Every business knows it needs to innovate. What isn’t so clear is how to go about it. There is no shortage of pundits, blogs and conferences that preach the gospel of agility, disruptive innovation, open innovation, lean startups or whatever else is currently in vogue. It can all be overwhelming.
The reality is that there is no one “true” path to innovation. In researching my book, Mapping Innovation, I found that organizations of all shapes and sizes can be great innovators. Some are lean and nimble, while others are large and bureaucratic. Some have visionary leaders, others don’t. No one model prevails.
However, there are common principles that we can apply. While there is no “right way” to innovate, there are plenty of wrong ways. So perhaps the best way forward is to avoid the pitfalls that can undermine innovative efforts in your organization and kill promising new solutions. Here are five things every business should know about innovation.
All too often, stories about great innovators read like superhero movies. The protagonist goes on a holy quest, overcoming rivals and naysayers along the way. These tales may be inspiring, but they are rarely helpful. The truth is that great innovators are real people, with human flaws. None are perfect.
Einstein could be terribly cruel and his inability to let go of his idea that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe” doomed his later career to irrelevance. Henry Ford dabbled in racism and anti-Semitism. Vannevar Bush, who did as much as anyone to build the modern age, engaged in behavior that would be considered corrupt today.
Yet it is often mistakes and failures that we can learn the most from. By understanding how great innovators struggled, we can learn how they overcame challenges to contribute something significant to the world. So when you hit the beach this summer, you might want to think about picking one of these up to learn how innovation really happens.
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In the middle of the 20th century, IBM used its headquarters in New York City as a showroom of tomorrow. Passersby could look into the window and see the newest mainframe on display, promising an exciting technological future. It was the dawn of the computer age, but marketers were largely out of the picture.
It would be hard to explain the the “Mad Men” back in the 1960s that someday those big, hulking machines would shrink down small enough to fit in our pockets, that these devices would have screens and that they would, to a large extent, replace TVs as the dominant driver of commerce.
Today, as Moore’s Law is slowly petering to an end, we’re on the brink of a new era and, in time, marketing will be transformed once again in ways that are hard to see right now. Over the next decade marketers will need to begin to shift to the post-digital world of computing. This next transformation promises to be at least as revolutionary as the last one.
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Becoming a successful executive is a fairly linear path. You start at the bottom and learn to solve basic problems in your field or industry. As you gain experience and improve your skills you are given more responsibility, begin to manage teams and work diligently to set up the practices and processes to help your team succeed.
The best executives make those around them better, by fostering a positive work environment, minimizing drama and providing strategy and direction that will enable the team meet its objectives. That’s how you deliver consistent results and continue to rise up through the ranks to the top of your profession.
At some point, however, you need to do more than just plan and execute strategy, you have to innovate. Every business model is disrupted eventually. Changes in technology, competitive landscape and customer needs make that inevitable and, unfortunately, executive experience doesn’t equip your for it. Here’s how you can make the shift from operations to innovation.
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In 1938, Bill Hewitt and David Packard, two graduates of Stanford University’s engineering program, decided to start a company in a rented garage with an initial investment of $538. In the decades that followed, their company, Hewlett Packard, became one of the most prominent technology firms in the world.
They also planted the seed for what is now known as the Silicon Valley garage startup. Today, we don’t see anything unusual about ambitious young entrepreneurs with an idea to change the world scraping together a prototype, attracting capital from venture investors and disrupting industry giants.
Yet now we’re entering a new era of innovation and things are no longer so simple. For many so-called “hard technologies” – those that do not involve software or consumer gadgets — a prototype typically costs millions of dollars and requires sophisticated equipment to develop. That’s much harder to acheive, but these three companies are working to make it happen.
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“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have written (he didn’t) and since that time thousands of mousetraps have been patented. Still, despite all that creative energy and all those ideas, the original “snap trap,” invented by William Hooker in 1894, remains the most popular.
We’ve come to glorify ideas, thinking that more of them will lead to better results. This cult of ideas has led to a large cottage industry of consultants that offer workshops to exercise our creative capabilities with tools like brainstorming and SWOT analysis. We are, to a large extent, still chasing better mousetraps.
Still, one thing I constantly hear from executives I work with is that no one wants to hear about their ideas. The truth is that, just like all those mousetrap patents, most ideas are useless, very few are original and many have been tried before. So if you’re frustrated that nobody listens to your ideas, here’s why that happens and what you can do to fix it.
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A decade ago, clean energy seemed like a pipe dream. Solar panels, windmills and electric cars were widely considered to be something for wealthy tree huggers to assuage their conscience, rather than components of a serious energy policy. Now, however, Morgan Stanley predicts that renewables will overtake fossil fuels by 2020.
The appeal of clean energy has gone way beyond climate change and the environment. It’s now being increasingly driven by basic economics. Wind and solar energy have achieved grid parity in many places and, over the next decade, clean energy will become far cheaper than traditional sources.
The sticking point is energy storage. While today’s dominant technology, lithium-ion, has made great strides, it is approaching theoretical limits. So we need to discover fundamentally new chemistries in order to continue to lower costs and increase the clean energy footprint. To get there, we’ll need to forge a new partnership between government and private industry.
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In 2004, I found myself in the unusual position of leading a major news organization during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. During those heady, but confusing days, I struggled to understand the events around me, without much success. It seemed like a strange and mysterious force was propelling events forward.
In the decade and a half since then, I have studied many social movements, both historical and more recent, in an effort to better grasp those events, speaking to revolutionaries of all stripes. One thing I have found is that while all social movements are very different, those that actually succeed are remarkably similar in their principles.
As a diehard football (and Eagles!) fan, I have watched the anthem protests unfold with interest. It is admirable that world class athletes are willing to risk their livelihoods and reputations for a higher cause, but disappointing how little real progress has been made in terms of concrete results. Here’s how you can make your efforts more effective.
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Historically, building technology had been about capabilities and features. Engineers and product designers would come up with new things that they thought people wanted, figure out how to make them work and ship “new and improved” products. The result was often things that were maddeningly difficult to use.
That began to change when Don Norman published his classic, The Design of Everyday Things and introduced concepts like dominant design, affordances and natural mapping into industrial design. The book is largely seen as pioneering the user-centered design movement. Today, UX has become a thriving field.
Yet artificial intelligence poses new challenges. We speak or type into an interface and expect machines to respond appropriately. Often they do not. With the rising popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Alexa and Google Home, we have a dire need for clear principles for human-AI interactions. Two researchers at IBM have embarked on a journey to do just that.
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Entrepreneurship in America recently hit a 40 year low, with far less business creation and new jobs coming from startups than in the past. Productivity numbers show a similar trend, with levels today far below what they were in previous decades. Clearly, these trends are troubling signs that need to be reversed.
To many, this is surprising because we seem to see innovation all around us, from smarter smartphones to speakers that talk to us and respond to our commands. However, the truth is that information and communication technology makes up only 6% of advanced economies. Silicon Valley can’t build the future alone.
Even more disturbing, this decline didn’t begin recently, but way back in the 1970s, with just a brief respite during the late 1990s and early 2000s. So if we want to revive innovation and entrepreneurship in America we have to fix some deep rooted-problems and reverse long-standing trends. Here are three basic things that we can do that will put us on the right path.
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