Organizational Innovation

Can you innovate too much? After all, new ideas fuel organic growth. One would think an organization would be happy to have as many ideas as possible.

But not always. Here are scenarios where over-innovating might be considered too much of a good thing.

1.  When you are over-positioned: Too many good ideas could lead you to an extreme position in the market where you stop earning at the middle and bottom ends of the market. Most companies crave the premium end of the market, but overdoing it can backfire.

Example: Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center has done such a great job at innovating in its domain that it’s considered in the top three U.S. children’s hospitals. Therein lies the problem. The local market may see Cincinnati’s Children’s as so advanced and innovative that parents are reluctant to take their kids there for routine health issues – bumps, bruises, fevers, and so on. It becomes the place to go only when their child is sick with a deadly disease – cancer and the like. Fortunately, the hospital recognized the risk and took measures to stay competitive for routine visitations.

2.  When you are under capacity: Generating new ideas puts pressure on an organization. New ideas must be evaluated, filtered, and developed. This takes time and resources. People are distracted from their regular day jobs and they feel overwhelmed. Too many ideas may exceed the organization’s capacity to make sense of it all. Idea fatigue sets in

Example: A major player in aerospace wanted to create a new digital app solution for its customers. The app was intended to retrieve sensor data from aircraft components and relay it into a useful smartphone application. The team slowed to a near halt. It had collected several hundred ideas from many different sources and consolidated them into a massive database. The team couldn’t possible manage the abundance of ideas and it was unable to move forward.

3.  When you stray from your core: Over-innovating may be keeping you too busy to seek new ideas where it counts the most – in your core competencies.

Example:  Kodak deployed way too many innovation resources to its technical skills around chemistry, fluid, and photography. Kodak missed what was happening to them. While Kodak was a highly innovative firm, it failed to innovate around its non-technical core competencies: consumer insights, design, system integration, and customer loyalty. Had it developed and innovated around these, it could have used them to enter virtually any category.

4.  When you drift off strategy: Generating too many ideas creates temptations to move in different directions. White space and adjacent markets start looking attractive when you are holding a handful of great ideas. But this, too, can derail an organization and cause it to move away prematurely from a market strategy that has been fueling growth.

Example: A major health care conglomerate in the medical device space wanted to expand to an adjacent market. It selected the anesthesia market, and it bought a bundle of intellectual property to gain entry. It wanted to enter the market with the most advanced anesthesia machine of its kind. But the project consumed so many discretionary dollars and human resources that it drowned the main businesses that were funding it.

Navigating complex organizations takes skill and savviness, or what some call office politics. It is such an important skill that world class companies like GE and Johnson & Johnson teach it to their employees and reward them for using it. We may not like it, but for good ideas and people to survive, we must build organizational savviness and influence skills.

Succeeding at innovation takes that same organizational savviness. Here are eight tips to improve your innovation savviness:

1.  You don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room. Corporate rookies, especially newly-minted MBA’s, rush in with the goal of getting to the best answer faster than anyone else in the room. Even when you are the smartest guy (gal) in the room, you should avoid this behavior. Otherwise, you will gradually lose allies. People will stop inviting you, and you will soon become a “solo act.” Instead, work hard to offer your ideas with the intent of combining them with the best of others. Be seen as an integrator of ideas rather than competing to create the best idea.

2. Make sure your innovation efforts are seen as relevant. It’s tempting to be the first to jump on the latest fad and prove your entrepreneurial spirit. However, by doing so, you risk being seen as someone who is out of touch, too theoretical, or “chasing windmills.” You may think you have a good grasp of what’s relevant to the organization. But your views may differ dramatically from what the boss sees at her level of the organization. Instead, make sure you solicit advice about the relevance of your project. How does it link to the strategic initiatives of the firm? How would you explain your project’s importance to an outsider? Pull out if you have difficulty making this link.

