Innovation

Everyone needs to be innovative today. If you're not innovating, shame on you. But even innovation by itself is not enough as innovation should be accelerated. You need to beat your competitors in innovation, lest you be left behind. So, what exactly is innovation?

Apparently innovation is, according to Mckeown, the radical and incremental changes in thinking, in things, in processes, and in services. Apparently some also feel that it is synonymous to the output of a process. But wait a minute, this becomes interesting. It seems that innovation can be created with a process. In engineering a process is often understood to be a serious of operations done to an input to obtain some sort of output. Fair enough: let's devise a process for innovation. You take some inputs, for instance creative ideas, apply a magical formula and out comes innovation. And of course accelerating innovation just means that you engineer your black box to speed up the process.

Now, according to my understanding, an important part of a process is that the process creates consistent outputs. If I have a manufacturing process for creating nuts and bolts, it's not very nice if the variation between the individual nuts and bolts is too big. In business, processes are often used to ensure consistent actions and is the opposite of what rock stars and divas do: Sarbanes-Oxley attempts to ensure that the processes of companies are well defined and adhered to so that individuals within a company can't create new Enrons and Worldcoms. Innovative accounting is the enemy of Sarbanes-Oxley, so to say.

But wait, if the point of processes is to introduce standardized ways of working or applying transformations and operations to inputs, that doesn't really sound very radical. Alright, maybe we're talking about incremental change, then. Incremental isn't necessarily radical; it may be a fair deal slower and the impact more minute. But it is often understood that innovation should create something new, and it should be substantially different from the previous in order to be considered an innovation. If you consider a field where an entity, say a company, might have a very solid foothold, the company might be able to plan and devise a very clear roadmap of incremental enhancements. 3G comes to mind, for some odd reason. Would someone consider a minor increment in the evolution of a technology an innovation? I guess one could, but I would still venture that it is neither radical nor necessarily substantially different from prior things (sustaining technologies vs. disruptive technologies, if we cite Christensen).

Now, my hypothesis is that innovation cannot be manufactured with rigid and well defined processes. It's not something that can be really grasped and managed in a consistent enough way so that one could say that Innovation Process A, B, or C could consistently bring significant value. In fact, intuitively an innovation process sounds like an oxymoron. Most innovation management processes, I guess, start by assuming that a great enough set of "creative ideas" are present. The a screening process of sorts kicks in and gets rid of the ideas that aren't relevant or promising. Transforms and other actions are then performed in some way and finally out comes innovation, as previously noted. At different steps along the way the process gets rid of more and more ideas; the motivation comes from Darwin and the idea is that only the fit will survive and that eventually only the best and most valuable ideas persist. But the truly greatest innovations have been creations of coincidence. It should not be assumed that visionary people have been able to foresee the consequences of their doings, unlike what analysts and other people watching the world from the rear view mirror would have you believe. There's always too much chance and uncertainty involved.

Look at entrepreneurs. For every Google there are a million and one failures. Google didn't become what it now is because Larry and Sergey were that much more special than the competition. Of course they are incredibly talented, but so are the other guys. They just happened to be talented enough (threshold criteria), but also in the right place at the right time with the right idea. One shouldn't over-analyze things and downplay the significance of chance. Nassim Taleb has written very interesting books on the subject.

So to summarize, really great innovation can seldom be created with rigid processes enforced by bureaucrats. Innovation management processes may be fine and dandy, but they create predictable and minute things. Creative chaos is overlooked by technocrats and boards and the concept of innovation has been done a great disservice by the aforementioned parties, who have consciously or unconsciously devalued innovation and all things related by placing it on every Powerpoint slide that they can. It's disgusting. And that's why corporate innovation is silly; it'll just happen if it is allowed to and if the processes don't kill it. It's like love, you can't force it.