It seems like we all are increasingly seeking to be more
entrepreneurial. These days, innovation is no longer a buzz word; it is in the
priority list for startups to large sized corporations. However, despite the growing
passion for innovation, many lack ability to execute. It is not about having
ideates or a strategy for creativity makes you more innovative – in many cases,
even a promising project will fall flat without gaining traction.
Studies show most organizations suffer from dyslexia of
understanding their own cognition. Many organizations that fall flat on
innovation are usually those having aged syndrome. These organizations are usually big and often
suffer from growing pain while others gradually degenerate to entrenched
behavioral pathology: extreme form of this behavioral degeneration is known as
“passive aggressive” behavior. At surface, such organizations are clam and
sprinkled with few world beaters who seem to be at loss not knowing why most
promising projects are not gaining traction. The passive aggressive
originations are great examples to learn things that should be avoided. In
contrast, some of the willing big corporations developed a way to cope with the
challenge, occasionally hiring consultancy firms to instigate change. Yet these
steps are merely inadequate to steer an organization towards innovation and
merely amount to dosing fire.
Innovation Culture
An important beginning instead would be, to pay attention to
important antecedents of innovation culture “perceived organizational fairness”. My research shows, this subtle
element is linked to many other interrelated rudiments such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment that
collectively shape how people behave in your organization. Evaluate your management practice and make it
more sensitive to human side of things e.g. collaboration, unification, goal
orientation and task orientation & relationship orientation (Prasad,
Martens & Matthyssens, 2011) etc.
Guide this management practices around core “Value”: create a “Core
Value” for your organization. Align the
core value of your organization with “innovation
value chain”: idea generation, conversion and diffusion. This is the first step towards achieving behavioral
augmentation of your organization: value influence attitude and attitude
influences behavior (figure 1). Organizational Culture, for that matter is the
collective reflection of behaviors enforced by innate belief system and
artifacts. In my article at Linkedin (Chowdhury, 2015a), I presented a
behavioral framework for leaders and employees to foster innovation. This
behavioral framework, which I denoted as DCB
(Deviant Citizenship Behavior) (Chowdhury, 2015b) is posited to be an
important step forward to implement innovation
culture in the organization. It is an endogenous quality that requires
organization to be risk tolerant, having strategy towards innovation and create
appropriate organizational support system that is conduit of innovation. For
example, Google created an organizational structure that accommodates
unconventional management practices within traditional system. Organizations that are willing to foster
innovation must trained leadership teams to adopt innovation work behavior (IWB) giving meritocracy priority through behavioral augmentation than the hierarchy.
Figure 1. Value,
attitude, Behavior and Culture (Chowdhury, 2013).
The next step towards innovation culture is creating environmental support through artifacts, context specific knowledge system (Chowdhury, 2013), risk tolerance, strategy and change management. This environmental support is essential: studies show organizations that failed to implement innovation culture lack adequate understanding of environmental support system for innovation.
Innovation Process
Innovation culture is an important step forward but
delivering innovate products and services required more than just cultural
initiatives. In human centered design, the process of innovation is viewed from
socio-technical system perspective, meaning the two competing systems are one
instead of separate systems. It is a balancing act in which design problem is taken
from work participants rather than pursuing it as context-free technical
issue. Conversely, in user centered approach,
usability is given priority rather than social context of use (Gasson,
2003). Both approaches seem omit focus
on customers. In contrast, 3M’s “lead user” model is a step forward in customer centric approach to innovation
(Eisenberg, 2011). According to Eisenberg (2011), the “lead user” model goes a
step further than traditional model of seeking use cases through customer
feedbacks, looking not only to the typical customer, but to those users whose needs and preferences
lead the market.
Figure 2. Innovation
Process.
This insight of “lead user” model is important in the
pursuit of ideates since simply
having an idea without its firm basis may not produce optimal result. However,
there are exceptions such as iphone, Blueray DVD players that are supported
through creative marketing. So, if your organization is not prepared for
creative marketing and cost associated with it to influence buyer behavior, “lead user” model worth the
effort. Create a selection panel for quarterly
review of ideates to be undertaken for further work at invention stage (figure 2).
However, an effort of invention must take into consideration the “contextual” (what problem you are addressing and how useful it is for your
customer/marketplace?) and “generative
“ (are you taking entrepreneurial or
customer perspective into context and/or combination thereof? Is this a
purposeful technology? Is your organizational aspiration aligned with the
discourse of invention?) aspects of the undertaking.
Achieving organization’s financial objectives should be
central: studies shows success rate of innovation is poor (1% to 7.5% only) in
many industries. Such poor success rate is often due to poor innovation
practices.
I recommend that organization considers unified model of development in which traditional product
development continues without interruption while budget and process structure
is created to support research oriented projects, e.g. disruptive product
development. Moving forward with an
invention would be to create “prototypes”. At this stage depending upon
organizational practices, appropriate process and technology should bring
together to support “productization”. One of the key practices that will
enormously benefit organization is to conduct BRR (Business Requirement Review).
What are the tangible and
intangible benefits can be realized by this productization. Simple ROI and
NPV analyses may miss intangible benefits of the proposed product and hence,
create a cross functional panel to
evaluate intangible benefits if any. Once BRR is complete, moving forward with
productization should use same NPI (New Product Development/Introduction)
process that is adopted in your organization.
Note: If you are interested creating innovation
practices in your organization, please feel free to communicate with me.
Reference
Chowdhury, D.D., 2013. Deviant
Citizenship Behavior towards Sustainability. Working paper. International
Journal of Management, Economics and Social Sciences, 2013, Vol. 2(1), pp. 28 –
53.
Chowdhury, D.D., 2015a. Leading Innovation: Transform
yourself and your organization. Available at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leading-innovation-transform-yourself-your-dhiman-chowdhury?trk=prof-post
Chowdhury, D.D., 2015b. Deviant
Citizenship Behavior: A Comprehensive Framework towards Behavioral Excellence
in Organizations. The East Asian Journal of Business Management Vol.5, No.1
pp.13-26.
Eisenberg, I., 2011. Lead-User
Research for Breakthrough Innovation.
Research-Technology Management, Volume 54, Number 1, January-February
2011, pp. 50-58(9).
Gasson, S., 2003. Human-Centered
vs. User-Centered Approaches to Information System Design. The Journal of Information Technology Theory
and Application (JITTA), 5:2, 2003, 29-46.
Prasad, B., Martens , R. & Matthyssens, P., 2011. Managerial Practices for Increasing
Perceived Fairness in Interorganizational Projects. The Open Management
Journal, 2011, 4, 28-38.
Tanev, S. & Frederiksen, H.M., 2014. Generative
Innovation Practices, Customer Creativity, and the Adoption of New Technology
Products. Technology Innovation Management Review. Available online at http://timreview.ca/article/763 .
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