necessity of the heretic. When asked what his most important responsibility was in leading the staff at the Pentagon, General Matthew Ridgeway (MacArthur’s successor) simply said, “Protect the maverick.” Many of our corporate organizations have failed to reflect Ridgeway’s wisdom. Last year I was with a client group planning a series of strategic planning and invention sessions, and when it came time to discuss who would participate I suggested that we be sure to include their resident maverick. Without exception, everyone knew the kind of person about whom I was referring. Not a pain-in-the-neck iconoclast, but the prolific, inventive, productive, and often pain-in-the-neck heretic. “But Lanny,” said the director of R&D, “you don’t understand. With all the re-engineering and down-sizings we have been through over the past ten years, all the mavericks have left.”

George Bernard Shaw once wrote that “reasonable men adapt to their environment. Unreasonable men try to adapt the environment to themselves. Thus, all progress is the result of the efforts of the unreasonable man.”

We might all do better to honor the prophet among us—even those who are in our own “country and land.” However, we might all build a bridge to our corporation’s future by protecting the maverick among us.

This article by Lanny Vincent was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in April 1998. For other issues of our newsletter, please go to www.innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.  

© 2013 Vincent & Associates, Ltd. 

Visionary versus Competitive Innovation

My father taught me to race a small sailboat on a lake in northern Wisconsin. One of the cardinal rules of racing is to always “cover the boat behind you,” assuming, of course, that you are not the last boat in the fleet. This means that when the boat following you changes direction to find clean air, you should change course in parallel with them. If they find better air, you will also.

There was another rule I learned later, after many seasons of racing. It came from the expert lake sailor Stuart Walker, who observed that there are always two winds on a lake. He said, “Pick one and stay with it.” Walker observed from all his years of racing experience that the wind direction next to the shoreline typically differs a few degrees from the wind direction out in the middle of the lake. If you go from one to the other you can lose out, due to the lull in between.

Paying attention to the competition is one thing. Reading the wind is another. Sometimes you have to choose one or the other.

These rules and choices apply to innovators too as colleague and veteran innovator, Carol O’Neill, senior vice president at Spartech, reminded me recently. Thank you, Carol, for referring us to “The Creative Monopoly,” an article by David Brooks published in the New York Times. It is a must read. (nytimes.com/2012/04/24/opinion/brooks-the-creative-monopoly.html).

Mr. Brooks does a riff on a course Peter Thiel (founder of PayPal) is teaching at Stanford. One of the core points of the course is that we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. When that confusion extends into the realm of innovating, innovating can suffer at the hand of competition. “Competition has trumped value-creation,” Brooks says, and this undermines innovation.

My own experience facilitating invention and R&D-driven innovating efforts over the past 30 years resonates with and confirms Brook’s conclusion. Steadily over those three decades, innovating efforts seem to have become more competitive and less visionary. Increasingly innovators are focusing on “adjacencies.” Adjacent opportunities, theoretically, are arenas where risks appear hedged by an entirely rational pursuit of improvements in value already established and validated for existing customers. Focusing on adjacencies carries the reassurance that in the risky endeavor of innovating, one can minimize the risk by staying close to the customer and just ahead of the competition. Covering the boats behind you. 

As more companies take this more rational and less risky approach, fewer established companies are looking to create new value for people and create new customers, markets and initiate “monopolies” in the process. Now it seems that looking for the new winds, whether in the center of the lake or along the shorelines, is an innovating strategy being left to the entrepreneurial start-up.

What if you are in the boat behind, or see a wind on the other shore? You may have the incentive not only to think differently, but also act differently, and break away from the pack. It’s risky for sure. But if you see a new wind, it just may be worth it. If you fail, you will have learned a valuable lesson—perhaps that is the real value that cannot be taken away.   

In his book, Birth of the Chaordic Age, Dee Hock, the founder of VISA, said in his wonderful story of the company’s creation “what is possible cannot be determined by opinions: only by attempt.”                 



This article by Lanny Vincent was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in May 2012. For other issues of our newsletter, please go to www.innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.  

© 2013 Vincent & Associates, Ltd. 

30 Years of Innovating: Lessons Learned

Editor’s Note: Lanny Vincent has been working in and studying the field of corporate innovation management for 30 years. The art of innovation management has evolved over this period. Despite the recent “noise” about innovation, a few sustained signals of wisdom have emerged through the years. The following are Lanny’s reflections on lessons learned from three decades of client assignments and 15 years of collaborative research with the Innovation Practitioners Network. We invite your response. ­— JG

Admired economist and innovation expert Clayton Christensen recently put his finger on why the current state of innovating is so weak. In articles in the New York Times and Forbes, Christensen lays blame on a combination of the wrong metrics, misguided teachers of entrepreneurship, and misinformed tax incentives, all of which erode a proper balance among three different types of innovation, which he labels empowering innovations, sustaining innovations, and efficiency innovations.

Empowering innovations are those that transform expensive products into affordable ones, create jobs and take 5 to 10 years or more to come to the market. The Ford Model T, Sony’s transistor radio, the personal computer, and cloud computing are examples. Sustaining innovations are those that replace older products with newer, improved versions, create few new jobs and take much less time to move from conceptualization to commercialization. Most of what people think of as innovation are of this type like Apple’s iPhone and iPod, and Toyota’s Prius. Efficiency innovations reduce the costs of making and distributing existing products, eliminate jobs and take the least amount of time to implement. Efficiency innovations “emancipate capital” which can be, but is not necessarily, reinvested in innovating. Toyota’s just-in-time production system is a prime example. 

Christensen makes the case that these misguided metrics, teachers and tax-incentives favor efficiency innovations over the other two types. As Vincent & Associates, Ltd. has been geared toward empowering innovations in corporate settings, we applaud Christensen’s observation.

