2.10 Managing for Innovation
Invention: coming up with a new idea
Innovation: coming up with a new application of an idea
Innovations can happen both in the product (new braking system, new hotel check-out service) or the process (new way to make them, new way to match customer with available rooms). The boundary is often blurred.
Pull innovation happens in response to customers needs while push innovations happen as a result of advances and speculative development.
The greatest portion of those developments is incremental but sometimes radical ones are needed.
There are several barriers and enablers to innovation.
\- Knowledge brokering is about helping people with a problem to become aware of the idea that might help. Knowledge brokers capture good ideas, keep them alive, imagine new uses for them and put promising concepts to the test.
\- Managing for creativity is about creating new knowledge, maximizing employee’s creativity which is a function of expertise, creative thinking skills and motivation.
Managers have most control about the motivations part. The thing about motivation is that if you enable intrinsic motivation (the desire to perform actions because the action is rewarded) people will walk around and find more things than based on extrinsic motivation (the incentive is external to the action).
Based on Amabile’s research there are sex important supports for motivation in encouraging creativity:
\- Challenge (a task that stretches you)
\- Freedom (in the choice of means, not the choice of ends, which can be argued but this is the idea)
\- Resources (e.g. time)
\- Workgroup features (mutual supportive with different expertise, experience)
\- Supervisory encouragement
\- Organisational support
Incubating ideas in relation to ideas is important, meaning to let them develop a bit in the subconscious. People sometimes need to be idle, let the mind flow.
Barrier to innovation can be resources but other examples include:
\- People working in narrow boxes
\- Fear of failure (see entrepreneurship in the US versus Europe)
\- Lack of rewards
\- Hoarding of the best people
\- Too much bureaucracy
\- Not-invented-here attitude
\- Poor Communications
\- Sticking to a successful product
\- Business-as-usual preference
\- Short-term thinking
Different organisations will favour different approaches. For further information on this see page 14. In general this might be to focus on social-external (inter-firm collaboration, supplier involvement, closeness to the customer, …), Social-internal (Planned process, cross-functional teams, use of intranets, …), Individual-external (Networking) or Individual-internal (Hero innovator, Air cover for mavericks, skunkworks, …) methods.
The implications of this is that you might need to allow considerable freedom to some people (hero innovators), create a liberal corporate culture or a clear R&D unit, decide what kind of secrecy you want your plans to have and have a clear managerial perception on the importance of innovation.
Some people say that customers should be included in the design process, sometimes called “Lead User Research”, which relies on identifying individuals or organisations that are ahead of their market segment. These might be:
\- Target market leader users who used prototypes they sometimes developed themselves
\- Analogous market lead users who come from fields with similar applications (racing for car brakes)
\- Attribute lead users