Who Speaks For Innovation?
I began writing this post last week but wasn’t sure where I was headed - now my thinking has crystalized. It all started with the Business Week article regarding the effect of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) on 3M’s innovation processes. Something about the 3M situation bothered me. After I wrote about the Institute for Systems Biology, my perspective on innovation practices changed substantially, but it wasn’t until I considered the two organizations side by side that the source of my 3M frustration surfaced.
Placed side by side, the two organizations are hard to compare. ISB is a young, non-profit R&D group, whereas 3M is a huge established corporation. ISB produces research and the technologies that result are spun off to other companies - 3M develops, markets and manufactures their own products. The only thing they seem to have in common is the need to innovate. If ISB doesn’t produce revolutionary results on a regular basis they will have a hard time securing funding. If 3M doesn’t produce new and improved products, they’ll lose market share. Market leaders create new products - nearly 50% of today’s gross revenue comes from products released within the past 5 years. So being innovative goes hand in hand with being a market leader.
The problem 3M is experiencing seems to come from the fact that, as a manufacturing company, 3M’s operations are process-intensive. ”Innovation,” as it pertains to coming up with ideas for novel new products and solutions, is but a small part of what they do in the big scheme. This makes a company like 3M an extremely attractive target for the LSS crowd. Processes for manufacturing, marketing, etc. can be improved, streamlined, made more effective. As I’ve posted before, improvement is innovation too, but I’m narrowing the context of ‘innovation’ in this post to mean ‘doing different, breakthrough change.’
Regarding innovation, ISB doesn’t suffer that disadvantage. ISB can focus 100% of its efforts on producing novel research, partially due to the fact that systems biology is literally virgin territory. They have built themselves from the ground up as an innovative organization, and in doing so increased the probability that their research will generate revolutionary results.
How well would LSS go over at ISB? What would LSS think of ISB? Maybe LSS would take inventory of research notes et. al. and render judgement on the ‘efficiency’ of their process - ‘you’ll be more efficient if it only takes you X ideas to produce those results.’
And this is the crux of my problem - there is no ‘novel breakthrough innovation’ version of LSS - a process that can be implemented anywhere and produces results. Too many believe that breakthrough innovation is the result of random, accidental creatitity. What we have are bits and pieces of a system floating around in the various ’skunkworks’ and idea labs of corporate America, with nothing to tie them together. In contrast, LSS is a system that can be taught, and in turn has taken a life of it’s own - complete with a culture of “LSS Illuminati.” As a result, LSS carries an air of legitimacy. There are no “Breakthough Innovation Illuminati” to counter the LSS proponents, and I believe that is what 3M is experiencing right now. Who speaks for innovation? Who speaks for creative thinking processes?
Over the weekend I concentrated on the ‘bits and pieces’ of what would constitute the framework of a breakthrough innovation ’system.’ This represents my current collective thinking on the topic, it might evolve. I don’t think you could assemble anything as exacting as LSS, but you can increase the probability of successful breakthrough innovation in this manner. You can invision this as an ‘Department of Innovation’ or a ‘Advanced Business Initiatives’ group that interfaces with various other departments. The components:
1. The people need to be innovators as I have described them here. All four major values - creativity, collegiality, pragmatism, and observation - have to be present. And just like at ISB, they should be a cross-disciplinary group - the more diverse their backgrounds the better. It also might be helpful to establish an internal facilitator ‘guild’ - people with facilitation skills to lead problem solving sessions as needed.
2. Again, taking a cue from ISB - their workplace should be as open as possible, encouraging constant collisions, small group meetings, anything to spur collaboration. “All of us are smarter than one of us.”
3. Once you have the people and the workplace, establish productivity goals. The individuals, as well as the the group itself, should have some sort of “innovation quota.” The concept of establishing an innovation quota is not new - Thomas Edison, according to creative thinking expert Michael Michalko, had a strict personal quota of producing a minor product every ten days and a major product every six months. The results of his personal quota-based innovation system are undeniable - he held 1,093 patents at the time of his death. In order to meet this quota, he had to proliferate ideas. A company might decide they wanted the group to produce a significant product improvement every month, and a major breakthough new product every six months. The best way to proliferate ideas is through focused, facilitated sessions - another benefit of cultivating a facilitator guild. If your innovation function is geared to producing results, it is less likely to be vulnerable to LSS-type analysis.
4. Once the goals are in place, start gathering the low hanging fruit. The group should be adept in ’strategic transfer.’ Strategic transfer jumpstarts revolutionary innovation. A large part of their time should be spent identifying technologies and products in other worlds that can be adapted to theirs. They need to be experts in the lateral connections creative thinking technique. They should also seek access to the ‘failed idea museum’ of other companies - fortunes have been made off the failed ideas of others. The harvest: many ideas for improvements and several for breakthrough adaptations.
5. Finally, the group needs to be pushed into the creative stratosphere to generate revolutionary breakthroughs internally. Part of the innovation quota must involve cultivating crazy, off the wall ideas - the more abstract the better. It is through these ideas that novel, revolutionary innovation occurs. What separates idea from reality is the ability to determine the essence of the crazy idea and how to convert it into a practical solution. Facilitators can make this process more effective.
As I said, this is a framework. Again I invite comments - what is of value, what have I missed?
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[...] “continuous improvement” and is embodied in disciplines like Lean Six Sigma and Kaizen. As I have discussed before, these types of innovation benefit from accepted systems and training/certification [...]