The Realist Innovator

Posted By on Feb 8, 2017 in Columns |


The Realist Innovator

 
Our columnist boldly refutes Lucy Kellaway and “ideates” his way to a realistic understanding of innovation.

 
Innovation and the related mushrooming vocabulary – buzzwords in everyone’s mouth. In mine as well, all too often. Sometimes I don’t even realise it anymore, as when Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway, to my befuddlement, awarded the word ‘ideation’ a place in her dictionary of useless business jargon. Up to this point, I had considered this a standard – and useful – word.

 
At second glance, several of the words drawing her vitriol are daily-use for me: business modelling, design thinking, open innovation, innovation labs – all things I am using daily in my work and I am teaching at Gakushuin University to expand the horizon of my students. Am I pushing them into an abyss of garbled language and meaningless jargon?

 
I certainly agree with Mrs Kellaway that many of these are less than pretty contortions of the Oxford Dictionary, but this does not mean they are devoid of meaning. ‘Effectiveness’, ‘efficiency’, ‘quality management’ – these are all accepted vocabulary and the hallmarks of ensuring the success of any firm’s current business. But the reason Innovation Management exists is because these alone are no longer sufficient to ensure competitiveness down the line.
Kudos to Mrs Kellaway for unpicking obfuscation, but things that did not exist before need new words. ‘Ideation’ is a good example: saying ‘to get ideas’ would be better English, but it would not capture what ideation wants to express: a structured and systematic way of doing so. That is what many companies lack. No one ever doubted Sony’s and Sharp’s mastery of the art of efficiently managing their existing business. The failure to develop new one before competitors caught up was what brought them into the quandary they are in today.

 
Certainly, innovation is a hyped subject and understandably starting to annoy many executives as one more thing to pack on their crowded agenda. The actual problem, however, is not these ugly neologisms or that they would lack meaning, but the inflationary use of “word shells”, as if pinning an innovation term on any given process would make innovation appear out of thin air: suddenly, talking to a customer becomes open innovation. At the end, only disappointment awaits and the conviction that all the fuss about Innovation Management is just a fad with little to show for it.

 
Still, “hype” is not the same as ”fad”. Innovation Management is here to stay. I think Innovation Management today is where Quality Management used to be in the 1980s: a great variety of approaches, pushed forward by a few eager companies and thinkers, but without any unifying framework or a strong support basis of professionals or tools and methods. This is unlike Quality Management, with dedicated departments, professionals, and universally accepted tools.
There are attempts to change this, most importantly, ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) committee TC279 (link). It is working on drafting the first Standard for systematic Innovation Management and on creating a common language for executives. But global agreement is a difficult task, and completion is still years off.

 
In the meantime, managers pushed to ‘do innovation’ often cherry-pick some flashy approach, be it 3M’s 30% rule, hot desking, or ideation workshops – only to invariably end up in the same trough of disillusionment. All too often managers think it’s nice to call together staff and let them dream up new ideas for new business, but once the ideas have been generated, no one knows what to do with them – as useful as a suggestion box that is never emptied. After all, it is called Innovation Management, and left to its own devices, indeed nothing will come of any of them. Executives must learn to approach innovation as they do quality.

 
Successfully creating innovation capacity needs dedicated structures and processes different from those of existing business: a dedicated team working on innovation, neither controlled by representatives from existing business, nor too far removed from them, that has its own set of KPIs that are different from KPIs for existing business, and that has a systematic approach for getting from idea to business model, prototype and finished product; a process that allows for trial and error; a point man who has the CEO’s backing and sees the process through from idea to product launch; a structured approach for sourcing ideas not only from staff, but also from external parties, be they startups, customers, or clients. In short, innovation needs management and is not the responsibility by lucky accident of a lonely thinker in a R&D department.
Starting from this basic premise, in this column I will be focusing on how companies, particularly in Japan, are grappling with these issues – not as an academic, not as a journalist, just as someone who is trying to get his head around how companies can spur and manage innovation: as a Realist Innovator.