Defining Innovation
A word that is over-used and misused so often... What does it really mean?
I was asked this week to talk to an audience of businesspeople about Innovation.
I didn’t get any further qualifications. Just come and talk about “Innovation”. My anxiety was heightened a little as I knew the customers’ expectations would be hard to predict. What does Innovation mean to them? Would I be talking with some relevance to what they were hoping to hear?
“Innovation” is up there with many words that have been abused, over-used, misused and hyped to the point where the meaning has been lost.
I thought I might write a few words to lend my understanding but I would love to hear your opinions too.
Do the definitions below match your understanding?
How would you define Innovation? Read on, and please do leave a comment below.
Let’s try and add some definitions
Innovation is the creation of a viable new offering.
This sentence serves as a great definition, and there is a lot to unpack.
Innovation is not invention
Innovation sometimes involves invention, but it’s many other things as well. One of the main perceptions to help move an audience away from is the mental image of a brilliant inventor.
When you ask people to think of brilliant contemporary inventors, the same names come back. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. And rest-in-peace Clive Sinclair.
And they are brilliant - but did they invent or innovate?
Innovation is about deeply understanding customer needs and collaborating with partners to execute and deliver them. It’s a business capability and a discipline that can be developed - not just individual, eccentric brilliance.
Innovations have to earn their keep.
Innovations have to return business value to their stakeholders, which is another distinction from invention. It’s about viability, return on investment and earning the credibility to work on your next Innovation.
A project that delivers Innovation has to sustain itself and return the cost of capital that was invested.
Very little is new in Innovation.
A controversial statement! But I think true. All innovations are steps forward from a previous state. As in biology - all living things come from a living thing.
Often Innovation is reexamining an existing product, service or experience and imaging how an existing thing can be made better. The Digital Transformation imperatives of “Velocity, Intelligence and Experience” can be applied to existing capabilities, and the future can be imagined.
Think beyond products
Innovation should be more than products. It’s about new ways of doing business, new channels to reach customers and new experiences. New forms of interactions between colleagues, customers and partners. New ways of engaging people.
Innovating requires identifying the problems that matter and moving through them systematically to deliver elegant solutions.
With that description of what Innovation is, let’s examine how to do it.
Another definition to be unpacked. Innovation is a business process - not a moment of realisation or individual brilliance. What are the dynamics of this business process?
Knowing where to innovate is as important as how
If you are going to strike oil, it’s not only about your ability to drill. It’s about knowing where to explore. The same applies in an organisation - you have to understand the landscape and the current state to know where to explore and to find the right innovation opportunities.
Tackle the hard problems, not the low hanging fruit
Identifying problems to fix and improvements to make is never the challenge. And the temptation is to try and tackle the low hanging fruit to deliver results. But the big steps forward are taken when you tackle the really hard problems. Have a way of classifying the problems you find and try and take on the big scary ones.
Refuse incomplete answers. Resolve tension rather than trade-off
But when you can’t find the answer to your problem, move on. Don’t accept insignificant improvements or implement small trade-offs. Tackle the biggest problem you can where a complete answer can be found.
Nothing matters if it can’t be delivered
The process isn’t finished until the Innovation is earning its keep and is delivering value. Innovation isn’t about prototyping - it’s about delivering value into the hands of users and customers.
Elegance and simplicity to complex problems
Look at complex problems and try and find the simplicity. Any simple interface to a complex system is the result of Innovation and a lot of engineering disciplines.
Simplify.
Innovation almost never fails due to a lack of creativity.
Innovation is about discipline and engineering capability. The ability to create fast feedback loops is as valuable as a killer new idea - perhaps more so.
I wanted to leave my audience with a better idea of what Innovation is and is not.
It is about the ability to execute and deliver on a business process that identifies friction in an existing “thing”, classifies the problems and systematically works to simplify them.
It isn’t about moments of individual brilliance by eccentric inventors
To read more about this topic, get hold of The Ten Types of Innovation workbook.
And please leave a comment below on your understanding of Innovation - did you agree with these definitions?
'Very little is new in Innovation.' is very true yet few people understand that. Also combining innovation with an ongoing process of continuous improvement to deliver value is a good way to consider it. It's about continuously improving on the previous state rather than moments of brilliance (though they can happen too); along with a mindset to do better and grow. I always agree with fast feedback loops too.
However, and not to be controversial, but there are times in business and other endeavours when we really have to step back, tear it all down, and start again. In our industry, we talk about legacy, and that evolves in lots of ways. It's not that innovation didn't serve us well back in the day we were creating this legacy, it's that innovation can only go so far. Eventually, we need either invention or disruption to do the job that innovation can't.