Crowd Innovation™

How Not to Innovate: Observations of Contemporary Business Practice

In this first of a series articles exploring innovation in companies, I explore the profoundly innovative ways that companies inhibit innovation.  The point here is to recognize some of these and perhaps others in your own organization.  This is a critical first step to improving innovation in your company.  The next installment will address three pillars of successful company innovation: chaos, order and self-organization.  Later articles in this series will propose strategies and tools for promoting innovation, ways innovation can be integrated into an organization and its culture and finally an outline for building your own path to continuous company innovation.

"We ought not be over anxious to encourage innovation, in case of doubtful improvement, for an old system must ever have two advantages over a new one, it is established and it is understood." -Charles Caleb Colton (1780 - 1832)

From a certain point of view, Mr. Colton seems reasonable.  One should want to have some control.  Yet, embracing his dated sentiment is fatal in an environment uniting rapid change and recession. There are examples in all industries where the failings of old systems are not well understood and the survival of those systems is doubtful.  Without Colton's "two advantages", one might expect to see many companies anxious to encourage innovation. Oddly, a little observation provides instead a comprehensive set of best practices for not innovating.

One of the most enlightening and entertaining activities during Crowd Innovation^TM seminars, workshops and coaching sessions that my colleagues and I run is when the group builds WIC, Inc., the worlds worst-innovating company.  It always results in a prodigious list worth more than a few nervous laughs.  Dear reader, please do follow that urge to invent your own WIC, Inc.  What's interesting is that everything in those exercises and the list you may be working on, is based in real-world experience and observation.  It is easy to limit innovation or even to stop it.  It is also easy to find evidence of this in practice. 

I like the definition of innovation offered by Pretium Innovation, LLC. : Innovation is the combination of invention with the creation of value from that invention. Invention involves recognizing problems and creating ideas to solve them.  It is inherently related to neurons firing in an individual's head.  This is a good place to start a discussion about innovation barriers.  Creating value from inventions, requires changing a system and since we are talking about companies here, it requires change to a group of people. So there are also barriers related to group interaction and activity and finally barriers within the structure of organizations themselves.

In my first engineering job, I discovered (by running head-long into) many innovation barriers.  I also managed to create a few of my own.  It was not until much later that I appreciated the value of these discoveries.  It was a company where the manager never ventured from his office.  I do not recall any incentives related to my creation of new machines or products.  I do recall wondering at one point why I had never seen the sales manager talk to the manufacturing manager. It seems like yesterday in my memory that one of the solutions I proposed was dismissed out of hand since, "we tried something like that twenty years ago."  I felt I was making a good effort to work within the system but was informed during the last meeting I had before leaving the company what a rebel I was.  You might be wincing at another company where innovation was festooned in a wet blanket.  Or, maybe you are remembering another rebellious jerk who just wouldn't go with the flow.  In either case you are considering the right issues.

In the spirit of WIC, Inc. and since the title of this article is "How Not to Innovate" let's talk about how to do just that.  As an individual, do not communicate and do not seek information beyond your department or area of expertise.  Use email instead of conversations.  Realize your role is limited and that you cannot change many things nor change them very much.  Believe that success is only built on successes and on action (thus neatly avoid both failures and contemplation).  Protect your ideas and hide them if you have to.  Do not miss an opportunity to show off your analytical prowess. Do only what you are told to do.  And finally, use meetings to review finished work and future work, not for doing any work.

"The only good ideas are the ones I can take credit for." -R. Stevens, from Diesel Sweeties, November 13, 2006

As a leader, you can have a great influence in keeping innovation out of your organization.  And, great success by following a few simple suggestions here.  Take aim only at the best returns you can get within the next three months.  Punish people who don't win quickly with a new idea.   Build consensus into each team and choose teams so that they get along.  Believe that "best practices" are the best that can be achieved.  Build a static hierarchy and make sure roles are cut into parts that can be quickly mastered.  Put people where you believe they will fit and keep them there.  Carefully divide the organization into completely separate functions.  Demand complete assignment of all employee IP to the company.  Make sure you only hire detail-oriented team players.  Keep your authority, limit autonomy, aggressively limit resources for change, but delegate responsibility liberally.

Taken together, these ersatz recommendations seem ridiculous.  Still, you may recognize in them examples where you limited your own innovation or innovation in those you have led.  I hope this leads your thoughts to how you can improve your own innovation capacity or that of your company. Beware: It is absolutely not a case of doing the opposite of what I jokingly suggest in the previous two paragraphs.  That would be chaos and paradoxically would have the same effect: no innovation.  Instead, I am suggesting that typically companies err on the side of creating too much order and there is some middle ground that is hard to define and hard to reach.

This is not comprehensive, but rather is meant to be the seed for some critical thinking about the status of innovation activity in your own organization.  Please share your thoughts about innovation barriers as a comment here or in the discussion in the LinkedIn Group that pointed you here.  This article is also meant to help create a more general discussion about how to identify various types of innovation barriers and this middle ground between order and chaos where innovation lives.  This sets the stage for the remaining articles in this series that cover what to do when you find these barriers.

In the next article Chris Welsh will illustrate the nature of innovation in groups of people in terms openly influenced by the observation of natural systems: chaos, order, self-organization, and human nature.  This will form a high-level template into which Chris and I will propose methods, tools and organizational development strategies during subsequent articles.