3.  Work only on those projects with a clear, supported mandate from senior management. While your innovation project may be relevant, that is not the same as having a mandate. Many initiatives and ideas may be relevant to the organization’s success, but only a limited number get the necessary dollars and headcount to be successful. Link yourself only to projects that have management’s support. Avoid being sucked into every initiative that comes your way. If you are talented, people will want your time and energy on their projects. Be sure to “limit rather than dilute” – it is better to succeed on a few projects than deliver marginal results on many.

4. Timing is everything. Every project or initiative follows a predictable life cycle: intro, growth, maturity, and decline. Be sure to join innovation initiatives early in their life cycle, and get out when they mature. Some make the mistake of hanging on too long, after the program has lost its “oomph.” Either they didn’t see the decline coming, or they became too comfortable to change. Either way, they are doomed if they stay with an innovation program to its bitter end.

5.  Learn to recognize…and deal with…sabotage by others. People treat ideas differently depending on the source of the idea. If an idea comes from an internal peer rival, people tend to see it as tainted. They sabotage it because it’s not theirs. If the same idea had come from outside the firm (from a competitor or consultant), people overvalue it. They see it as tempting. You should expect to see this behavior and have ways to neutralize its effect. One way is to not associate ideas with a specific person, especially you. Contrary to popular wisdom, avoid giving attribution the person who created the idea. This makes sure the idea is stripped of any associations related to the inventor. The idea now has its best chance of survival.

6.  Savviness is not the same as manipulation.  There is an old saying in the corporate world:  “Don’t make enemies of your peers. If you do, you won’t need more enemies – they can ruin just fine.” When navigating the innovation waters, don’t see it as a political chess game where you have to manipulate others to get what you want. Savvy innovators have a high level of political astuteness and possess strategies and skills for ethically navigating the corporate terrain to gain “organizational influence and impact with integrity.”

 7.  “It’s not what you don’t know that will kill you. It’s what you know that ain’t really so.” Will Rogers is credited with this savvy quote. That wisdom holds true today for innovation. People let their current knowledge about an issue blind them to other facts that may contradict their beliefs. Holding onto a belief that you are certain is true…only to find out later that it isn’t…will cause others to question your flexibility and judgment. Learn to recognize this blind spot (called Confirmation Bias), and seek ways to weigh data equally, including data contrary to your point of view.

8.  Treat yourself to continuous development and improvement. The biggest mistake corporate innovators make is they stop developing themselves. Your first priority is to assure your relevance to the organization, and you can do that only if you take the time to learn new skills and update old ones. If you are doing today’s job on twenty year old skills, you have become the proverbial “dead man walking.” Instead, you should make every year count – take time to do something, anything that develops and improves your innovation abilities.

Mitch Ditkoff notes a common misperception regarding bad ideas:

“One of the inevitable things you will hear at a brainstorming session is something like “there are no bad ideas.” Well, guess what? There are plenty of bad ideas….The key for aspiring innovators? To find the value in what seems to be a “bad idea” and then use that extracted value as a catalyst for further exploration.”

I agree. Good ideas usually start as bad ideas, an insight I learned originally from the folks at SIT. But the question is: how do you extract the value from a bad idea to transform it? I offer three approaches.

First, look carefully at the bad idea and try to characterize the single benefit that the idea delivers to the customer regardless of how whacky that benefit is delivered. It is the benefit that you want to hold onto, not the whacky deliver system. Ideate new ways to deliver that benefit.

Second, what criteria are being used to judge the idea as bad? Try using the Reverse Assumption technique on those criteria. Turn them around, challenge them, re-frame them. Make the seemingly bad idea look good in a different context.

Third, look for what is old about the new idea.  Thomas B. Ward, is his chapter, “What’s Old about New Ideas,” says:

“Structured imagination refers to the fact that when people use their imagination to develop new ideas, those ideas are heavily structured in predictable ways by the properties of existing categories and concepts.”

In other words, we do not ideate in a vacuum, but rather in the context of what we already know. My advice is to take the bad idea and look for the original concept that it was built upon. Can that be taken in new directions using a structured process?

For corporate innovators, I see this as a best practice. I often ask people what they do with their bad ideas. If I see a curious look on their face, it usually means they are not taking advantage of this phenomena.

Bad ideas are better than no ideas.