Words & Meaning (3): Innovation

So back in 2001 when we had blown grandma's life savings on "investments" in bungyjumpingterriers.com stock (and after all that advice she had given us about consultants too), all anyone wanted to talk about was cost-cutting & firing people - sorry "strategic profit improvement". So we cut out the fact-finding trips to Barbados & fired some people - sorry "strategically improved our profits" - and then wondered what to do next. "Growth" was the word on everyone's lips. So we rubbed our hands greedily over China & India and then got the shock of our lives when we realised that "growth" meant their right to grow into our consumer goods & professional markets and our right to grow very afraid and our children's right to grow poor (N.B. I don't necessarily believe that a larger world market overall means that the West will be disadvantaged but I couldn't let that stand in the way of rhetoric - more on that another time).

So the rallying cry became "innovation". Now what does innovation mean? From my extensive reading around the subject and exposure to some of the world's finest research labs, I can say that it means: "Doing something new that makes things better". That may mean new income streams or greater efficiency or whatever.

There are different types of innovation. Tidd et al differentiate product, process, positioning & paradigm. To which you might add organizational and others from here. But basically anything you can ask a questions about (who, how, what, where, why, when, so what) you can innovate around. In fact, anything you do, say or think; you can do, say or think differently.

But there's a problem here. We don't like to do things differently - esp. if some moron we don't know is telling us do things differently. Innovation inherently involves change & conflict. And here are two things that most organisations are bad at doing well. If instead of "innovation", we called it "annoying large numbers of existing employees & customers" then it may lose its allure a tad.

Which brings me to the incremental / radical distinction. To me, this is simply an issue of scale. All innovations are radical to someone - otherwise their value is presumably small. The radical / incremental distinction actually boils down to: "Does this merit a whole slide in the CEO's next quarterly investor call?"

So let me bring on Bob Sutton. Bob is currently getting a lot of well-deserved attention for a book with a rude word in the title (penny in the swearbox, Bob). Before that book, he wrote this one. It has 11.5 rules in it to encourage innovation. I refer you to rule 8: Find some happy people & teach them how to fight. Constructive conflict is good (but that doesn't give you a free pass to behave like the title character in Bob's new book) - and it is only through constructive conflict that innovation will happen. If you want to find out more, read the book.

N.B. There is "good" innovation and "bad" innovation. Modern sewage systems in cities to reduce cholera & typhoid = Good. Enron-style creative accounting = Bad.