Managing Innovation at the Organisational Level

Strategic Importance of Innovation in Organisations

I have written much about the limitations of continuous improvement and the role of creativity in injecting new avenues of improvement into an organisation and in thinking outside the natural laws that govern the technologies that define a current produce, service or process.

Each time a new source of improvement or breakthrough is found, the propensity for innovations come into existence. The capability to identify this source and the capacity turn it into innovations is an advantage that organisations must afford to have in order to stay competitive.

From Managing Innovations to Managing the Engine that Creates Them

However, organisations cannot depend on a single improvement or innovation to stay competitive. In a dynamic market, competition is nearly perfect and organisations do not have long periods to enjoy the gains from their own innovation. The lifecycles of products, services and processes are getting shorter as more organisations have learnt to innovate and are capable of taking their own innovations to the market.

This means organisations need to move away from managing an innovation or a number of innovations; seeing them from conceptualisation to commercialisation, to managing the pipeline that creates these innovations. This is the engine that is capable of producing new innovation to replace the ones that are currently decaying in their lifecycles.

However, to manage innovation at this level, Organisational Development (OD) practitioners need to recognise the kinks in the pipeline. These kinks are the outputs of an overactive organisational immunity system working against all things that may create instability ln the organisation's current social order and topple its existing structures. This means, innovations do not flow through the organisation very well and regular interventions are needed to nudge the ideas and the innovations that come from them forward.

Seven Kinks of the Innovation Pipeline

Before we talk about the types of intervention, let's examine these seven kinks in the pipeline:

The Challenges of Imperfect Market

There are many individuals in organisations with ideas and solutions. Equally many are individuals looking for them. The challenge is that there is little knowledge in the market who and where these suppliers and buyers are and this create exchange inefficiencies in the organisational market of ideas and solutions.

Projectisation Challenges

Many ideas with breakthrough potentials are often given up because very few individuals are willing to stick their heads out to turn these into projects in order to draw value out of them. This does not mean that the motivation for enterprise is found lacking amongst the employees in the organisation. It suggests that people are turned off by the organisation's aversion towards uncertainty, its unforgiving nature towards failures, and an overly myopic focus on short-termism.

Challenges of Time and Space

Project teams face much inertia when they try to get their projects started. Some of these include finding the right members, right problem definition, and right range and scope. When things become tough, there is always a tendency for these teams to fall back on routine work methods and proven solutioning approaches, and symptomatic rather then underlying fundamentals issues get solved.

Challenges of Social Constraints

Research has revealed that leaders have the tendency to unknowingly introduce organisational and social constraints that prevent creativity and innovation to flourish in their own organisation.

Organisations may formulate and implement seemingly well meaning policies that have unexpected consequences that constraints the flow of ideas or innovations within the organisation. Organisations have both formal and informal structures that govern the distribution of power, influence and control between stakeholders. The flow of ideas and innovations in the organisation could be channelled or halted by these elements and the leaders needs to be sensitive to their use and the impact they create.

Challenges of Participation

Social interactions are always at the centre of creative ideas and innovations generation. The willingness of various players in innovation - the fund managers, entrepreneurs, protectors, advocators and promoter, to believe and participate in these interactions will determine the projects’ success.

Therefore, the quality and frequency of these interactions cannot be taken lightly and has to be cultivated over time. This requires the skills and acumen of the pipeline architects and the recognition that these players have to play two roles - the role of managing today and the responsibilities of managing for tomorrow now.

Challenges of Scarcity

The availability and accessibility to resources can make or break the project. Money is not the only resource teams need. They also need management approval, support and protection as these are capable of influencing the motivation, make-up and dynamics of the project team. Often, teams are frustrated and jaded because of the lack of such resources. Jaded individuals could create long term impact for the organisation as their existence always challenges the credibility and authenticity of management towards being an innovative organisation.

Challenges of Withholding Value

In a knowledge-based society, creativity and innovation is not constraint by the boundaries that separate spaces. Individuals and teams could choose not to contribute and they are equally capable of withholding the value of the innovation from the organisation and passing it someone they find worthy of receiving it. Individuals could start translating an idea created at one organisation in another. There is very little the organisation could do in terms of the policies that could be used to prevent the leakage of value from the organisation.

Managing Innovation in the Organisation is about Managing the Pipeline

It is therefore not surprising organisation has no problem recognised as being innovation when they managed these kinks well and those trying to be innovative find it to be a challenge to be one because they are doing the wrong things by copying them without understanding the underlying principles.

This article was 1st written on 29 April 2009 and updated on 15 May 2009.

Copyright 2009. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

Space and Innovation, and their Relationship

Divisive Nature of Space on Wisdom

I have begun investigating into space and innovation, and their relationship in 2005. I believe that the way a space is configured at the workplace impacts the quantity and quality of creative ideas and commercially viable innovations produced by the organisation.

