Why cutting back can sometimes be the best innovation option

GUEST POST from John Bessant

Every year about this time we move southwards. Like very late swallows. Desperately seeking some of the yellow stuff to help recharge our solar cells and thaw out frozen fingers. Our preferred destination is Cyprus, Aphrodite’s island, a jewel set in the Mediterranean whose long history of invasion by others suggests significant local attractions. In particular it has a track record of sunshine hours which is hard to match, an average of 300 days per year.

(Of course that begs the question of what climatic shape the other 65 days take and it would be greedy to expect the absence of a few drops of rain or the odd cloud or two….)

Unfortunately the changeable element in the weather pattern has a predilection for December/January and so this year we have enjoyed a meteorological smorgasbord in which the weather has been experimenting with all the things it otherwise never gets a chance to play with. Including hail, thunder, snow (visible in the distance dusting the mountaintops), winds, even waterspouts out at sea.

Plus rain. Quite a lot of it. In fact enough to challenge even my generous view that it’s OK to wash out another day of my sunshine stay because the dams need filling up ready for the dry spring and summer.

Despite this I’m mostly doing fine with my optimism, enjoying the peace and beauty of the island (when we can go outdoors) and compensating for the lack of sunshine by drinking its distilled variety in the form of local wines to accompany local foods, liberally sprinkled with excellent olive oil, again courtesy of the missing sunshine…

However this morning sees me a little end-of-year blue because I’m pressing my nose up against the rainy window pane to see the bougainvillea. Or rather not seeing it. Let me explain.

When we bought the house one of the things I loved was the bougainvillea. Three trees worth of it, massive gnarled old trunks which spiraled up and over a wooden pergola guiding the branches and leaves to create a spectacular roof of purple and red. Look down on it from the bedroom window and there is your magic carpet waiting for you to climb aboard and fly away, watching the world below through its soft feathery leaves. Look up at it and you have a wonderful cave of shade, shielding you from the fierce summer sun, with its thick green foliage and gentle impossible blossoms. Whichever angle you viewed it from the effect was the same — crystalized summer …

Except that last year the pergola frame on which this whole amazing confection was resting gave up the ghost. Pressed down and strangled by its burden of branches it finally began to lean dangerously to the point where we had to bite the horticultural bullet and rethink.

Our superhero builder Dave sucked his teeth, cocked his head a couple of times then confirmed that we needed to replace the frame with a stronger new pergola suitably secured to the ground. But in order to effect this reconstruction we’d need to cut back the bougainvillea. Big time.

Cue Ollie whose green fingers and experienced brain have learned to work with the island’s fecund sun-rich approach to growth. He reliably reassured us that the project would work and that, while the short-term operation might look a little savage, it would all come out right in the end. He reminded us that this was precisely why the local wines taste so good — because the vineyard owners understand the importance of pruning.

I’d noticed this; the winter round of hacking back the thick bushes which had been so rich in foliage and fruit to the point where there are just a few stumps sticking up like dead men’s fingers clawing at the sky. And yet by the spring time the whole glorious cycle starts to repeat itself. His parting words were along the lines of ‘trust me… Nature’s got this!’

We bit the bullet. So what greeted us this year on arrival was a somewhat stark reduction in the foliage. In fact no foliage at all, just a couple of very lonely-looking stumps…..

Not so easy on the eye but I’ll try to have faith. And at least it offers an interesting metaphor for how we might think about innovation management at the start of a New Year.

It’s a safe bet to assume that there are plenty of resolutions buzzing round the brains of those with a stake in helping create value from our ideas. Lots of good intentions about doing things differently in 2025, expansive plans to try out new approaches, deploy new tools, do new stuff.

And there’s no shortage of new things to try. There’s a whole industry out there dedicated to challenging us to revise our innovation approaches — research papers, conference speeches, benchmark case studies, even, dare I say it, the odd blog or two like this one. The invitation to re-frame, to reinvent ourselves comes at us from multiple angles — and there’s a bewildering but enticing display of new tools and techniques which threaten to turn us into children running through the innovation sweet-shop on a serious sugar high.

And now we have AI. You don’t need to be Cassandra to be capable of making a pretty safe bet — 2025 will be the year of AI moving mainstream. Already a majority of organizations report experimenting with the enormous opportunity; it won’t take long before that converts to proven improvements in practice. Changing the ways in which we work with innovation, the products and services we offer and the different targets we try to reach.

The danger in all of this is that we keep adding to our repertoire, adding more and more growth to our innovation operations. We risk them becoming a close cousin to my bougainvillea thicket, overgrown to the point of collapse.

