Renaissance comes from combining art and science for innovation

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“The art of innovation needs to be broken out of the science that needs to be applied”.

 I wrote this in my last article and I thought some might ask “what the heck does he mean by that?” So I owe an explanation, perhaps partly to myself as well.

I’ve often heard and read that innovation is either an ‘art’ or a ‘science’ but we do seem it always struggle to combine them.  Why is that?

I finished that particular article (bit.ly/NlrOpV ) with this:
“The art of innovation needs to be broken out of the science that needs to be applied, and then knowing its entire component parts then recombined in sustaining, thoughtful ways. We do need to harness the energy of innovation and we are not yet fully achieving that”.

Let’s begin at the beginning when art and science were one

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The long and winding road we travel in the name of innovation

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Innovation is a long hard and tough journey. Regretfully we do ourselves no favours in not having a common language, a repository of proven techniques and methodologies.

We often continue to layer on to the existing often failing to consolidate and validate.

I get frustrated as you look around there are most of the answers but not the ‘attention span’ or the real incentive to go and properly learn it, to master it.

We lack discipline in innovation although that might sound counter to the way innovation is often presented. The art of innovation needs to be broken out of the science that needs to be applied………

This was how I started in a reply to an email sent by Ralph-Christian Ohr (@ralph_ohr). He was commenting on my recent series on the Three Horizon framework, I had collated and sent this to him and Tim Kastelle (@timkastelle) to comment upon.

This had been updated recently and published in the site of www.innovationexcellence.com over five days recently.

Ralph clearly caught me in a reflective mood when I replied.
We travel a long pathway called innovation

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Lingering dogma, fixed mindsets, tensions and conflicting needs

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Sometimes you would be amazed at the underlying tensions that occur when you get into those discussions around the board table on what and where innovation contributes to strategic direction.

Even managing the present portfolio of innovation initiatives gets caught up in these underlying tensions as it becomes another opportunity to open up the old wounds of bruising past battles and get back into those discussions again.

Suddenly the CFO becomes animated over the uncertainties; the research director grows defensive, and the marketing director more strident in why it is constructed that way.

The HR director raises their concerns on stretching the resources too thinly and suddenly a fast and furious open debate erupts. Then the Supply Chain director throws in the concerns that the system will not cope with the sudden influx of new introductions in the remaining part of the year.

Each has a valued perspective but much of these are based on past positions, attitudes built up from other pitch battles and scores to be settled.

The CEO listens and silently thinks to himself:  “what happened to the series of bonding exercises that we had all had invested in, suddenly just gone”.

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A new raison d’être for HRM through innovation engagement

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It is widely recognized that Innovation is in need of a significant transformation on how it is designed, developed and executed in most organizations. Traditional approaches to managing this simply need ripping up and redesigning to allow innovation to become more the central core.

In most organizations the Human Resource Management (HRM) function seems to have been far too often side-lined on shaping and influencing how innovation should be designed as a critical part of the future for the company. Many of the existing traditional HRM solutions might actually be in conflict and working against innovation actually.

If we look at the broad areas that HRM has to cover and master in organizational development today, it can, perhaps, leave little time for adding in innovation into this array of demands.

You can understand that HRM has little time to master a ‘decent’ understanding of what makes up innovation, when they are grappling with so much already but they should.

It might simplify or promote a rationalizing of some of the existing practices built up over considerable time as the expedient option but this is still creating a ‘lagging’ set of effects and not offering the ‘leading’ ones that innovation demands.

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Are we all upside down?

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This is one of those rants occasionally I feel a real need to express. Forgive me, normal service will be resumed after this ‘break’.

Coffee in hand, soapbox set up, let me begin.

Today, we are all struggling to transform ourselves in our businesses, even just within ourselves, to adjust to the current economic difficulties we all seem presently to be facing.

We are not only confronted with the toughest downturn in modern times but with all the pressures with the speed of decision-making, and technological advances that seem to just simply ‘suck up’ more of our daily lives instead of helping to resolve it.

We have the pressures of global competitiveness and calls that constantly are urging us to never stand still because others aren’t.

We often become overwhelmed by the merging, acquiring, and rethinking that is going on constantly around us, the changes in processes, new alliances and the sudden emergence of a ‘new kid on the block’ who sees a weakness and rapidly fills that gap overnight.

Oh yes, and we still are not very good at being more innovative!

Lots more hotfixes or a more radical redesign?
These pressures compel us to focus on a host of ‘quick fixes’ but what we are failing to recognize is where all these changes fit within our long term plans.

Just finding the opportunity to take out precious ‘thinking’ time to synthesise and reorganize ourselves seems impossible, we are just getting caught up in the flotsam of life, just bobbing along.

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Self-inflicted wounds on innovation

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Many organizations have made Stage-Gate or a mutation of it, their ‘go-to’ innovation process that all innovating concepts and ideas must ‘somehow’ pass through. We are often giving self-inflicted wounds caused by jumping hurdles and closed gate around managing the innovation process,

Squeezing all types of innovation through this, for whatever people claim is a linear process, is simply wrong.

