Inside Innovation - NeoStrategy - Page 2

Innovation sounds like an exciting word at the beginning and that is how things often are once you start. But soon, the people in charge of driving and delivering the innovations come under pressure. There are two main reasons why. At the beginning most people think they are the only ones with their unique ideas. Very soon, they realize that there are a bunch of other people with similar ideas. So the initial rush goes away. The second reason is that you need to execute at hyper- speed to deliver your innovation first. Otherwise it becomes worth nothing.

I think innovation is like a marathon where you have to sprint each mile. If it was just a regular marathon, you could run at a slow pace and you would be fine. But now you need to cover the same distance at speed. This is why you need a different kind of genetic make-up for this kind of journey. This is why only a few companies are truly innovative. In my personal experience, like with any other mission, your team is the most important factor. In the traditional, slower-paced world, it is okay if one or two people within the team don’t have the genetic make-up required. Someone else can always pick up their slack. But in the real innovation game, if even one key member does not have the right personality, they will drag your innovation project down. It may not always be possible to get the best team, but with the wrong team you will fail for sure.

This is why you need an F1 team for innovation!

“The true entrepreneur is a doer not a dreamer” -Nolan Bushnell

When you have an original idea you will have an Aha moment. And now that I’ve convinced you that an idea without implementation is little more than a daydream, you will be eager to get to the execution part. That’s when you will have your Oops moment. This phase may be less frustrating if you are leading a small startup in an incubation center, but in a large corporate setup, it will likely be very challenging. Regardless of what your environment is, don’t be disheartened. You have to take your idea into unfamiliar territories, become comfortable with experimenting and make it a success.

Remember that at first a number of people will come to hear you out, but once you start facing challenges, people will move away. Any entrepreneurial journey will become lonely at some point. When you start seeing some success, everyone will try to join the party and have a piece of the cake. This is especially more common in large corporate setups.

You will be given a small fund for implementing your idea and then put under tremendous pressure to show results and profits. At one point you may even want to kick yourself for having your idea! You knew an idea could change your life but you didn’t expect it would be in this way! The point is that true innovation is an entrepreneurial journey. Only if you are prepared to take some knockouts and still stand back up will you get the taste of it.

“None of us is as smart as all of us” -Ken Blanchard

Since products and frameworks can be standardized, people think that “anybody can do any thing” given the right guidance and support. Personally, I think that ideation and innovation are driven greatly by the biology of our brains.

Some people naturally generate more ideas. We usually describe these people as “creative”, “innovative”, and “imaginative”. Other people are gifted at the execution of those ideas and we commonly think of them as “go-getters” and “doers”. Still others we may think of as “empathetic”, “motivating” and as great “communicators” shine in people-management and relationship-building skills. Although an individual’s personality can mature given the right environment, we can still broadly group people into three categories based on whether their hardwired nature makes them idea-focused, task-focused or people-focused.

Here comes the tricky part. Earlier we could afford to have three different sets of people working together to deliver the desired product. One set could focus on generating the ideas and the other two sets could focus on leadership and execution. But now if you simply give an idea, even if it is a great one, no one will really value it. Some one else will steal your idea and deliver it faster. Ultimately, nobody cares whose idea it was. All people care about in the end is results. This is the hard truth.

To deliver an innovation in the fastest time possible, the innovator now has to think like a leader and form a well-suited and competent team to help her make her ideas a reality. This is very different from the earlier days where some high-flying, intellectual guy would come up with ideas inside a closed room and he would be looked upon as great.

Now innovating means delivering, not just having ideas. The major innovators of our generation have brought in ideas and implemented them for profits because that’s what all businesses care about the most- their bottom line. I strongly feel that real innovators are actually entrepreneurs.

So never forget that Innovation = Ideas + Implementation the next time you have a great idea!

“When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars, people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?'” -Elon Musk

Until a few years ago, most companies focused on process improvements or incremental changes. The strategies used to remain competitive were cost optimization, economies of scale, quality improvement, moderate time-to-market, etc. Different groups and initiatives were formed within organizations to work on these Key Performance Indicators. When companies like Apple and Google emerged, they revolutionized the IT industry, and competitors and segments focused just on improvement were eliminated overnight. It was a wake up call for everyone working on the incremental stuff.

Fortunately, there is no longer any confusion on what to emphasize. Rapid technological advancement has called for big ideas and bigger thinkers. Every business and industry is now expected to bring true change. And innovation in one industry is expected to trigger innovations in many others. I call this Innovation Proliferation.

In the words of Ray Kurzweil: “Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion”.

Superficial improvements just aren’t enough when innovations hit the market at an exponential rate. Whether as an individual or as a leader of a company, you will be expected to deliver cutting-edge services and products. Without speed and disruption, you can only expect to deliver mediocre improvements. True innovations require agility and daring. Only a few can cope with the requirements of both visionary thinking and ruthless execution. The best companies are now trying to crack the innovation code by developing new philosophies and frameworks informed by this new methodology.

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it” -Albert Einstein

Innovation is a big buzzword nowadays. It is supposed to be the key to success, the path to fortune and the answer to all our problems- even the ones we didn’t know we had. Everyone, from IT companies and startups, to schools, businesses, big industries, and entire economies, wants in on the action. So what is innovation actually? We could say we have been innovating since the day we were gifted our human brains, since we are continually discovering or making something new in every arena- be it in science, technology, music, art or literature. People may have used different names for it in different eras, calling it magic or imagination, or a vision or contraption. Maybe during the Industrial Revolution they might have called it “continuous advancement”.

The fact is that we are born innovators. But two factors have made it more relevant now than ever before:

1. We have reached the end of the Industrial Age where there is relatively little need for manual or routine work.
2. Almost everyone everywhere has access to the same, high-quality information because of the Internet.

The truth is that innovation will stop being just a fashionable word, but become an essential commodity for survival in the fast- approaching future.

“Held in the palms of thousands of disgruntled people over the centuries have been ideas worth millions – if they only had taken the first step and then followed through” -Robert M. Hayes

India today is a restless country. We are better connected globally than ever before, our GDP growth is strong, and there is an increasing availability of both venture capital and a highly educated and talented workforce. But the more visionary ones among us realize that the key to continued prosperity is to have our business products and services keep pace with the rapid evolution of technology. Models that were successful before will not be viable forever. For example, we can expect jobs in the once-revolutionizing Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector to be replaced very soon by faster and cheaper artificial intelligence.

Luckily, there is no shortage of people wanting to think bigger, think outside the box and make their ideas a reality. As organizations have slowly started modernizing their hierarchies and processes, employees have begun to feel more comfortable approaching their management with novel ideas. Many dream of leaving their uninspiring jobs and starting up something of their own. Even recent graduates have started rejecting the security of corporate jobs to become entrepreneurs.

The fact is, I meet these kinds of people all the time and call them aspiring innovators. Sadly, most of them will never actually be successful in turning their ideas into hard, profitable, game-changing reality. This isn’t because they aren’t smart or hard-working. It’s because they think that’s enough.

To become a true innovator, you first need to understand what innovation is and what it is not. Then you need to recognize the important role personality plays in the process. Most importantly, you need to grasp the two most important strategies- Design Thinking and Lean Startup- all successful innovators adopt, whether they know those names or not. I am not THE expert on innovation and neither am I attempting a novel methodology. What follows is what is according to me the most relevant information, presented in a way that’s quickly and easily digestible. It is my original take on the subject after years of observing strategies that work, and more frequently, those that fail.