Innovation is all about creating and developing ‘routines’ — patterns of behavior which enable us to repeat the innovation trick. We learn over time effective ways to make it happen — how we search effectively, how we choose amongst different opportunities, how we implement in agile fashion, streamlining the process of converting ideas to value. Over time we build on those which work for us, embedding them in ‘the way we do things round here’, shaping them into the kind of innovation system which the International Standards Organization now recommends. Not just slogans about the importance of innovation but the structures, processes and policies to enable those behaviors.

Managed well this is a prescription for healthy growth. But it’s not a matter of abstract systems or process flow charts; it’s much closer to the challenge of planting and tending an orchard. A rich harvest of innovation fruit comes from strong branches on trees which have matured thanks to careful cultivation. Maintaining what’s already established and allowing for new shoots, sprouting in new directions, opening up more possibilities for future growth.

This doesn’t happen by accident. We need to think about ‘innovation horticulture’ — how best to manage the orchard.

That’s a lesson which has been learned quietly by many organizations, who’ve been playing the innovation long game. Members of the ‘Hundred Club’, those who’ve survived and thrived over a century or more. Organizations which have ridden out some stormy weather by a commitment to innovation and to creating the kind of innovation system of which the ISO would be proud.

What they have in common is the ability to maintain what works, not just following fashion but carefully reviewing how they manage innovation on a regular basis. They’ve become skilled at enabling new growth through adding new routines, analogous to planting new saplings or grafting new strains on to old branches. Above all they’ve mastered the art of pruning to create space for this to happen.

This is the key part of the dynamic capability which innovation represents. The ability to step back and review, asking three simple questions. Of the innovation routines, the way we manage the process:

· What do we need to do more of, reinforce and strengthen?

· What do we need to do less of, even stop?

· And what new routines do we need to develop to cope with new challenges?

It’s as much about letting go as it is about adding new approaches. And it is crucially about strategically identifying where we need the new growth to come from. Just like a skilled gardener cuts back deep but also makes sure she has identified the spurs, the tiny buds which will provide the sites from which new things become possible.

This extended gardening metaphor might sound a little fanciful but we’ve got plenty of examples to illustrate it. Think about 3M, one of the longest established innovation gardens, still able to grow vigorously in new directions after well over a hundred years. During the early part of this century the company invested heavily in developing routines around six sigma and process improvement, securing significant gains in terms of productivity. But it soon became clear that the relentless focus on doing what they already did but better was driving out their capacity for breakthrough innovation. So the program was pruned to allow more exploration space. Importantly it wasn’t abandoned but rather trimmed back to enable new growth to come through.

Or Procter and Gamble, making the bold decision to cut back on the long (150 years) tradition of routines built around research and development and making the radical shift to a more open approach. ‘Connect and develop’ is now at the heart of how they innovate, drawing in a steady flow of ideas from outside the company alongside their internal capabilities. It has taken a quarter of a century for these new routines to mature but they now yield significant gains across the innovation spectrum.

Or the German company Hella, experiencing a key challenge around its rapid growth from being a successful 19th century start-up to a large established player. Its early experience helped create routines around new opportunities, triggered by new technologies and by discovering new market niches. There was plenty of innovation activity, a veritable hive of creativity with bees buzzing in and out working on a growing number of projects. But proliferating projects meant increasing costs and growing confusion around priorities which could only be solved by adding more minds to the mix. In the end the innovation engine began spinning out of control, overheating with all the innovation efforts.

It came to a head with a review which suggested that of the roughly 4000 products in the range at that time the vast majority took up time and effort but made little contribution. In particular it suggested that:

· 95 products were responsible for around 80% of turnover and 34% of R&D costs

· 305 were responsible for 15% turnover and 35% R&D

· 3100 were responsible for 5% of turnover and 31% of R&D !!!

The answer wasn’t to slam feet on the innovation brakes and stop. But it was about pruning, cutting back on most of the projects and focusing attention on those with strategic contributions to make. And having done this, to put in place new systems for project selection, portfolio management and regular staged reviews.

So whilst I’m still harboring doubts I’m hoping to see a bougainvillea renaissance beginning on my next visit. A sort of blooming version of ‘Field of Dreams’. As with baseball teams so with pergolas and bougainvillea bushes. Create the space — and the new growth will come.

Of course it’s not just about cutting back to make space in our innovation garden. The other side of this involves introducing new routines to enable new growth. But these by their nature will be young seedlings, not well-established trees. They need careful tending and experienced innovation gardeners understand the importance of supportive structures and growth regimes to help them take root. Using canes and trellises, introducing fertilizers and nutrients and above all keeping a careful eye on these early-stage experiments. They won’t all survive but those proto-routines of today could become critical capabilities in the future so it’s worth investing the time and effort now.

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Image credits: Dall-E

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