By dividing the space into smaller parcels and allocating these to different organisational stakeholders to facilitate labour division, specialisation and scaled economisation, people get divided and their collective institutional memory and tacit knowledge is also disaggregated, distributed and stove-piped within these pockets of space. While technology may support the retrieval, transmission, sharing and storage of information from and at different venues, the reintegration of these elements into their original whole and relaying it as wisdom between organisational members remains a challenging and costly affair for many practitioners of organisation development.

Politics are Built into the Space

The call for keeping wisdom centralised and intact comes from the recognition that innovation is a product of creativity that combines and recombines current wisdom into new forms of representation that transcend traditional arrangements and structures. This propensity to create is heightened when innovators gain access to a wider array of wisdom that exists in the various communities in the organisation. In a divided organisation, the dispensation of this wisdom is obstructed by the rights, influences and power one has over the wisdom in a broken-up space vis-à-vis some other spaces. While these are intangible, their physical representations like social boundaries, physical structures, and geographical time zones are. These barriers constraint the movement of people and the knowledge they carry. These undermine their chances of creating breakthrough ideas and innovations.

Channelling Causes the Creation of Dark Spaces

Inductively, one can conclude that there is an explicit and positive relationship between the configuration of space and the prospect of the organisation in producing innovations. The layout affects the movement of its occupants, who are the carriers of knowledge and wisdom in the organisation. This channelling effect determines the preferences of the occupants over the use of a certain passageway, corridor or access route. This means it is more by design than coincidence that the foci of a network and its social order is skewed towards those destinations where channelling plays a defining role in the given space.

Unlike explicit knowledge, which is observable, recordable and storable, tacit ones are more likely to be effectively transferred from one individual to another through interactions like conversation, discourse and collaborative work. The effects of channelling create pockets of vacuum in certain parts of the organisation where such interactions are disabled. These dark spaces lack the drawing power to bring in enough of people to generate the diversity necessary for wisdom to be created. They also provide little attraction to stem the flow of these resources out of the space. This makes the stay in the dark spaces short and this disables meaningful and fruitful interactions, which is essential in the creation of breakthrough ideas.

Limiting Factors - Scientific Management Principles

Nevertheless, the way businesses are structured today informs us that the artefacts of scientific management will continue to be the cornerstones of organisatíons. Productivity with labour division, controlled decentralisation, and scale economisation will remain the dominant forces in influencing the organisation of resources for competition. In the face of such an arrangement, innovation practitioners need to find creative solutions that allow them to leverage on the current sciences of organisation to cultivate ideas and harness them as commercially viable innovations. They need to create white clearings in the dark spaces.

A Toothless Elephants are Forever White

In the course of my work, I have worked with organisations keen in creating spaces for creativity and innovation. The experience has been mixed. I have come across organisations which had funded the building of innovation rooms for the sake of meeting some business excellence requirements without wanting to understand how the rooms were to be subsequently used. Many of their investments ended in waste and further development in this area was shelved given the rooms' low utilisation rates. Eventually, these white elephants were converted for other uses when new priorities surface.

The main reason for these failed experiments is not because of the shortage of space or people with knowledge and wisdom. It is the lack of sharewares that enable meaningful and fruitful conversations, discourses and discussions to take place in these spaces. When the interactions are not meaningful, participants cannot find the purpose and motivation for attending and participating in these wisdom engagement gatherings. Spaces provided for these gathering are eventually unused. With proper channelling and availability of sharewares, we have the ingredients to build white space, as opposed to dark spaces.

Wiring Up the Space

As early as 2006, experiments to hardwire sharewares into the organisation's white spaces had begun.

Plan-Do-Check-Act or PDCA is the mother of all problem solving sharewares. What does it actually do and why is it so important? A process is a mechanism that times the release of a number of problem solving or consensus building sharewares to the participants at the most appropriate moment. It is important to time their release because there is a need to account for the pace of the conversation and learning during participation and overcome the forming, storming, norming and performing stages of a team as it grows it knowledge and experience.

My early attempts were confined to incorporating accelerated solutioning processes into spaces like meeting and work rooms. Several approaches were contemplated at that time and the more concrete ones are presented below:

• Hardwiring – This is the kind of wiring found in the iStudio of the Ministry of Education, where the innovation process described by John Kao was hardwired into the space. Here, the designer believes that breakthroughs could happen when participants experience total immersion in and strict in adhering to the prescribed process and hardwiring the process into the space guarantees such results. His process could be found scripted onto the walls and the fixtures are built and acquired to allow the participants to follow the given script.

• Soft Wiring – This is the type of wiring that was adapted by the Ministry of Defence for its innovation rooms. The layout and fixtures are designed and acquired to create an environment that is suitable for a finite array of processes. We were able to accommodate a range of layouts within these definitions:

• Very Soft Wiring – where the layout of the room could be copied from some where without the need to understand the influences and nuances of the process and environment on the team's performance.
• Semi-Soft Wiring – where the layout of the room is configured around a generic team work methodology and could be used for a finite array of processes. Here the influences and nuances of the process and environment on the team's performance are broadly accounted for during design.
• Softwiring – where the layout of the room is laid out around a particular category of team processes and could only be applied for a particular category of team work. Thus, if the room is fitted for prototyping, it could support all kinds of prototyping activities and nothing else. Here, the influences and environmental impact on team's performance are narrowly considered.

