Why is my business not innovative?

Back to innovation for this article – and I’ll do at least one more follow up in the next week or so.

I wanted to explore why large businesses don’t seem to be able to successfully innovate.  As with anything, there are plenty of well-reported exceptions, but considering the level of investment in innovation those businesses make, I think my generalization is justified.

I have a theory around what a business needs to be able to innovate – there are three key elements; a credible challenge, means to deploy and conviction to deliver. 

Credible challenge is a threat or opportunity that the business associates feel direct ownership for.  The challenge needs to be self-evident, and the associates need to not only be affected by the challenge, but also have the ability to influence the outcome.  They have to be direct stakeholders.

Means to deploy are suitable and accessible resources that can be used to address the credible challenge. 

Conviction to deliver is the ability to define the credible challenge, effectively manage the means to deploy and stay the course in light of inevitable failures (and hopefully some successes too).  A pretty good definition of leadership even if I do say so myself J.

So just add those elements and you should be delivering world-class innovation in no time, right?  Probably not.  What makes this difficult is that the larger the business, the harder it is to define a credible challenge.  Conversely, the smaller the business, the more limited the means to deploy. 

The tension between 'credible challenge' and 'means to deploy' with respect to business size

Logically therefore, a ‘sweet spot’ exists – a size where a business can find optimal balance between the two.  I suspect that this ideal size is not fixed, but is actually a function of the organization and culture in place.  In fact, the optimal balance could even be different depending on the defined challenge.  Probably some other things I haven't thought of, too.

One of the well-documented exceptions I mentioned earlier, W.L. Gore and Associates, is renowned for both innovative success and revolutionary culture, and it’s pretty obvious that the second enables the first.  However, I think a key component of this is that Gore’s culture and organisation actually enables the concept of credible challenge to exist amongst a larger group size, which therefore supports a greater means to deploy than would typically be expected with such a large group.  Even so, Gore actively prevents a business unit from growing beyond a couple of hundred associates.

OK, so we’ve covered off the three elements we need to put in place, and why that’s not as easy it sounds – but how do we diagnose what is missing and adjust accordingly?  Don’t forget that this is not a case of implementing a list of stuff, but instead an attempt to deliver a best compromise across competing elements.  So being able to identify the status and adjust the balance is critical.

The effect of missing elements with the pursuit of innovation 

 

If your business can’t seem to pursue an objective long enough to deliver a result, then you’re probably directionless and need to focus on your conviction to deliver.

Continuously executing every idea you have, until you run out of resource?  A clear need to define a credible challenge and avoid being clueless.

If the problem is associates being frustrated by a lack of resources needed to make things happen, the means to deploy needs to be adjusted so that your associates don’t feel so powerless.

Of course, it’s possible to have two or even all three of these issues, but by far the most difficult to address is the credible challenge.  So in the next article we’ll discuss some thoughts around how to narrow the field at least a little.