Xiaohao's Knowledge on Innovation: 2011

Monday, November 07, 2011

Developmental Perspective of Innovation

Looking @ Innovation from Inside Out

We know the value innovation brings to organisations. It could provide us the access to compete in traditionally unavailable markets. It could also create blue ocean markets that earn us supernormal profits.

However, we cannot depend on a single innovation to compete in these markets. Our competitors are always attracted to these markets because of their profits and are motivated to leapfrog with innovations combined from and with more advance technologies that deliver substantial value at costs driven by greater production economies. This means that time is never be on our side regardless of the characteristics or conditions of our innovation lifecycle. Someone will take the pole position if we are to rest on the successes of our only creation. To secure our leadership position so that we continue to prosper into the future, we need a stream of innovations to compete with others that are coming into the markets.

Although the word 'innovation' has been widely used in our national discourse since 2000, this does not mean that its true meaning is fully appreciated and understood. It remains a jargon and big word even for the most educated person in our society. When asked about innovation, we typically hear people describing it as something new, unique and original. However, as architects of our organisation's growth and prosperity, we need to put on a different lens and move beyond this simplistic view of innovation in order to create the stream of innovation mentioned in the previous paragraph. We need to examine the engine that creates them.

When we strip the engine of an innovative organisation of its casings, we will typically find numerous pipelines of innovative projects in different stages of development weaved into a fabric of supportive culture (like value, beliefs and attitudes) and enabling resources (like tools, methods and processes). On this mesh of activities, opportunities are identified, explored and assessed for their potentials before they are exploited to grow the business. However, the flow inside each pipeline is not always dynamic, making the fabric creased and wrinkled. There are a number of obstacles that obstruct its flow, and the people engineering organisational level innovation needs to be informed to help reduce these effects on their efforts.

On further examination of the engine, we will also discover that innovations and the resources used for creating them are not the only artifacts that flow through its pathways. People and the teams they lead do as well. Innovation does not exist without the cognitive investments and entrepreneurial expenditures of

people. This suggests that to use innovation as the multiplier to win at the market place, we have to take care of the people in innovation; to pay attention to the motivations behind wanting to do good for oneself, and one's community and society.

Many have recognised the importance of diversity in teams - diverse work preferences, orientation towards problems, and workplace skills. However, such teams are challenging to create, manage and sustain because of differing cultures, conflicting values and competing interests. In the age of self-determination and self-empowerment, the onus of resolving these problematic differences cannot rest squarely on the shoulders of the leaders but on the team members as well.

The last group of artifacts that keep the traction in the pipelines is the permission, protection, support and push the management gives to teams to enable them to fight against the immunity organisations impose on the change brought on by innovations. These are resources external of the teams' sphere of control and have to be acquired. This means, to access them, the teams have to secure the stakeholders buy-in for the change.

Innovation is about doing things in ways that have never been done before, and this is problematic with stakeholders. In the absence of hindsight, they tend to be more adverse to risks and inclined to reject the change out of fear instead of putting in place resources and supporting structures to mitigate them so that change has a chance to take place. By measuring its leading indicators for success, the team, after thinking big, is enabled to start small, scale fast and impact deep to complete the conversion and implementation process of innovation. Therefore, stakeholder communication is about allying these uncertainties by focusing their rationality on its possibilities for success rather on its propensity for failure.

This article was 1st written on 16 February 2011, updated on 2 August 2011,

and subsequently published on 7 November 2011.

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Fully Appreciating the True Meaning of an Innovative Team

Critical Factor of Innovative Organisations No. 10

Innovation is not a product of sterile amalgamation of ideas. Instead, it involves a number of people, who are propelled by different motivations, driving forward the belief that their solution will produce the benefits that the public wants, and they will go about amassing the resources to make it happen for all who wants to enjoy these benefits.

The birth of an innovation begins when a new opportunity calls for ideas to be connected in ways that were never been done before. The people, who had identified the opportunity and created the original idea, may continue to expand different amount of effort to prove and translate it from mere concept into real device that unorthodoxly solve problems and truly bring value to their stakeholders. Therefore, innovation is about the unique way the device creates and delivers value to those who needs it rather than the device itself that makes this happens for these stakeholders.

Metaphorically, it is as if that the innovation flows through a pipeline greased by the ideas that its sponsors have to offer. Since organisations cannot depend on a single innovation, this pipeline will consist the flows of differing threads of innovations with varying degrees of penetration championed by a multitude of different players.

The unit of innovation is the team, and to tactically manage innovation, we need to manage the people behind these innovations. More specifically, it is about managing the dynamics of a team of people, empowered by different talents and skills, who are envisioning, creating and influencing extraordinarily for its cause - bringing the innovation to market. In other words, we cannot leave the evolution of innovative teams to chance. They have to exist by design and be developed through aggressive nurturing.

So, what sort of teams should we cultivate? I called these 'Tag Teams'.

Tag teams are different from ordinary work teams in many ways. First, their members have highly diverse work preferences. Some would love to challenge existing norms by creating new ways of doing things. Others would prefer to plan and organise resources to support the task at hand. Still, a couple would really enjoy directing work and producing outcomes, while the rest would never give up the opportunity of connecting with thier counterparts to promote their ideas.

Also, collectively, members of tag teams are more likely to see beyond their difficulties and problems, and appreciate these as challenges for doing better or as opportunities to access their breakthroughs. They tend to be more resilient and hardy as they see these more as avenues for greater effectiveness and efficiency than obstacles that derail them from their main focus; that is to bring their innovation to market.

Finally, tag teams possess a set of skills that they inherent from their members. There are a total of thirteen skills, and they range from skills that keep them operationally effective and efficient, to skills that spiritually bond the teams to their cause and to their organisations, and to skills that provide greater clarity into the strategies of getting their intended outcome and strengthen the drive for their cause. They use these skills to navigate through the dynamics of working together as a collection of differentiated people. They also apply them to negotiate through the myriad of organisational red-tapes. There is nothing unique about these skills except that no one in the team monopolises any of them, which is unusually unique for tag teams. This means the skills and their competencies are widely distributed, and every member is responsible for their application and accountable for their outcomes for the overall common good of the tag team.

Just like in football teams, tag teams are constraint by their own temperament arising from the interplay of these diverse preferences, orientations, and competencies. Organisational leaders, like coaches, need to understand the working of these elements at their component level as well to appreciate their interactions when they come together to truly know the means of creating, developing and harnessing tag teams for innovation.

Here are the other critical success factors of Innovative Organisations: