What Has to Be Managed?
Let’s switch our attention to understanding innovation as a verb – a ‘doing word’. What are the actions involved in innovation and how can we use this understanding to help us manage the process better? What comes into our minds when we think of innovation taking place in an organization?
If someone asked you ‘When did you last use your Spengler?’ they might well be greeted by a quizzical look. But if they asked you when you last used your ‘Hoover’ – the answer would be fairly easy. Yet it was not Mr Hoover who invented the vacuum cleaner in the late nineteenth century but one J. Murray Spengler. Hoover’s genius lay in taking that idea and making it into a commercial reality. In similar vein the father of the modern sewing machine was not Mr Singer, whose name jumps to mind and is emblazoned on millions of machines all round the world. It was Elias Howe who invented the machine in 1846 and Singer who brought it to technical and commercial fruition. Perhaps the godfather of them all in terms of turning ideas into reality was Thomas Edison who during his life registered over 1000 patents. Products for which his organization was responsible include the light bulb, 35 mm cinema film and even the electric chair. Many of the inventions for which he is famous weren’t in fact invented by him – the electric light bulb for example – but were developed and polished technically and their markets opened up by Edison and his team. More than anyone else Edison understood that invention is not enough – simply having a good idea is not going to lead to its widespread adoption and use.
Unlike Messrs Spengler, Howe and the many others who tried and failed to get their inventions across, smart managers realize that innovation is an extended process with a number of key stages. More important, they avoid thinking in partial or simplistic terms about the process and instead develop rich and integrated models of how it works – which they can then use to organize and manage the process. Take a look at Table 1.1 and think about how you would design a system for innovation which avoided some of the traps on the right-hand side.
One of the problems we have in managing anything is that how we think about it shapes what we do about it. So if we have a simplistic model of how innovation works – for example, that it’s just about invention – then that’s what we will organize and manage. We might end up with the best invention department in the world – but there is no guarantee that people would ever actually want any of our wonderful inventions! If we are serious about managing innovation, then we need to check on our mental models and make sure we’re working with as complete a picture as possible. Otherwise we run risks like those in Table 1.1.
Rather than the cartoon image of a light bulb flashing on above someone’s head, we need to think about innovation as an extended sequence of activities – a process. At heart innovation is a sequence of such activities involved in turning ideas and possibilities into reality.
To make this happen organizations need to generate, select and implement. And this involves things like:
Generate innovation possibilities
Scan and search their environments (internal and external) to pick up and process signals about potential innovation. These could be needs of various kinds, or opportunities arising from research activities somewhere, or pressures to conform to legislation, or the behaviour of competitors – but they represent the bundle of stimuli to which the organization must respond. Strategically select from this set of potential triggers for innovation those things which the organization will commit resources to doing. Even the best-resourced organization can’t do everything, so the challenge lies in selecting those things which offer the best chance of developing a competitive edge
Generate Select Implement
Implement – make innovation happen Having chosen an option, organizations need to grow it from an idea through various stages of development to final launch – as a new product or service in the external market place or a new process or method within the organization. On the way they have to solve a host of problems (like where to get hold of the knowledge they need, how to find and integrate different groups of people with key skills, how to get the bugs and wrinkles out of the emerging innovation, how to steer the project against tight budgets of time and cost, etc.) and they have to do all this against a background of high uncertainty!
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