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Bursting Innovation Myths
Bhupendra Sharma
Thursday, November 1, 2007
For most of us, a social conversation in Bangalore starts and ends with feelings and words exchanged about the infrastructure and the pathetic state of response from the state machinery. This is true not only of Bangalore, almost all the cities going through the pangs of development face the same kind of official attitude. Almost all these issues need innovative ways of dealing with. Not only issues in the cities, but also the way we are governed and the way administration is run require a whole lot of innovation if India has to get going and truly live up to its potential as often talked about.

Innovation is now getting into boardroom discussions, and thankfully has moved away from just academic limelight, which it enjoyed till the early part of this millennium. But to ensure that it succeeds it would be necessary to look at myths surrounding innovation and the way companies are trying to drive it.

In my work over the last 20 years I see how people and companies get frustrated with the overall rate of success with their innovation attempts and so I decided to look into this issue and studied the methodology and approaches that have been used over the last 3 odd decades. It was fascinating to observe some deep-rooted notions on what it takes to make innovation happen, and therefore the myths associated with them.

For entities to truly derive full benefits from innovation it would be important to understand that the challenge here is to increase the strike rate of successful innovation; let us see if we can do that by understanding innovation differently.

Myth 1. Innovation is out of the box thinking
Well, indeed so, however there is a catch about the box here. Most innovation in attempts don’t succeed the way they were conceived, primarily because there are forces of gravity that pull them down. These forces are in the invisible mindsets in the organization’s or industry’s or country’s culture. It has by far been the area most ignored by the innovators to be able to skillfully create a breakthrough at the mindset level before attempting to offer ideas in technology and products. Newsweek’s sept 3 cover story details this aspect brilliantly. It would be a breakthrough for the U.S. to apprehend Osama Bin Laden, and since the last 5 years they have put the best ideas, talent, technology, and resources in this pursuit. But, what has come in the way is the ‘gravity’ at some level of the mindset that has made the task not only difficult but has also diluted the troops’ resonance with the purpose. The next time you hear someone say ‘out of the box’ do ask him ‘out of which box’, as the mindset gravity could be sitting anywhere in the culture of the mindsets.

Myth 2. Innovation is generating new idea
For a budding innovator nothing could be more exciting than to sit through a session abundantly flowing with ideas. Of course, it is great fun generating lots of new ideas and that’s why companies spend a lot to offer courses on lateral thinking, creative thinking, etc. Ideation techniques are in abundance, – TRIZ, De-bono, Synectics, etc. – but the key to successful innovation is not merely lots of new ideas but personal insights. Often the ideating entity, be it a group or an individual, use information and domain expertise as basis enough to think of ideas around it. The capability of finding insights is a highly developed skill in innovators and the process of discovering insights a first hand one. It is not enough to use a third party or agencies to gather insights as they would bring in lots of data and information but almost never insights, as it needs to be uncovered by the innovator by cracking open blind spots in his mindsets. The biggest enemy of insights is ‘Self Projection’. This is where the potential innovator inadvertently deploys his knowledge and expertise to gather understanding from the customer or market and therefore discovers only what he was looking for, rather than discovering something which shakes up his mindsets.

Myth 3. It starts with having a breakthrough idea
I have often come across senior leaders coming out of a brainstorming session shaking their heads with dissatisfaction and saying, “No Breakthrough got generated.” This notion of let’s find the breakthrough and the rest will be taken care of doesn’t augur well for the initiation of a potentially successful innovation journey. For the innovator, finding the next big challenge is the excitement and not worries about the next big idea. The Ansari X-Prize is a great example of this phenomenon where tons of breakthroughs get successfully deployed as the challenge itself calls for it. The leadership challenge is to identify these challenges in their industry. What has not been cracked so far can give us the leapfrog effect in our industry, and would be a good trigger to search for challenges that would be most conducive to innovation. Identifying such challenges and committing to them would generate enough of escape velocity and thus be a good tool to fight gravity by which even a great idea might get sucked in, lowering the strike rate of the innovator.

Myth 4. Innovation is about R&D, technology, and products
Nothing could be more archaic than these notions, which get companies to over invest in these areas and also use that as a measurement for how innovative they are. More work on these fronts gets in a lot of patenting kind of drive which, in my view, could lead to creating a museum of ideas without delivering any value or relevance. Such attempts lead to a lot of typical conclusions from half-baked innovators like, “We were ahead of the times.” Purposeful innovations, as I mentioned earlier, require relevant and current insights and very often that can lead to innovations in business models and service models, or to strategy breakthroughs. E-Chaupal from ITC, one of the most endearing innovations in the last decade in India, started off as a process breakthrough and has developed into a business model innovation story.

Myth 5. We need a process to drive innovation
The innovators are rarely bound by the rigor of methods, but are held back by the rigor in their rhythms. Most companies that are large have deployed old organization principles to deal with innovation, which contributes to a lower strike rate as well. Innovation begets an innovation manager who manages the process and the process has gate keepers who evaluate at every stage what should be the next point of progress. Popularly known as the ‘stage gate process’, it has been in use by almost all companies that talk about formalizing innovation. This process is at least 5 decades old and is based on evaluative principles of thinking, in itself a mass murderer of fresh ideas. Innovation requires an evolutionary approach and thus calls for creating unique capabilities in people who are put behind innovation agendas. These capabilities are learnable and I have seen quite often successes take place while attempts at innovation are being made.
“If most of the talent in India has to find its’s glory under the sun it must take on innovation as their single point agenda as I believe, innovation must do for India what the quality movement did for Japan in the late 70’s and 80’s. It is imperative that companies, social organizations and Govt’s stop spending their time and money with old theories and solutions. Imagine this, How can we stand up to global onslaught with answers, methods and solutions which are at least 15 years old and my worry is that lots of companies and govt agencies are buying these methodologies, peddled by global consultants even NOW.”

The author is, Director and Co-Founder, Erehwon Innovation Consulting
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