 

Video Demonstration of Function Modeling

In a previous blog, "What Customers Value", I discussed how customers don't value the thing; they value the functionality they get from the thing.  In this blog post I demonstrate how to build a function model of a product using Pretium's Guided Innovation Toolkit™ software.  The product I have chosen is a zipper seal plastic bag vintage 1970 (that is a zipper seal bag with no zipper slide).  In the video I show how to build the major logic path for the product and also how to incorporate harmful functions that limit the delivery of functionality.  Click here to watch the video (about 8 minutes).  Your comments are appreciated.

Making Innovation Work

I have had the opportunity to talk with many executives about innovation.  Most say innovation is critical to the future of their companies.  Many say it is one of their core values.  However, when pressed about how they innovate, many executives struggle to tell me exactly how they make innovation happen.

We can't just wish for innovation to happen.  We can't become innovative with rhetoric.  There are skills, knowledge and experience that people need to conceive innovative problem solutions.  Pretium offers such methods and other do as well.  It is not my point here to argue whether our methods are best (they are!). Rather, if you have provided your employees methods and tools for inventive problem solving, what next?

The inventive problem-solving process lies at the heart of an Innovation System.

 

 

Once the system has been established and employees have been trained, the characteristics of the Innovation System will determine the organization required for effective implementation.  Organizations require metrics and incentives. Metrics and incentives have a strong influence on employee behavior.  Metrics and incentives induce employee behavior.  Once proper alignment of the Innovation System, organization, and metrics/incentives have been achieved, employee behavior will enable the Innovation System resulting in a culture of innovation. Improper design or misalignment anyplace in this structure will result in employee behavior that disables the Innovation System and threatens the future of the organization.

Please comment and share experiences where proper alignment resulted in a self-reinforcing innovation system or experiences where innovation failed because all of these elements were not present or improperly aligned.

Six Sigma and DIminishing Returns

Many companies find that their returns on six sigma decline over time (see figure below).  Some speculate that this results from a loss of commitment, a Hawthorne effect or a structural failure of six sigma itself.

 

 

A more rational explanation can be found in the very nature of problems and solutions.  We can consider problems at one of five levels as shown in the figure below.

 

 

Level 1 problems are Inspection problems.  No innovation is required.  For example, if we remember the quadratic formula, we can find the roots of a quadratic equation.  Period. 

 

Level 2 problems are Engineering problems.  While the problems are more complex and more than one solution is possible, there is minimal innovation involved.  For example, if we are to design a system to pump 100 gallons of water per minute to the top of a building, there is some room for creativity, but the design alternatives are generally known. 

 

Level 3 problems are Improvement problems.  In this case, problem solution requires innovation but innovation within the current paradigm is sufficient.  For example, going from rotary dial telephones to touch tone dialing is innovation within the paradigm.  There is a technology difference, but we are still dialing a number. 

 

Level 4 problems are Invention problems.  Here, problem solution requires innovation outside the paradigm.  For example, the development of GSM phone systems is innovation outside the paradigm.  The technology is radically different (digital versus analog, satellite versus land line, and the application is extremely different (voice only versus text, video, internet access, in-phone cameras, mp3 players, etc). 

 

Finally, Level 5 problems are Discovery problems.  In this case, we have new to the world technologies and products.  For example, Albert Einstein discovered the principle of coherent light in 1905.  Charles Hard Townes, Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in the 1950’s in the design of lasers.  Theodore Maiman built the first operating laser in 1960.  The first commercial application of lasers took place in the 1980’s.  While new to the world discoveries can radically change things, these discoveries often require decades to commercialize.

 

In the beginning of a six sigma initiative, high impact, level 3 and 4 problem solutions are relatively easy to find.  Once this low hanging fruit is picked, the solutions tend to be much more incremental.  It is precisely this situation where inventive problem solutions are needed.  Please share your experiences with six sigma initiatives as they mature.  Thanks.

What Customers Value

How do we know what features customers want in our products?  If it was a simple as asking them directly, then everyone would be developing innovative new products.  One key in identifying what customers will value in future product designs is recognition of functionality.  Customers don't value the "thing"; they value the functionality that the "thing" delivers.  When I was young I played music on a phonograph.  The primary function of the "thing" in this case is "Play Music".  Notice that the function is defined by the combination of a verb and a noun.  The phonograph delivers its functionality through a series of related functions as below.

When each of these functions is performed, there are harmful effects that also occur.  For example, when you "Rotate Vinyl Disk" you "Produce Vibrtion", when you "Vibrate Stylus" you "Wear Vinyl Disk", etc.  Some of these harmful functions are shown below.

 When people played music on phonographs, these harmful functions were accepted because "that's the way a phonograph is".  Some phonographs were better than others at minimizing the harmful effects, but they were there.  Now consider the evolution of devices that "Play Music".  From phonographs, we went to tape players, CD players and then iPods.  Each of these devices has the same primary function, "Play Music". These devices replaced their predecessors because they eliminated the harmful functions and resolved the contradictions that limited delivery of functionality in the previous generation.  The key to development of successful new generations of products is to identify amd resolve the underlying contradictions which inhibit delivery of functionality.

Do you have examples of where new generations of products have resolved limiting contradictions in the previous generation?