• Flexible Wiring. This kind of wiring combines the benefits of both hardwiring and softwiring but uses different technologies to overcome the challenges experienced when switching between these two kinds of wiring. Technologies are used to make the switch seamless. Taking this a step further, flexibility wiring includes the ability to strip down a team process into specific components and to have these combined and recombined with other strip down components of other team-based processes to form new processes. Thus, the idea of creating self-contain modules from pieces taken from different team work methodologies and supporting their execution within the space is the main thrust in its design.

I have left the public service in February of 2007 and is unable to follow-up and learn more about the outcomes of these experimentation with spaces. However, I have heard of initial successes during the early day of their implementation.

This article was 1st written on 17 April 2009.
Copyright 2009. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.

Goal Setting – Charting Your Future for Successful Breakthroughs

There are two worlds that we need to effectively manage in our lives in order that we remain successful. One of these worlds is the present and the other is our future. Both of these worlds are interrelated. Our future can only be created from the present but rarely are we able to create our future when the present is messed up by our past.

This programme is designed to help you deal with your present by unhooking the things that happened in the past, which are holding and preventing you from move ahead in life. When you life is free of the shadows of the past, you could then begin to chart and building your future with the present as your starting point.

Course Objectives

At the end of the course, you are able to:

• Manage your present with what you already have
• Charting and build your future from the present

Course Outline

Part 1: Managing the Present with What You Already Have

We have everything at our disposal to make it in life. Didn’t we survive our last birthday? Aren’t we doing alright at the moment? However, ‘alright’ is not always better. It is always good to uncover the things that are holding us back so that we could do even better in life. Our lives could be built from learning and self-discoveries, and this is the true nature of life.

Something is Not Working – Using ‘Tension’ as an Early Warning Devise

There are occasions in our lives when everything seems to fall apart. Most of us confront them by adopting strategies that may alleviate the discomforts these occasions brought on to us. Others just run away believing that they would go away at some point of time. Seldom do we recognize that the stress we experience comes about because situations have changed and our major life strategies no longer work.

In this module, we will play a game called the ‘The Journey to Kinderland’. In the game we will learn to use our body to inform us of things that are not working properly.

Where is it Not Working – Identifying the Source of the Tension

When we know something is not working, we usually put in more effort, time and money to turn it around, only to be disappointed because things get from bad to worse. So, what is wrong here? Actually, nothing is wrong. We are just blinded to the source that creates these tensions.

In this segment, we will learn the source of our problem by uncovering the drivers that derail us from our happiness. We will complete the Personal Derailment Profile, which may point us to the specific drivers that are causing the stress in our lives.

Looking for the Gaps – Things that You Could Do

No future could be built at any other time but today. Therefore, understanding the concept of time is very important and the question we must ask is what we should do to move ahead in life.

In this module, we will learn the true nature of time and its impact on your future. We will also complete the Linking Skills Profile to discover the skill sets we need to make the future more precise.

Part 2: Working Your Future from the Present

Once we become aware of what is in the past that is ruining our present, we can now look at what we could do now to create our future.

Envisioning Your Future – Getting the Fog Out of the Way

We cannot talk about our future until we could see how it looks like. Once we have an image of the future, we get to be inspired by it, motivated by it, and our aspirations could propel us to great heights.

In this segment, we will spend time creating our own vision board. Through the board, we attempt to make as clear as possible our true desires and we represent these with pictures to enhance the clarity and impulse for them.

Translating Talk into Tangibles – Setting My Plans

We cannot talk about our future. It carries no value. We have to build our future from today, that is, it has to be now. This means that we need to have a plan. The plan calls on us to work towards a goal and it tells us if we are ahead or behind in our pace today into our future.

In this module, we will use a multitude of templates to work out a set of plans that we could implement immediately. If fact, we can begin to call on resources and support using the programme to kick-start our plan, inching a step towards fulfilling a breakthrough life. In order words, we are innovating our lives.

Breaking Out of the Box - Barriers to Your Innovated Life

'Think outside the box' is one of those management jargons that has been wildly circulated and widely used in many learning communities in the world.

But what does it really mean? What is the 'box' mentioned in the phrase? We have included an 'outside' in the maxim, how does the inside looks like? Since we know we need to 'think' to get out, then what kind of thinking should we use to do that?

In this module, we will learn the types of barriers we may be pre-disposed to and we will rely on the Opportunity-Obstacle Quotient Profile to gain this insight.

If you are keen to find out more about this programme, please contact Anthony Mok at spaceman@pacific.net.sg.

This article was 1st written on 17 April 2009 and updated on 22 Jun 2009.
Copyright 2009. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.