Sowing innovation #1: competence
Hi everyone, and happy new year 2011! Expect this year to be more thrilling than 2010 but far less than 2012 for all of us working with technology and innovation.
Last year, I argued that by lacking any out of three fundamental characteristics, your organization will fail at any innovation strategy, including Open Innovation. In this post I'll try to provide arguments to why this is so for the first characteristic: competence.
By "competence" here I'm referring to good knowledge and hands-on experience on some field of science or technology. Why both? One can grasp a fair amount of knowledge about a given field by e.g. reading research papers on the 'net. After that, speaking to anyone unsavyy in the field shall make her feel like he's in the presence of Zeus himself. You can argue absolutely anything and that person will swallow whatever you throw at her. Meet someone with even light hands-on experience in that field and he'll beat you to dust almost without trying. Believe me, I've experienced this a few times along my career (and I've been on both sides of it, everyone has a past OK?).
Most businesses with a certain age employ very competent people. These people have been working for years with the product(s) or service(s) the business sells for a living, and they know every bit of them. Problem is, by being totally devoted to those product(s) and service(s) each of these employees are a well of competence, and a very deep one. Their visibility of the outside world is limited, as is that of a horse pulling a carriage of a F1 driver at 250 mph. Therefore any relevant innovation they are able to devise shall one way or the other be tightly related to their field of expertise, i.e. the product(s) or service(s) they know so well. Or in other words, they won't be able to innovate overcoming the chasm between that product/service and the next generation that shall wipe it out from the market.
If we represent the breadth of knowledge as a horizontal arrow and its depth as a vertical arrow, we'll find that the competence profile of most grown-up businesses' employees is as in the following figure:
That's what I call the "competence well". Most companies favour that profile by rewarding going deeper in the well, while breadth of knowledge is commonly dismissed. Exploring, learning new things and connecting them is not rewarded at all. That's one of the reasons most companies fail to adapt to the changing shape of the technology world. Employees (technicians and managers alike) are so entrenched in the company's portfolio that they fail even at seeing what comes next, while devising it is out of the question.
Ironically, the above is one of the reasons most elder employees are regarded less valuable than younger ones. Since the former have been driven to spend their lifes deepening in the knowledge well, sooner or later they become unable to see the ground up above them. In contrast, younger employees bring in fresh minds and an ambition to learn and explore that lead to innovation. These guys' profiles when entering the company are as in the following figure:
Now you may be thinking: "Okay, okay, so if the problem is lack of breadth in my knowledge pool, why don't we just sit together in a room deep-profile employees together with broad-profile ones and ask them to start innovating? Won't we get the best of both worlds that way?". Well, I've seen that approach put to practice. Senior managers appointing newcomers to be part of a sort of "young advisory board" supplying the former deep down in the well with information from the ground level. It doesn't work. Mismatch between both is just too large.
To successfully innovate requires people able to sistematically devote part of their lifetimes to learning and trying out new things, and connect them with the business they work for. Or in other words, diversify their competence. Some highly motivated people divert part of their free time to this activity, and usually those people are the most capable of anticipating events and devising radical innovations.
An innovation strategy like Open Innovation shall help to turn some of those brilliant ideas into successful and profitable innovations for the company. But the innovation strategy shall not generate those ideas, and the naive belief that successful innovation is just there for us to grab it is as useless as believing one can grow tomatoes without sowing them first.
To finish, just two proof points: both Google and Atlassian claim many of their most innovative products have arisen from the 20% free time those companies grant their employees to diversify their competence. So if you want to innovate, do yourself and your employees a favor and start rewarding them for diversifying their competence. You will get a motivational boost as a side effect.
Last year, I argued that by lacking any out of three fundamental characteristics, your organization will fail at any innovation strategy, including Open Innovation. In this post I'll try to provide arguments to why this is so for the first characteristic: competence.
By "competence" here I'm referring to good knowledge and hands-on experience on some field of science or technology. Why both? One can grasp a fair amount of knowledge about a given field by e.g. reading research papers on the 'net. After that, speaking to anyone unsavyy in the field shall make her feel like he's in the presence of Zeus himself. You can argue absolutely anything and that person will swallow whatever you throw at her. Meet someone with even light hands-on experience in that field and he'll beat you to dust almost without trying. Believe me, I've experienced this a few times along my career (and I've been on both sides of it, everyone has a past OK?).
Most businesses with a certain age employ very competent people. These people have been working for years with the product(s) or service(s) the business sells for a living, and they know every bit of them. Problem is, by being totally devoted to those product(s) and service(s) each of these employees are a well of competence, and a very deep one. Their visibility of the outside world is limited, as is that of a horse pulling a carriage of a F1 driver at 250 mph. Therefore any relevant innovation they are able to devise shall one way or the other be tightly related to their field of expertise, i.e. the product(s) or service(s) they know so well. Or in other words, they won't be able to innovate overcoming the chasm between that product/service and the next generation that shall wipe it out from the market.
If we represent the breadth of knowledge as a horizontal arrow and its depth as a vertical arrow, we'll find that the competence profile of most grown-up businesses' employees is as in the following figure:
That's what I call the "competence well". Most companies favour that profile by rewarding going deeper in the well, while breadth of knowledge is commonly dismissed. Exploring, learning new things and connecting them is not rewarded at all. That's one of the reasons most companies fail to adapt to the changing shape of the technology world. Employees (technicians and managers alike) are so entrenched in the company's portfolio that they fail even at seeing what comes next, while devising it is out of the question.
Ironically, the above is one of the reasons most elder employees are regarded less valuable than younger ones. Since the former have been driven to spend their lifes deepening in the knowledge well, sooner or later they become unable to see the ground up above them. In contrast, younger employees bring in fresh minds and an ambition to learn and explore that lead to innovation. These guys' profiles when entering the company are as in the following figure:
Now you may be thinking: "Okay, okay, so if the problem is lack of breadth in my knowledge pool, why don't we just sit together in a room deep-profile employees together with broad-profile ones and ask them to start innovating? Won't we get the best of both worlds that way?". Well, I've seen that approach put to practice. Senior managers appointing newcomers to be part of a sort of "young advisory board" supplying the former deep down in the well with information from the ground level. It doesn't work. Mismatch between both is just too large.
To successfully innovate requires people able to sistematically devote part of their lifetimes to learning and trying out new things, and connect them with the business they work for. Or in other words, diversify their competence. Some highly motivated people divert part of their free time to this activity, and usually those people are the most capable of anticipating events and devising radical innovations.
An innovation strategy like Open Innovation shall help to turn some of those brilliant ideas into successful and profitable innovations for the company. But the innovation strategy shall not generate those ideas, and the naive belief that successful innovation is just there for us to grab it is as useless as believing one can grow tomatoes without sowing them first.
To finish, just two proof points: both Google and Atlassian claim many of their most innovative products have arisen from the 20% free time those companies grant their employees to diversify their competence. So if you want to innovate, do yourself and your employees a favor and start rewarding them for diversifying their competence. You will get a motivational boost as a side effect.
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