Want to survive? Just innovate

A book title that really appealed to me was “Why Things Fail” by British economist Paul Ormerod, so I picked up a copy last year. The book is a study into similar patterns of failure that appear in a variety of different environments (biology, geology, economics etc).

 The guts of the book (warning, spoiler ahead) is that all environments change so if you don’t change what you are doing you are most likely doomed to failure. The only strategy against this is to innovate.

Now having spent most of my life working in small businesses, I like to think that I have masses of experience with innovation, and consequently lots of experience with failure (I mean lots!).

Unsurprisingly, I tend to find the study of innovation and failure quite interesting. So much so that I ended up having an event at the Churchill Club around innovation to see what lessons I could glean from the experts.

So last week I ran a panel on how to make innovation a sustainable activity inside your organisation. The panel consisted of:

Wes Sonnenreich, director of innovation at Deloitte, Roger La Salle, chair of innovation Queens University in Belfast, and Crispin Blackall, director business operations at Telstra.

Learning Number 1: How do you define Innovation?
Plenty of consultants want to own the definition, but I thought Roger La Salle’s was pretty reasonable. Innovation is change that adds value.

Learning Number 2: How to come up with an innovation?
Roger felt quite strongly that you didn’t have to create a disruptive innovation or the next big thing. In fact he had plenty of examples of success through minor changes. His take on being innovative was very simple:

• Find something that’s already working and do it better.
• Look at your products, processes and services.
• Finish the sentence – I wish this product would…………….

Learning Number 3: How do you successfully deliver innovation?
Crispin Blackall had lots of experience delivering innovation inside Telstra. His thoughts included:

• Have a clear, well defined strategy.
• Use small teams with the right people and enable them to make decisions.
• Clearly identify what success looks like at each stage (gates for continuing the project).
• Use only the processes needed for that innovation (don’t stifle people).
• Don’t stop before the innovation is delivered as you will destroy the team.

Lesson Number 4: How do you get innovation DNA in your organisation?
Wes Sonnenreich had a huge amount of experience in running an innovation program within Deloitte and with their clients. My understanding was that he felt there were five steps to making innovation part of your organisation.

• Step 1 – Build a culture that understands what innovation is and values it.
• Step 2 – Enable your team to come up with ideas.
• Step 3 – Build a pipeline of ideas and processes to manage it.
• Step 4 – Build processes to deliver the innovations.
• Step 5 – Provide feedback and ongoing guidance.

Lesson 5: Selecting innovation metrics
An old business partner of mine, Bill Lang, has always said to me, if you can’t measure it, then don’t waste time on it (in regards to business activities only!), so I had to ask the question, “How do you measure innovation?”.

There wasn’t one specific answer though, as every situation is different. There did however seem to be a bit of a theme that innovation was not about the processes, but about the outcomes.

Which is why I liked the statement: “In 12 month’s time, 20% of our revenue will come from products and services that don’t currently exist.”

Innovation – easy peasy.