You can simply say: “we destroyed much to get sometimes so little out as the final outcome, when initially it was seen to be so promising.”

The difficulty is that we are still struggling to find a real alternative, although there have been some recent noteworthy attempts, firstly by Jose A Briones and his Spiro-Level 3D approach and then by Paul R Williams, of the American Institute for Innovation Excellence, to move the discussions beyond the Stage-Gate process from this linear into more spiral concepts and beyond.

There has been an awful lot written on Stage-Gate, some people attacking it and suggesting it “guarantees mediocrity for your business”.

Clayton Christensen has suggested “the Stage-gate system is not suited to the task of assessing innovation whose purpose is to build new growth businesses, but most companies continue to follow it simply because they see no alternative”

Stage-Gate has certainly earned its place for product management.

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An Ideal Innovation Client Engagement Process

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Some years back I came across a visual suggestion of what a client engagement should entail. I had been for years ‘casting around’ looking for something that gives the process a good structure and clarity.

So I reworked it for my ‘ideal’ way to approach the client engagement process needed for my innovation work and made it into this visual.

Take a look below as my preferred way to approach innovation in any engagement.
The critical discovery phase I regard as vital

For me, the more you invest in the pre-contribution, the discovery phase, the higher likelihood of better results that meets both the ‘known’ and ‘unseen’ innovation issues.

The problem or dilemma we all have engaging with clients is that ‘until the clock is running’ and we have a signed commitment, these investments in scoping are often (perhaps always) understated by the client, misunderstood by the advisor and no fees or solutions have been generated.

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A call for a more open collaborative innovation consulting framework

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forming a collaborative environment

We are coming up to nearly 10 years since Dr Henry Chesbrough wrote his first book on open innovation as the necessary business imperative.  There has certainly been considerable progress in many business organizations to embrace this open collaborative principle.

“Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as their own internal ideas, and explore both internal and external paths to market. Firms need to look to advance their technology, resources, their knowledge and understanding through innovating with partners by sharing risk and sharing reward”.

Isn’t it strange that the very consultants expounding ‘open’ for innovation are as closed as ever? Why is this?

I would argue that the consulting industry specializing in providing innovation services is its own worst enemy today, by not being more open themselves. It is actually failing to recognize that this is inhibiting their own long-term prospects.

Nearly all within the innovation consulting industry seem to be resolutely staying very internally driven, self-promoting, still trying to convey the story of their mastery, when clearly this is so painfully lacking from the results in growth by many of their clients from their existing innovation activities.

Due to this lack of openness, they are failing their clients by not offering them leading and emerging practice advice. Yet the client is increasingly requiring more complete or holistic solutions, not from a ‘piecemeal of innovation offerings’ they are presently receiving.

These separate pieces currently being offered by one group of consultants often don’t dovetail into a complete innovation system because they are supplemented by a variety of different service providers, all having their own ‘pet’ approaches, methodologies, techniques and tools.

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Making those increasing connections

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I am always looking for innovations connections. This last week I’ve been working around some different themes that grew in interest the more I investigated them, both in their importance and messages.

I’m undertaking a rather exciting approach to describing innovation, within a collaboration venture, that gets more exhilarating and inspiring as we explore, clarify and document. Regretfully I can’t share this here at present but I certainly will when it gets to that point of ‘release’.

Some of the different areas or themes I’ve been investigating have flowed from one set of enquiries that have taken me into another and then yet another.

These simply get my innovation juices flowing and really are allowing me to make so many new connections. Here is just a few of these in this last week that have emerged from some of my research that provide a host of thoughts:

Leaders & Laggards
In this group of investigations, I started in trying to gain a better perspective of the discussion of leaders and laggards and what differentiates them. Timely to these investigations has been some recent studies by Capgemini Consulting and IESE Business School with a recent leadership study “Managing Innovation: An Insider’s Perspective”

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We seem to pass over distinctive innovation, why?

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I see so many suggestions on the types of innovation, actually, I’ve offered a few myself, just go and take a look at http://cirf.pbworks.com for a different slant on this.

For me, one ‘type’ of innovation that seems always to be often passed over is distinctive innovation in discussions. Why is that?

Most people work away in the trenches of incremental improvements and these outputs make up the vast substance of innovation activity.  Many working in these trenches of innovation on a daily basis would love to be part of a breakthrough but tend to find this is always ring-fenced for a few others to work upon. All they can often do is gaze over the fence or quietly accept this divide simply goes on.

I believe many who work within innovation simply do not share in this delineation of innovation activity, as it divides talent into separate teams, often pitting scarce innovation resources against each other, often in many unseen ways.  This divide of activities is often a real pity but perhaps another story for another day we can explore.

Disruptive innovation is seen, partly by the way it has its effect on us and our lives. Many of us are always happy to discuss disruptive as long as it does not have an impact on ourselves, on the receiving end.

As long as we are the ones doing the disrupting, or just wanting to show off the status as being early adopters or within the early majority of the innovation adoption curve, then we love disruption. Otherwise, it is a very uncomfortable space many are not prepared to travel to.

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