Everyone seems to agree that innovation is important. Consider the following:
• Studies show that innovation increases profits and returns for investors.
• Being innovative can help you make better business decisions.
• Focused innovation can also increase productivity and reduce employee turnover.
• Searching for ‘innovation’ on Amazon within business books returns 5,757 entries.
Even allowing for duplicates, this indicates a lot of interest in the topic!
So why aren’t more companies innovating more often? Can innovation really work within a corporate structure?
Are you Darkmind?
“Darkminding” is a term I use to explain two of the natural ways we think:
• Stick to what is known: We don’t like things to change, so even if we could be more creative, we resist developing new ideas because they create risks. We “watch out for the dark” by keeping it and trying not to let in any light (ie new ideas). This is another way of saying that we like the status quo.
• Avoid trying to develop new ideas: it’s too much work! Why think new things when the old way still works? We keep our minds dark and avoid the effort of creating light.
Darkminding can be quite useful for some things. If you had to reconsider every step in every process you carry out, you would never achieve anything. Routine can be efficient and help us accomplish things that we do regularly.
But unfortunately the world changes, and often the process we’ve developed doesn’t. However, these changes happen very gradually, so it’s hard to notice when the normal routine becomes less useful. If things start to go wrong, a few tweaks to what we’re doing and we might be right back where we were. But if the fundamentals have changed, these minor differences suddenly become very big problems.
All of this is compounded by a corporate structure that often rewards, in subtle and more overt ways, sticking to how things are done and protecting its own area of business. Change in a company often means a threat to status and control, making ideas dangerous.
How a company can create a solution
If our brains naturally work that way, you might be wondering “Can innovation fit into my company?” Fortunately, our brains also work in more creative ways that you can encourage, based on facilitating our initial reaction to ‘Darkmind’ at the first glimpse of a new idea. It can be hard work, but realizing our limitations and implementing some of the changes below can create an atmosphere of innovation in any company.
1. Why should I care?
The first step is to understand why innovation is important. There are several ways to accomplish this, but the most important are those that provide information about your specific business. You can produce multiple studies and statistics that show the value of innovation, but without relating it to your company it will not have the same impact.
what are your competitors doing? You need to understand how they innovate and whether you are up to their standards. Comparing yourself to others outside of your industry can also give you a benchmark to aim for. An analysis like this will give you insight into where you are falling behind and falling prey to more creative competitors.
You also need to know how big a gap is between where you want to be, say, three years from now and how long it will take to get there. If you want to increase revenue by 20% in that time, and assuming some of your products and offers become obsolete or obsolete, how are you going to make up the difference? If new product revenues are to provide part of that turnover, how many new innovations are required? If your analysis indicates that two or three new products will be needed, it can often mean that you need to have a minimum pipeline of 6 or more viable ideas. The gap may be bigger than you think, but you won’t know until you check.
2. Make ‘business as usual’ unusual
Let me be deliberately provocative for a moment. People need motivation to come up with ideas and embrace a culture of innovation. A radical but effective way to do this, suggested by Peter Drucker in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, is to review every area of your business at least every three years and make it clear that they will be on trial for life. Areas of poor performance should be rigorously reviewed and removed if necessary. This approach focuses minds on new developments and ideas and prevents people from getting stuck and going with the flow. If you know you’ll need to explain how you’ll be profitable in the future, you’ll need to be able to explain the gap and how you’ll close it. Innovation is the best way to make your case. If this sounds scary, the pressure the market will eventually put on an underperforming area is often worse. Globalization only amplifies this pressure.
3. Make it part of the system
No matter what systems you have in place, make innovation part of what you do every day. If you’re reviewing monthly budgets versus actuals, add a section on the status of current product development. If you have regular meetings with staff, add a five-minute slot to allow people to discuss recent innovations they’ve developed. Make innovation seem important and it will soon become part of the culture. Don’t forget that you should also take some time to step away from your regular job and go through some techniques to come up with new ideas that may lead to new products, market approaches, or cost savings. Just put some time in your journal! Remember, if you make it a habit, it will be easier to keep doing it.
You also need a system to track the innovations that are being developed, including who is doing most of the work in this area. You can then ensure that you have a new and growing list of new ideas waiting to be developed. You can also reward people who are continually innovating. Someone should be accountable to the CEO for this list and for growing the number of ideas produced. Without a system, you won’t be able to monitor where innovation is needed, and you won’t know how to use all the skills of your most innovative employees.
4. Create connections
Creativity is connection, so the highest priority is fostering people’s ability to do new things and meet new people. Innovation is killed by people working in silos, passing product from one area to the next. Your company can no longer survive with the following mentality:
• “Here you have engineering. We designed it, now you build it.”
• “Here’s marketing. We’ve built it, now let people know.”
• “Here you have a sales department. We have announced it, now you sell it.”
Everyone must work together, from the beginning, on ideas or services to ensure that they are a perfect fit for the client’s needs. The added benefit is that the more a diverse team works together, the more unexpected innovations will emerge. Try mixing people up and see what happens.
Another way to get people to think differently is to move them. Make seconds easy, both for internal and external movements. And when they’re free, make people aware that some of their time should be spent thinking about how their experience can improve what the company does in other areas.
The need for leadership
Some of the above ideas could be easily implemented, in fact they can be done without people realizing that you are encouraging innovation. Behind it all, however, is our human inclination to prefer the way things are, so a lot of work needs to be done to implement a fully working process. Which leads to a need for leadership. Innovation always brings uncertainty and the top managers and directors of the company need to define a vision so that everything seems less scary. Can you help people see, feel and know that this is the most important problem facing the organization? Can you make the vision so vivid and compelling that people naturally want to go to that future? That is often the hardest part of driving innovation.