What Kills Innovation

innovate |ˈinəˌvāt|
make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products:
innovat- ‘renewed, altered,’
verb innovare, from in- ‘into’ + novare ‘make new’ (from novus ‘new’).

Innovation is new ideas that create impact. Ideas that take form of a solution that is new, not to the whole world but to the context of the problem it is solving.

Innovation is about creating a solution that is better, that brings some improvement to the existing problem, and a solution that creates certain value for the organisation, monetary or otherwise. Innovation is generative by nature. Innovation is about changing the existing.

When we look at innovation from the lens of this definition, it can be applied ina wide range of situations to solve a wide range of problems. Innovation doesn’t have to always be associated with something bombastic or revolutionary. (In fact all innovations are incremental in nature, as there are certain inevitable steps that build up to the final outcome — but more on that in another article)

In simple words, innovation is about new ideas. New ideas are the seeds of innovation. So what kills innovation or new ideas in organizations? Every time this question is posed, we get different answers. Invariably these answers, or innovation killers can be broadly categorized under three categories — Myopia, Monkey Mind and Inertia.

Innovation Killer 01: MYOPIA

Myopia is near-sightedness. It is the inability to see beyond line of our sight. It is lack of foresight. It is lack of imagination.

Monkey Mind is the propensity of our mind to jump into solutions. This is inevitable as the human mind is wired to make sense of the world through pattern matching. We are wired to match any incoming information with patterns that already exist in our heads. These existing patterns are a result of our education, knowledge and experiences. When presented with a problem, we tend to find solutions by matching it with what we already know. Our brain is instinctively lazy. Or in other words, our brain is instinctively efficient. It automatically tries to fill gaps of missing information with what it knows.

Innovation Killer 2: MONKEY MIND

In organizations, this tendency to pattern matching is manifested as group think or expert think — “if most people in the room think this way, it must be true” or “if boss or subject matter expert thinks this way, it must be true”. One monkey jumps and the rest follow. This nips new ideas in the bud. For sure!

Inertia is our propensity not to act on an idea or solution that we may already have. Inertia is another potent killer, putting new ideas on the chopping block. You may have a new idea or a new solution but get bogged down by doubt or by the risk of failure.

Innovation Killer 03: INERTIA

It is not just individuals or smaller organizations that are affected by these three innovation killers. Even large organizations that have wherewithal and talent suffer from this malady.

We will explain this with a couple of examples. Do you remember the very first generation of mobile hand phones? I call them brick-phones. There used to be Ericsson and Siemens phones that I can remember. These first generation mobile phones solved the utility part of the service equation — they served the purpose of ‘communicating while walking’. But they were clunky and not very comfortable to carry around. They didn’t have a user-friendly interface (it was just one small strip of a screen on which you had to scroll horizontally to read text).

So it served the ‘utility’ purpose. Unlike a landline phone, you didn’t have to stand next to it through the length of the call. With brick-phones you could carry the phone out of your house or into your car and still continue to talk.

But Ericsson and Siemens missed the very important factor of ‘usability’ — that the phone should be comfortable to carry, it should have an easy to understand user interface with a simple & intuitive navigation. Nokia filled that gap.

Organisations fail because they stop seeing what is happening around them, what is changing around them

But Nokia again missed the behavior change in people. Desktops were fast being replaced by laptops. People had this emergent need to check their emails while on the go. What Nokia missed, Blackberry understood. It created a product around this behavior. Blackberry was an email device through which you could also talk!

Yet again, both Nokia and Blackberry missed another unarticulated need, need of convergence, need to carry your computer with you, need to carry your camera with you so you could instantly capture and share moments that you relished. Apple did! This was a behavior shift towards instant gratification that Apple built its phones on.

In the above cases, innovation killers are on ample display. Near sightedness makes you fail to see beyond your current markets or customers. You miss micro trends, changing behaviors, unarticulated needs, emergent and unripened technologies.

There is another insight here. Innovation is not a one-time thing. Even if you have been able to defy these three killers once (we also refer to these killers as maladies), it doesn’t ensure your continued success. Defying these maladies has to become part of your process, your culture and your day-to-day work.

Monkey mind is also on display in these cases, as organizational thought was governed by only one idea; utility in case of brick-phones, usability of current services — call & sms in case of Nokia phones, and utility again in case of Blackberry. It was groupthink! (“Why should I stick my head out”!)

Inertia sure was on abundant display. Do you think the Nokia R&D team had not figured out how to add email to a phone? Or how to make a touchscreen keypad easy to use? Or have a high quality camera in their phones? I am sure they had — but inertia was at play! Risk of failure, approvals, market research, financial implications of not succeeding, etc., etc. all must have played their own small and sweet part in the impending implosion that we all witnessed! We don’t want to change the existing. We don’t like to change what is working today, until the time it doesn’t and is invariably too late.

But all is not doom and gloom. If we recognize and identify the innovation killers in our respective contexts, catch early signals and address them in a systematic way, we can very well remain on the innovation track, and relive and ride multiple cycles of change through innovation.

How do we do it? How do we fight innovation killers?
Here are three simple ways. To tackle myopia we need to look at things differently. To tackle monkey mind we need to think about solutions differently. And, to fight inertia we need to learn to make things differently!

However, I accepted the invitation, and thought I will share whatever I know from my practice, with earnestness and honesty. Like everything else I have learnt in life, design-thinking* or human-centered design* is acquired knowledge for me. (*These terms have been inter-changeably used).

My approach has been to go to the basics whenever I have to learn a new concept. I asked myself - ‘What is the soul of design-thinking?’ What is at the crux of it? This made our task easier.

Methods, tools, etc. are important, but the key principles are like soul, the light source that guides the methods and tools. Key principles help us to keep a check on whether we are designing and applying methods in true spirit and form or not. Any method without soul is just body which is there but serves little. To realise true potential of design-thinking, you need to invoke its soul, internalise it first, before you externalise it in its various manifestations in the form of methods, tools and practice.

To us there are two words that can best describe soul of design thinking - empathy and co-design. Let’s talk about them one by one.

empathy | ˈempəTHē |

noun The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

ORIGIN

Early 20th century: from Greek empatheia

(from em- ‘in’ + pathos ‘feeling’) translating German Einfühlung.

Self-awareness is the starting point of empathy

Empathy starts with self-awareness. Self-awareness makes you more perceptive and sensitive to your inner-self, your motivations and purpose, your behavior and actions. Sharpening your faculty to be self-aware makes you more discerning and acute in your ability to see other people’s needs with more clarity. You don’t only see their point-of-view or perspective, rather you feel their needs, context and situation with more compassion and clarity.You need to understand yourself first before you can start to tread the path of empathy. If you do it with sincerity, rigour and perseverance, magic happens. It’s a bit like spirituality, you need to become one with the soul of the cosmos to find peace and harmony. You need to become one with the user to emotionally and spiritually go through their experiences. Then you don’t even need to discern insights, you feel them.