Start building the house from the roof
Hi there! I hope this post finds you all fine and trying to change the ways your organizations innovate. Innovation for innovation, that's how it's done.
In this post I'll be analyzing what I by far consider the biggest mistake when introducing the Open Innovation approach into an organization. It can be summarized as "building the house from the roof", or in other words, creating a structure that rests on pure air.
Open Innovation, as many other doctrines buzzing around these days, is nothing more -and nothing less- that a unified set of approaches, mostly driven by common sense, aiming to maximize the ROI an organization obtains from innovation activities. But as any other doctrine, it cannot generate innovation by itself. The innovation must be there before the doctrine can be applied. If the doctrine is applied to an organization without building the substrate required for innovation to spur, the outcome shall not only be a lot of wasted effort; it might even stress the organization and discourage its members to the point that productivity decreases below the initial levels.
But how can this be? How can applying a doctrine that has been successful in many cases cause stress and demotivation in an organization? Let's try to explain it by means of an example: a technology company Tech Inc. runs a small Technology department in charge of developing innovations based on new technologies. As cool as it sounds, productivity of that unit is far below expectations. Without further consideration the company decides to replace the unit's manager in the hope that fresh blood changes things, and opts for an Open Innovation doctrine fellow (it happens to be that some top manager has heard of that term somewhere and thinks to remember it proved valuable at Scrappy Inc.).
The brand new manager starts by deploying all the nice Open Innovation approaches to her new organization. Processes are put in place, started and monitored. Goals are set. People are taught in the new ways of thinking. And after a few months, results start to pour in. Seduced by the apparent effectivity of the approach, other units within the company begin applying it as well, without further considerations of course.
However, after some more time (may be just one year), achievements start decreasing. People are stressed and demotivated. There's just too much work and activities as to be handled comfortably. Some people leave the unit. More and more effort is required to justify goals achievement. It's then when some key guys leave the unit and the whole thing crumbles down.
Why did this happen? As simple as it may sound, a root cause analysis was missing. It was not analyzed what were the reasons for the low productivity of the Technology unit. Just some proven processes were deployed on top in the hope that they by themselves would change things. Doing that was much simpler and cheaper than analyzing the sources of the problem -and fixing them-. More often than not we can count the following sources:
So, as conclusion to this -rather long- post, before deploying the Open Innovation doctrine on your organization make sure at least the three issues I mention above are fixed. Otherwise you will not only fail but might even make things worse for your company.
(I want to thank my family for allowing me the time to write this post)
In this post I'll be analyzing what I by far consider the biggest mistake when introducing the Open Innovation approach into an organization. It can be summarized as "building the house from the roof", or in other words, creating a structure that rests on pure air.
Open Innovation, as many other doctrines buzzing around these days, is nothing more -and nothing less- that a unified set of approaches, mostly driven by common sense, aiming to maximize the ROI an organization obtains from innovation activities. But as any other doctrine, it cannot generate innovation by itself. The innovation must be there before the doctrine can be applied. If the doctrine is applied to an organization without building the substrate required for innovation to spur, the outcome shall not only be a lot of wasted effort; it might even stress the organization and discourage its members to the point that productivity decreases below the initial levels.
But how can this be? How can applying a doctrine that has been successful in many cases cause stress and demotivation in an organization? Let's try to explain it by means of an example: a technology company Tech Inc. runs a small Technology department in charge of developing innovations based on new technologies. As cool as it sounds, productivity of that unit is far below expectations. Without further consideration the company decides to replace the unit's manager in the hope that fresh blood changes things, and opts for an Open Innovation doctrine fellow (it happens to be that some top manager has heard of that term somewhere and thinks to remember it proved valuable at Scrappy Inc.).
The brand new manager starts by deploying all the nice Open Innovation approaches to her new organization. Processes are put in place, started and monitored. Goals are set. People are taught in the new ways of thinking. And after a few months, results start to pour in. Seduced by the apparent effectivity of the approach, other units within the company begin applying it as well, without further considerations of course.
However, after some more time (may be just one year), achievements start decreasing. People are stressed and demotivated. There's just too much work and activities as to be handled comfortably. Some people leave the unit. More and more effort is required to justify goals achievement. It's then when some key guys leave the unit and the whole thing crumbles down.
Why did this happen? As simple as it may sound, a root cause analysis was missing. It was not analyzed what were the reasons for the low productivity of the Technology unit. Just some proven processes were deployed on top in the hope that they by themselves would change things. Doing that was much simpler and cheaper than analyzing the sources of the problem -and fixing them-. More often than not we can count the following sources:
- lack of competence: people just don't have the right competences required to innovate within a complex technical and business context (not everyone needs this competence, remember Jobs&Wozniak? But at least someone needs to have it)
- lack of motivation: innovation relies mostly on intrinsic motivation, which requires a specific environment to grow; if the environment is antagonic to intrinsic motivation, innovation won't succeed
- lack of leadership: successful innovation requires a strong, recognized leader with high business or technical competence, clear views and a defined course of action
So, as conclusion to this -rather long- post, before deploying the Open Innovation doctrine on your organization make sure at least the three issues I mention above are fixed. Otherwise you will not only fail but might even make things worse for your company.
(I want to thank my family for allowing me the time to write this post)
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