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Organizational Innovation
About
Innovation Network
- O r g a n i z a t i o n a l _ I n n o v a t i o n -
John Snyder
Whether your company has one employee or thousands, innovation is critical to your success. Innovation means, among other things:
- strategically staying ahead of changes in your market and industry (preferably leading those changes)
- bringing new products and services to market quickly and economically
- continually optimizing your business processes
- creating a workplace that brings out the best in people
There are many models of "innovation success" in the literature, but most
boil down to four things.
- Identifying the unexpressed needs of your customers
- Understanding your firm's values and unique strengths
- Inventing the solution your customers will eagerly adopt
- Delivering your new product or service on time with high quality
These four innovation "must haves" call upon a wide range of business
capabilities. Customer relations, market research, values assessment,
individual and team creativity, design skills, process coordination, quality assurance, progressive management -- these and others must be in place.
This is why piecemeal approaches don't work. Customer needs go unsatisfied without creative solutions. Creative solutions never see the light of day without innovation-friendly management, process coordination, and smooth operations. Solutions and needs get out of alignment without market research and quality assurance. And so on.
Innovation is easier than you may think. All viable companies have
"innovative moments," but most fail to sustain innovation over time by
neglecting to develop one or more of the necessary capabilities.
The "management fad cycle" can even reinforce this forgetfulness. During
the age of TQM, many companies drilled on quality assurance and customer relations, but neglected creativity, design, and systems perspective. Today some proponents of organizational learning lose sight of quality assurance and creativity in their enthusiasm for vision, systems
perspective, and dialogue. Some creativity gurus bet the farm on inspired craziness and positive thinking.
So how can we keep all the prerequisites of innovation in mind? Innovation is behavior, and I find it easiest to think about sustainable innovation in the form of rules of thumb. We will return to these maxims in future columns, but here are the headlines:
1. Live your values. Know your purpose. Achieve innovative momentum by consciously grounding your efforts in a purpose that itself is grounded in your values.
2. Think for yourself, but not by yourself. Genuine collaboration
is the key to customer relations, sustained creativity, and, surprisingly,
to quality assurance.
3. Stop reacting and start designing. Moving toward what you want,
using the raw materials at hand, (design) is more powerful than moving
away from what you don't want (problem solving).
4. Exploit the possibilities in your problems. The line between
creative breakthrough and despair is often thin. Learn how to walk on the
creative side of the line.
5. Don't compromise -- optimize. Don't settle for small local gains
when you can understand and optimize the whole system.
6. Increase information; decrease control. Only informed, empowered
people can innovate -- or support the innovation of others.
7. To innovate tomorrow, measure today. Measuring the effectiveness of
today's innovation is a concrete way of saying "we may still have something
to learn here."
In the spirit of "not thinking by myself," I would love to hear from you on the subject of how to create sustainable innovation. Drop me a line.
John R. Snyder is president of Innovation On Demand, Round Rock, TX. IOD collaboratively builds sustainable innovation into its clients' businesses. Contact him at (512) 218-4870 (phone & fax) or at jsnyder@bga.com