 overcoming barriers to transformative innovation
By
Udaiyan Jatar
Transformative
Innovation
We’ve all heard that we
will need more Earths if we cannot curb population growth, reduce per
capita consumption, or get more
from less. We will need to do all
three, but “getting more from less” is what this series of articles is
about.
The story is the same at
the micro level. Our organizations have fewer resources than are needed
to meet the growing needs of our stakeholders (communities, donors,
shareholders, employees, and so on). We cannot achieve our expanding
goals with declining budgets by doing what we have always done. To
transform our outcomes, we must transform what we do and how we
do it. As
the saying goes, doing the same thing over again and expecting
a different outcome is the definition of insanity!
I think we can agree
that transformative innovation (TI) is necessary.
An example of
incremental innovation is moving from rotary dial to touch-tone
phones. This innovation improved productivity incrementally. However,
cellular phones are transformational. You don’t have to walk
miles to an emergency phone if you are stranded on a highway. If you are
a farmer in a remote village, you can access a world of information from
a cell phone. This innovation, along with the Internet, has dramatically
improved human productivity, and cut costs and reduced materials used at
the same time.
The problem is that TI
is rare and unpredictable. Why? Most of us focus on barriers like
lack of vision, funding, risk-taking, or even talent. But to unleash
innovation, the boards and senior executives of large organizations need
to remove the invisible barriers.
Barriers to Transformative Innovation
Human Nature. Let’s start with
the obvious: a majority of us don’t like major change, until we have
absolutely no choice. So we avoid it by taking “practical” incremental
steps, until sometimes it is too late. This gets amplified in our
organizational behaviors.
Poorly Defined Core Competencies.
Emanating from our basic nature is our most sacred of management
principles: “Stick to your core competencies,” or “Avoid mission creep.”
The unintended consequence of this otherwise sound idea is that it
frequently forces us to abandon ideas that are necessary to achieve an
outcome, but are too different from our existing activities.
By definition, we can’t
be experts in something that doesn’t exist yet. Therefore, we can’t
stick to activity-based core competencies and still create a
transformative innovation. This conflict explains why small
entrepreneurs—not large organizations—conceived and incubated most of
the world’s greatest innovations, organizations, and brands: United Way,
Susan G. Komen for the Cure, Goodwill, Coca-Cola, Nike, etc.
We shouldn’t define our
core competencies or our missions by what we do, but by our
desired outcomes. This might mean developing new competencies.
This removes artificial constraints to transformative innovation. Apple
is a great example of this—fear of the unknown didn’t prevent them from
taking on the music industry or the cell phone industry with the
transformative iPod and iPhone. If transformative innovation doesn’t
become a part of our core competency, it will be difficult to survive,
let alone thrive.
Illogical Time Horizons. We
measure performance in annual cycles—an agrarian operating paradigm that
simply makes no sense more than 200 years into the industrial age. The
annual agrarian cycle forces us to create annual plans and incentives.
Therefore, our projects face invisible and irrational pressure by trying
to show meaningful progress for an annual review. Wall Street takes this
irrelevant timetable to another level of idiocy by tracking companies’
quarterly results. Transformative ideas need time to evolve, especially
in the social sector. Forcing annual results squelches innovation. If we
invest big money in an innovation, we have to monitor results as
frequently as possible. But why do we have to invest big money?
Unreasonable Scale. Coupled with
illogical time horizons is the “big organization” mentality of trying to
achieve scale quickly. This makes our TI experiments too big and our
failures bigger, leaving transformative ideas dead on the vine. These
failures, then, discourage future innovation. The trick is to start
really small. If you start small, your risks are lower and the need
for annual monitoring is felt less acutely. This gives the innovators
breathing room to fail, learn, and improve—just like all those
entrepreneurs who created iconic brands.
Impossible Success Criterion.
The greatest entrepreneurs failed often, gaining rich insights before
they achieved their breakthroughs.
We won’t get
transformative innovation right on preconceived metrics or on rigid
timelines. Instead, one needs to promote several quick innovations—which
may be failures—in an organic process, while allowing serendipity to
emerge. The good news is that flexible milestones can actually speed up
the TI process if managed wisely.
The barriers listed
above are systemic and are difficult to reconcile with conventional
management wisdom, but they can be overcome—even by large organizations.
I will discuss how we can unleash transformative innovation through the
steps of discovery, invention, and execution in the next three issues of
Community Wealth Vanguard.
Udaiyan Jatar, the
founder of Blue Earth Network, is a former Global Vice President
(Innovation) at Coca-Cola. Blue Earth Network partners with nonprofits
and corporations to develop and incubate sustainable and transformative
innovation.
You can reach him at
udaiyan@blueearthnetwork.com.
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