How can today's companies harness creativity and innovation to help the strategic focus of their business?
...kols goes on to elaborate on this definition, stating that it is ‘a complex web of thoughts, ideas, insights, experiences, goals, expertise, perceptions and expectations that provides general guidance for specific actions in pursuit of particular ends.’ At this point we can, maybe, start to see an alignment between ‘innovation’ and the business strategy. Ideas, insights and experiences are all key to innovation. Innovation can and must be managed as part of the business strategy for two reasons. Firstly the organisation needs to ensure that there is a flow of quality ideas that are aligned to the values of the business in the early stages. These ideas are often stimulated by the insights and experiences of the consumer. Secondly they need to focus resources on fast-tracking the right ideas through later steps to get new products, services or process improvements to market faster, with higher success rates than the rest of the industry. Without a strong link to the business strategy, neither of these tasks is possible as there would be conflict over alignment with the business values, prioritisation and resource allocation to name but three. An organisation’s leadership, mission and values, together with the way people are both challenged and supported, inspires employees to pursue innovation with passion, energy and commitment. With such a supportive culture, people will come up with the ideas for improving the way they work; with suggestions for improving the products and services the company offers and commit to delivering exemplary service to the customers or consumers. The challenge is with the leadership team to create the environment for success, promoting innovation and building creativity into the organisation's highest level thinking and taking a new attitude to risk which will allow innovative solutions to create dramatic business growth. This implies the need for transformational change within the organisation and the requirement to cultivate a new style of corporate behaviour that is comfortable with new ideas, change, risk and even failure. Taking the Necessary Risk Harvard Professor Clayton M. Christensen has conducted comprehensive research into all elements of risk associated with innovation. In his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma3, he discusses people’s perceptions of risk in relation to disruptive innovation. ‘Managers may view creation of new markets as risky propositions, in the face of contrary evidence, because they do not understand non-existent markets; similarly, they may regard investment in sustaining technologies, even those with high intrinsic risk, as safe because they understand the market need.’ Risk is therefore a difficult subject to grasp. Disruptive innovations tend to take us beyond an environment that we know and understand. They often seriously under perform in the early days as the concept is beyond the current understanding of the consumer. But as we have seen from disruptive innovations over the past couple of decades, such as the low cost airlines, on-line book retailing, digital cameras, mobile phones, etc, it is often necessary to take the risk when even market research is unable to supply guidance or evidence to support your decision-making process. This increasingly unsettled and disruptive environment was touched on in The Innovation Wave4 in which author Bettina von Stamm conducted an interview with Gary Hamel of Strategos. He stated that “Success is becoming harder and harder to defend as the world becomes an increasingly discontinuous place. We need to blend all of the virtues of optimisation with a new set of virtues that encourage experimentation, imagination, diversity and creativity.” So how do we generate a greater acceptance of the levels of risk associated with a more innovative culture? The development of the right processes to sit behind the innovation programme is a key driver to Board level acceptance. Though innovation itself is seen as being unconstrained by process, it is vital not to lose sight of the need for process once the idea delivery has commenced. Traditional stage-gate processes such as the one below5 are often used within organisations to ensure greater discrimination of the projects they progress. It introduces discipline into what is ordinarily a chaotic process. The intention is to reduce any possible risk and ensure that further investment in product development is only committed if the project meets the business requirements at the key decision points. Sophisticated risk assessment models which can be built in at the latter stages of this stage-gate process are another useful tool to prevent the implications of excessive risk. Care needs to be taken, however, that these decision points are not too early in the process to rule out potentially beneficial projects or too late to put the business in jeopardy. Leaders and managers need to commit to and work with this process, accepting that there will be a high percentage of projects which fail but that the processes will ensure that failure comes early and thus reduces any negative exposure both financially and publicly. Once the leadership team are convinced that there is a robust structure in place for reviewing potential projects and driving those likely to fit the business strategy and values, the work on cultural change can commence. Internalising the Process This is clearly a new way of operating for many organisations, particularly those steeped in tradition and business process. The model developed by the Fellows of Innovation University and reproduced in Appendix 1 summarises the context for innovation. Entitled ‘Innovation DNA™’ it presents the broad scope of what it takes to create an ‘innovation organisation’ and the key requirements for success. Again, the strength and commitment of the leadership team comes out on top. What it also clearly states is that nothing happens without people. Every organisation has a "personality" that comes from its collective and shared beliefs, attitudes, behaviours and most of all, from the relationships among its people. It is this “personality” that has to develop to embrace a more creative and innovative culture. Personality changes, however, do not happen by chance and are a slow process. Questions may be raised about addressing cultural issues first before launching an innovation programme. The answer, however, is that an innovation programme will help to change the culture of the organisation. If communications are engaging, leadership ‘walk the talk’, staff are encouraged to participate and strict pre-defined lead-times for communication to submitters of ideas are maintained, then this will help t...