Innovation is a Many-Splendored Thing...
..but it does have one big enemy: isolation
There can scarcely be any doubt that innovation is among the most top-of-mind issues facing the world of business today. The need to innovate manifests itself in manifold organizational activities, always with the goal of boosting some dimension of organizational performance.
There have been myriad approaches, prescriptions and mantras purporting to help organizations boost their innovative prowess. If you look at the most successful among these - Open Innovation, "Crowdsourcing", Co-creation, User-centric Innovation - you will find that they appear to have quite a lot in common with each other. And if you think about it a bit more, you will realize that this similarity is not a result of coincidence. It is because each has at its core the same idea: that of opening out, inviting fresh perspectives, admitting new participants, allowing new combinations - in short, dissolving conventional boundaries.
Thus, the success of the above approaches to innovation is hardly a matter of happenstance. They succeed precisely because they all hold forth a very solid prescription. This prescription is that the organization needs to blur its boundaries with the environment, allowing the judicious flow of information, ideas and insights across what would conventionally be watertight walls*. Of course, the above idea applies equally well to boundaries within the organization too.Why is blurring or dissolving boundaries in the above manner so effective in spurring innovation?
One reason is that the simple problems have been solved long ago; the ones that really need innovative solutions are complex, having facets rooted in diverse disciplines, and typically need to be attacked with multi-disciplinary knowledge and skills that are not normally resident in any single organizational entity. Another reason is that such an opening out brings in new perspectives that help see things in a new light. Information, ideas and insights can thus combine in new ways. Very importantly, such an approach allows the risk so inherent to innovation to be shared by multiple entities.
What common term can we use to collectively refer to the above-mentioned approaches to innovation? 'Open innovation' appears to be a good candidate, but the term has already been appropriated to refer to one of the specific approaches. And so, to collectively denote the above innovation approaches, I will use the term 'Unplugged Innovation', where the word 'unplugged' is used in the sense of 'to set free'.
Here then, are a few pointers that serve to help thrive in the new, unplugged innovation landscape. I will elaborate on some of these with examples in future posts.
Create 'multidimensional' teams. Multidimensional teams embody competencies that span conventional disciplinary boundaries. Such teams are also ambidextrous, with the right balance of left-brain and right-brain skills. Assembling teams from diverse disciplines will not be easy, but has huge payoffs. Encourage individuals within the teams to become multidimensional too. And encourage the diversity of opinion inherent in such a set-up - it can be a valuable source of new knowledge.
Make walls porous. Promote interaction externally with alliance partners, consumers, academia, and internally across functions. Facilitate that interaction with incentivization, technology support and process changes if need be.
Dont just look for new ideas, old ones are often just as good! A concept considered mundane in one field is frequently novel in another. In fact this is one of the most powerful mechanisms by which unplugged innovation works, by allowing the transplantation of ideas from other disciplines. In the same vein, ideas don't have to be spectacular to lead to useful innovation - incremental or micro-innovations can translate into significant performance gains. Our research (some of which appears in this article) has shown how useful innovation often happens based on 'old' ideas or small incremental changes.Networks are your resources. Conventional resources such as capital and employees are of course important, but the unplugged approach opens up access to another kind of resource with immense potential: networks. Social networks between consumers / prospective consumers, alliances and relationships with academia, external experts, vendors, and other partner companies, are all valuable resources that can be drawn upon.
Accept failure (even encourage it!) If all your efforts at innovation are succeeding, it probably means you are operating well within the zone of comfort. Innovation efforts that are bold and audacious will almost certainly fail at least some of the time. Failure can of course also be costly and traumatic and so the risk-sharing aspect of the unplugged innovation approach is greatly helpful in raising failure-tolerance, and hence the ability to innovate.
Go evolutionary rather than big bang. It has come to be widely accepted that the best way to create a new product or service is by starting small and evolving toward completion, in interaction with users. The unplugged approach, with its emphasis on greater involvement of users as well as other parties, strongly supports this iterative development.
Pool. The unplugged approach by its very nature lends itself to pooling - of data, brainpower, patents,.... Do we have an integrated view of the customer and her need? This may need pooling of data from across multiple organizational units that touch the customer. Will our new product need to use some knowledge that is the intellectual property (IP) of someone else? Pooling of patents may be an answer.Unplugged innovation brings with it several challenges - the boundaries that are sought to be blurred have been acquired over time, and often have good reasons for their existence. Managing and motivating teams formed from multiple groups or disciplines needs tact and maturity. Coming from different backgrounds, such teams may not communicate well, at least initially. When reaching out across external boundaries, IP, contractual and regulatory considerations can be vexing.
Nevertheless, if done well, unplugged innovation can lead to enormous dividends. The conventional, 'closed' approach to innovation is no longer as potent as it used to be.The lonely innovator is a thing of the past. In the lexicon of modern-day business, innovation and isolation are firm opposites.
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* Barriers to information / knowledge flows are one kind of levee in business, a novel concept which our research has uncovered. Among other things, this line of thinking holds that removing or weakening such levees is a promising approach towards innovation.
Comments
When it comes to the open way of making innovation happen, one company that "gets it" is Intel.
Henry Chesbrough, in his book, "Open Innovation", quotes the head of one of Intel's research labs as saying, "the primary role of the labs is to link Intel with the outside research community".
A far cry indeed from the days when inhouse research labs were supposed to do all the research on their own, and to be the 'be-all and end-all' of corporate research!
Posted by: Sachin P (Sach) | February 7, 2008 03:50 PM
Thanks Sach for your input. You are right, corporate research once meant conceiving and commercializing great new ideas internally (in fact, the term "inhouse" research labs signifies this closed approach!).
Today, an increasingly important competency of corporate research labs is working with a variety of partners both for the conception and commercialization of new innovations.
Posted by: V P Kochikar | February 11, 2008 06:02 AM
One has to agree upon the fact that gone are the days when organisations are highly focused on 'strategic technologies or innovation'. To reinvent the changing trends and technologies, organisations need to impose 'unplugged innovation' as a strategy. In addition, distructive innovations are also essential to be aligned to the market needs.
Posted by: Virat Jhala | March 27, 2008 12:23 PM