Managing Innovation
Innovation has always excited me. It meant doing something
better and different from what was expected. I have invariably moved on to
roles and opportunities which required innovation. In each of those roles, when
it was felt that we had innovated enough at that point, I have been lucky to
move on to a different role. Over the
course of my career in both IT Products and IT Services organizations, I have
had opportunities to both manage innovation and be managed to innovate in structured
and unstructured ways. Based on my experiences with innovation- first hand, observed
and hearsay, I have tried to pen down my gospel for managing innovation.
My gospel
for managing innovation:
1.
Quality over Quantity
One of my most important learning in
managing innovation is that when it comes to innovation, quality and not
quantity is the way to go. What I mean by that is, while it might seem very
rational and logical to institutionalize innovation across large organizations,
however I believe innovating with teams, processes, projects and people in a
well thought out and a hand-picked manner beats the results from large scale
institutionalized innovation hands down. In most scenarios, when we try our
hands at mass innovation, we often get entangled in dealing with huge volumes
of data and ideas and are caught up in the process of innovation and tend to miss
the real point of innovation.
2.
Remove the middle men
The well-practiced and often blindly
followed practice of delegation creates bandwidth for people at the top of the
hierarchy to focus on more important aspects of work. However with innovation,
delegating the responsibilities and outcomes to the wrong set of people plays
havoc. Mass communication of innovation mailers from unknown or unrelated mail
ids or from the HR department, marketing or even 3rd party hot-shot
consulting houses, gives the impression
of the initiative being yet another initiative for academic reasons and rarely
excites the ones who ought to be excited. Hence it is imperative for the team that is
fully focused on creating innovation (different teams in different pockets of
the organization) to be from a relevant in-house function who reaches out to
the rest of the people who they reckon can create innovation. Other than this,
the team that is reaching out should be made popular (known to people in those
respective pockets) and the seriousness of the initiative should be elevated in
branding and also reflected in the org reporting structures.
3.
Strategy Eats Execution for Breakfast
In the words of Peter Drucker, “culture
eats strategy for breakfast”. There is nothing better for innovation than
having a culture of innovation. However, what Drucker’s famous quote does not
reveal is the fact that you can come up
with a great strategy a lot quicker than you can create a great new culture.
Before splashing the ”I” word all over the organization, the leadership needs
to decide why they need to innovate, where they need to innovate and who they
need, to innovate.
Some of the typical innovation happens
in IT Products and Services companies in the following aspects:
·
Business Model Innovation
·
Technology/ Product Innovation
·
Service Delivery Innovation
·
Business Process Innovation
o
Incremental Innovation
o
Adjacency Innovation
While innovating across of all these
areas and across all functions of an organization is ideal, it is important for
the leadership to decide the order of priority on areas of innovation that they
perceive are going to yield maximum results. Based on this, the right kind of stakeholders
should be subjected to the right amount of stimuli to minimize dilution of
innovation and to maximize results from innovation.
For critical areas of innovation like
creating new products or creating new service lines, leadership needs to avoid
the temptation of saddling people with “business as usual” responsibilities
with the bottom line for innovating. I am surprised that after years of failing
to do new things by going to people who are adept at doing old things,
organizations continue to go to them despite fully knowing that people in their
interest of accumulating more power, never say no to new responsibilities
despite their lack of expertise, energy or enthusiasm for the new workload.
Hence it is in the organizations own interest to not let limited people control
everything and instead get more people to manage the many things that are of
stated importance to the organization.
It is also important for the
organization to create goals that are win-win for both the innovating team as
well as the team that will have to eventually absorb the innovation in its
service line or product line and convert it into a “business as usual”
activity.
Unless the strategy is in place, the
org structure is sorted out and leadership is in alignment, tireless pursuit of
innovation is not as much fun and rewarding as it ought to be.
4.
Un-Process
When it comes to the food you eat,
lower the processing, better the results. It is no different for innovation. Simpler
the process, better the results! Prefer easy to use systems for idea submission.
Do not have the Ideator provide too much information. Do not have too many
rigid templates that mandates to provide data that will probably be needed a
year down the line. To be honest, the innovator has a very high chance of
getting the market size or the total available market completely wrong. You
might as well not ask for that information at the time of submission of an
idea. Have relevant workflows for approvals and filtration. Route to the right
personnel for first round of evaluation. A small team of say 5 people
evaluating fifty thousand ideas is a bad joke on everyone involved.
5.
Different Strokes for Different Folks
Innovation,
if decided to be done across the organization, need not just involve one small
central team to run the show. Instead it is better to decentralize the process
of innovation across an organization. Different departments in an organization
can be initiated to innovation at different points of time based on the prioritization
by the leadership. Key members
(innovation ambassadors) are to be identified in each of these pockets and they
need to carry the responsibility of getting their unit/department to innovate.
While for some departments, like enabling functions, while the focus could be
usually incremental process innovations it is not unheard of such innovations
from non-core functions leading to creation of new revenue earning service
lines. Once the innovation ambassadors in each of these units are apprised of
what is the prioritization and expectation of leadership on innovation, it
should be best left to them to determine and to go after the kind of innovation
they would like to see in their respective functions.
6.
Ideator need not be the executor
Another temptation a lot of organization succumbs to is to
pass on the burden of proving an idea to the Ideator himself. While often, the
Ideator has enough passion to take the idea forward, it is very likely the
Ideator may not be a great executor and as a result a great idea often runs
into mediocre execution and does not hit the mark it had intended to. Also, the
original Ideator is often too personally attached to the original idea and is
reluctant to dispassionately view the review comments or feedback received to
improve upon the idea. Hence it is often a good practice to keep the Ideator
and the executor different while keeping the Ideator fully looped into the
developments.
7.
Manage the IP and IPR arising out of
innovation
Often in IT services organizations and
even in product organizations, it is important to protect or to have clear entitlements
to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) created as a result innovation to be put
to commercial use.
Following are some of the ways to
protect IP created as a result of innovation in different contexts:
If the IP created
is as a result of innovation on a customer’s engagement:
·
Contracting
·
Co-creation
·
Abstraction of the innovation
If the IP created is as a result of
internal innovation:
·
Plagiarism checks/ IP Contamination Checks
·
Establishing Freedom to Operate (FTO)
·
Patenting/ Patent cluster creation
·
Defensive Publications
If the IP created is as a result of
innovation in conjunction with a partner or a 3rd party:
·
Alliances/Co-Creation
·
Acquisition
·
Patent Procurement
8.
Mix, Match and Pivot
Finally, while it is important to have
a strategy and plan for innovation, often results are obtained by pivoting on
the original innovation. For example a business model innovation on top of an existing
product/technology may outrun a far superior technology/product innovation, but
riding on a traditional business model. It is very important for an
organization to be nimble, flexible and open about leveraging its innovation in
many other ways than what was originally planned.
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