As a result, the following retrospective on managing innovation efforts in corporate settings over the past 30 years is biased toward empowering innovations, and intrapreneurial more than entrepreneurial contexts. Here are the top ten lessons learned from each of the past three decades in a chronological sequence.

The 1980s: ATTACKER'S ADVANTAGE  

Lesson 1: Nothing happens except out of relationships.

Innovating is not a solo act. The lone inventor or entrepreneur is a persistent myth. Look more closely and you will see a relationship. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Roy and Walt Disney. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Bill Gates and Paul Allen. HP recognizes this wisdom in its new business creation efforts by pairing a technologist with a business person where both together lead the early effort.

Lesson 2: Insight about users without invention is science; invention without insight is clever.

“No wine before its time” was a slogan made famous by Ernest and Julio Gallo.  Similarly, idea generation before its time turns into either sour grapes or fresh wine in old wineskins. Either the ideas fail to ferment to a satisfying vintage or the corporate skins can’t contain them. Either way, idea generation is best done after an immersion in new realities gleaned from investigating the end-users’ context. This requires from innovators empathy and identification with the end-user before generating new ideas.

Lesson 3: Process follows content just as form follows function.

Toyota surprisingly turns out to be agnostic about methods and techniques used in their development system and slow to implement software solutions. They are rigorous about principles, however, and this is one of them.

Lesson 4: The new is always at first rejected. If it’s not rejected, it’s probably not new.

Many companies seek to avoid rejection, and look for safer adjacencies to capitalize on their go-to-market capabilities. This safekeeping produces imitations more often than innovations.

The 1990s:  KNOWLEDGE-CREATION

Lesson 5: Innovation is “learning applied to creating value.”

The late Al Ward (an expert in Toyota’s development system) described innovation with this phrase. Peter Drucker, the father of modern management theory, made a similar point when he called “ideas the least reliable source of innovation.” Ikujiro Nonaka reminded us that what enables a company to create new value and wealth is not what it knows so much as it is its ability to create new knowledge. Knowledge-creation (learning) is the fundamental phenomenon of innovating, even more basic than idea generation. This is particularly true for empowering innovations.

Lesson 6: Learning comes from safe, productive failures more than from success.

Fail early, often and in the field, where the truth of failures can teach us much. The biggest mistake is to try something and end up relearning what was already known. This is one of the more difficult things for corporations to do: create safe, productive failure zones where the learning curves are steep.

Lesson 7: Profits accrue to innovators more than inventors.

David Teece’s study for the Commerce Department in 1988 showed that “complementary business assets” are the key enablers to generating profits, even more than inventions. The implication? A company’s willingness to adapt and flex its go-to-market business models comprises the larger portion of success in innovating. As important as inventions are, getting them to market is even more profitable. Sometimes this requires the company to get out of its own way.

The 2000s: INSULATE (not isolate)

Lesson 8: “Success is the enemy of innovation.”

Peter Chernin, COO of Fox, said this in a meeting we facilitated. Many companies launch their innovation programs with the naïve notion that everyone in the company will welcome the new. However, sibling rivalry for resources and management attention is inescapable in a corporate setting. Our Innovation Practitioners Network actually mapped this paradox and found effective mechanisms companies use to address it. Sponsors, midwives and innovators all are necessary to avoid costly and unnecessary mistakes of innovating from the inside out. Empowered innovating is an outside-in job.

Lesson 9: Types of innovations and innovating vary depending upon context and business architecture.

Innovating in contexts of high volume, standard products is one thing; innovating in the context of a complex system architecture is quite another (think consumer packaged goods versus an enterprise IT system). What is true about innovating in one is not necessarily true for the other. And there are many different types of innovations from technology platform innovations to basic product innovations; from manufacturing and business process innovations to marketing innovations. Cross-context generalizations about innovating are dangerous.

Lesson 10: Networks, communities of practice, and organizations each play a role in parenting innovations.

The social architectures of networks (designed for transferring information) are fundamentally different than the structure of communities of practice (designed for creating new knowledge). Both differ from the basic architectures of organizations (designed for executing efficiently and effectively). Innovating takes all three, but progressively, and in stages. It takes a village.

LOOKING FORWARD

The 2010s: INNOVATING SYSTEMS

As we progress into this current decade, we anticipate gaining fresh and relevant wisdom on innovating principles from systems thinking. Already our Innovation Practitioners Network has developed two models with which we will begin simulations this winter. Some additional lessons are already starting to show themselves. 

Lesson 11: Innovations emerge, as do innovators.

In complex and even complicated contexts—where most of us spend our time—innovating efforts may need stage-gate resource management schemes. However, we should never think that innovations develop in a flow. They morph within and between phases. So phase changes are the worst time to conduct stage-gate reviews.

Lesson 12: Corporate innovating efforts need leading more than managing.

Our systems analysis work is revealing that companies tend to be quick to manage their innovating efforts, but slow to lead them. Just the opposite should be the case, as innovations—particularly empowering ones—tend to redraw boundaries and attract the creation of new resources where before there were none. Boundaries and resource creation are governing issues more than management tasks. Leaders create powerfully positive effects on their innovator communities when they express convictions describing why and where innovations are needed. When this is done well, leaders will have more than enough compelling options from which to select.

Lesson 13: Break through often requires a break down.

One reason a break through comes so infrequently is that most of us resist letting go of what worked in the past. Empowering innovations require releasing the rigid containers of our current core competencies and reframing what we know in light of the new and relevant requirements emerging from the company’s immediate external ecosystem. Discovering these new requirements is possible, and surprisingly, not with that much effort.              



© Vincent & Associates, Ltd. 2013
This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in January 2013. For other back issues of our newsletter, please go to www.innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.