services | Human-Centered Change and Innovation

In a popular previous article we looked at the Top 10 Reasons Not to Innovate. In this article we will look at Ten Reasons You Might Suck at Innovation as we explore the following question:

Do you need an innovation intervention?

Unless you feel that your innovation program is a runaway success and exceeding your expectations, the answer might very well be…

yes.

Ten Reasons You Might Suck at Innovation

Nobody can articulate your definition of innovation (or you don’t have one)

Nobody can articulate your innovation vision/strategy/goals (or you don’t have them)

People struggle to tell the story of one or more innovations launched to wide adoption by the organization

Most of what passes as innovation inside the organization would actually be classified as improvements (not innovation) by people outside the organization

The organization no longer makes external innovation perspectives available to a wide audience

Nobody takes the time to participate in our innovation efforts anymore

Your organization is unable to accept insights and ideas from outside the organization and develop them into concepts that can be scaled to wide adoption

Innovation program leadership has difficulty getting time on the CEO’s calendar any more

Your innovation team is trying to do all of the innovating instead of helping to accelerate the innovation efforts of others

Your pace of innovation is slower than the organizations you compete with for market share, donations, votes, etc.

What is an innovation intervention?

An innovation intervention is a professionally directed, education process resulting in a face to face meeting of consultants, leaders and/or managers with the organization in trouble with innovation. People who struggle with innovation are often in denial about their situation and unwilling to seek treatment. They may not recognize the negative effects their behavior has on themselves and others. Intervention helps the person make the connection between their use of innovation and the problems in their organization. The goal of intervention is to present the innovation user with a structured opportunity to accept help and to make changes before things get even worse.

This may be a somewhat tongue in cheek adaptation of a definition from the substance abuse context*, but it’s almost scary how much I didn’t have to change in the switching of contexts. To make it easier for people to accept help, I came up with the Ten Reasons You Might Suck at Innovation above, and a service offering to hopefully fit within your purchasing authority and your budget (especially if you split it up into two installments of $4,999.99).

Purchasing an Innovation Intervention for $9,999.98 + expenses (or two payments of $4,999.99 + expenses) will get you a three day engagement including:

A cross-functional and/or cross-site innovation maturity study using my 50 question innovation audit, including analysis of the results, and presentation of the findings
One or two days on-site:

Seeing where and how your innovation happens
Conducting interviews to understand the structure of your innovation programs, processes, and other key elements of your innovation infrastructure
Walking through past innovation successes and failures

The balance of the three days will then be spent analyzing the on-site observations and creating a set of actionable recommendations
Up to five (5) copies of my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for you and your leadership team
Up to ten (10) sets of my Nine Innovation Roles cards for you and your leadership team
Up to five (5) copies of my book Charting Change for you and your leadership team
A 10% discount on any future keynote speeches or innovation training sessions for your organization
A 10% discount on any Change Planning Toolkit™ site license purchases for your organization
A 10% discount on any Disruptive Innovation Toolkit™ site license purchases for your organization

Together we’ll get your innovation efforts back on track towards success and build a foundation capable of sustaining continuous innovation. Forward-thinking organizations that haven’t begun an innovation program or a focus on innovation and want to get off to a strong start will be able to leverage the Innovation Intervention service too.

Image credit: calbaptist.edu

*Thanks to the NCADD (National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, Inc.) for the inspiration

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You Cannot Always Invent Your Way to Innovation I’d like to start today with a quote from a NASA article in Fast Company – “But sometimes the better part of innovation, is not invention but effectiveness.”

I’ve detailed my views before on how invention is not the same thing as innovation, but to build upon them and the quote above – sometimes progress or innovation is achieved by taking value out of a product or service. Southwest Airlines created innovation not by giving passengers more food, more legroom or more options, but fewer. Apple succeeded with the iPod, not by providing more capacity or more features, but by making the features they provided more beneficial than the competition.

People ultimately do not care whether a product or service is better at the tasks it is asked to perform, but whether it more effectively meets their needs. These are not the same thing, and in fact make success far more difficult.

A sponge may clean better than all other sponges at absorbing liquids, but if to do so it has to smell like a wet troll, it is ultimately not going to be the sponge most effective at meeting customers needs (or likely to make repeat visits to their shopping baskets). Success becomes more difficult because customers don’t always surface their needs. Chances are your market research wouldn’t have surfaced their need for a sponge not to smell like a wet troll. But if succeeding becomes more difficult when success is not purely a technology challenge, then this is a good thing for the truly committed, because difficulty creates opportunity.

So during the product development process, don’t ask yourself “How can we make X do Y better than the competition?”. Instead focus people’s attention on asking “How can we better meet our customers’ needs?”. If you focus on the second question, the competition becomes almost irrelevant, and you will become better at creating products or services that are more likely to be valuable instead of merely useful, and that is where true innovation lies.

What do you think?