The dramatic spread of COVID-19 has disrupted global businesses, communities and livelihoods. As expected, this disruption has caused organizations to delay planned innovation as well as many new initiatives.
McKinsey & Co., early in the pandemic, reported that most organizations were delaying innovation efforts while seeing unprecedented opportunity with CEOs expressing a lack of confidence to address those opportunities.
In prior crises, including the SARS outbreak in Asia and the global financial crisis of 2008, the businesses that continued innovation not only survived, but came out stronger, beating the S&P 500 by 30 percent or more. Based on this, it appears that businesses that continue to pursue innovation will perform better during hard times and emerge from a crisis in a stronger position than those that merely hunker down.
The case for continuing innovation is strong, as uncertainty across all industries opens opportunities for seeking competitive advantage.
Recent studies also reveal that innovation is valued at the C-level. Yet many leaders don’t feel they have the team and resources necessary for effective innovation. That’s usually an oversight by leadership, because chances are good there are innovative teams waiting to be formed, but nobody has taken the time to organize them effectively.
The reason for this? Most often, it’s a misunderstanding of what innovation is and how it happens.
Defining innovation
There’s more to innovation than just cool new ideas. That’s creativity, which is great, but creativity in and of itself just sits there.
Creativity is the generation of new and/or novel ideas. Innovation is a creative act or solution that results in quantifiable gain. Innovation puts it into action. It’s the means — the team, the process, the discipline — to implement all those creative ideas in a way that generates value for the organization and its customers.
Different types of innovation goals require different types of innovation energy. There are at least three ways of addressing an innovation challenge: evolutionary, expansionary and revolutionary approaches.
Evolutionary innovation accepts the problem as defined, while focusing on optimization and incremental change.
Expansionary innovation focuses on doing things differently.
A problem that has a low risk tolerance and perhaps a smaller budget needs evolutionary or, at most, expansionary approaches to problem-solving.
In contrast, revolutionary approaches to innovation involve high levels of system disruption and frequently redefine the presenting problem.
When should each innovation mode be chosen? It depends, but the organization should first choose the type of innovation it is seeking based on goals, strategy, culture and tolerance for risk.
Ideally, a defined innovation continuum will emerge for the organization, allowing for the delivery of evolutionary, expansionary and revolutionary innovation on-demand.
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory sets an example of deploying all three, with some emphasis on revolutionary innovation.
“APL works across the [innovation] continuum with our partners, but from our assessment we concluded that we should increase the percentage of our internal R&D investments that was potentially revolutionary,” the organization states. “It required each area to review its vision. You can’t strive to be revolutionary without a long-term vision of what that looks like. We continue to use the continuum framework in our periodic R&D investment program management reviews.”
Leveraging difference
Just as organizations have different types of innovation efforts, they also have many different types of innovators. An innovative organization figures out how to maximize the talents of their various innovators.
Nowhere is innovation more essential to the mission than at defense contractor Raytheon Technologies. The company has decades of experience rolling out military electronic systems innovations, but it continues to curate teams for continual performance across the innovation continuum.
Similarly, according to the chief innovation officer of the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, “There is a portfolio of projects, and there is a portfolio of people. To get the right distribution of personnel, you need
to understand the framework and makeup of personalities and traits of who those personnel are. You just can’t assign a number to a job. You have to assign a personality, value system and skill set.”
If an organization simply puts all its most outside-the-box thinkers in a room, chaos may result.
However, these outside-the-box thinkers may be just what the problem needs if the desired innovation requires paradigm-breaking ideas. To marshal the team toward innovation, the group in the metaphorical room needs to think and act in ways that lead not only to breakthroughs but also to practical implementation.
If the wrong people are used for the wrong things, the organization is destined to get the wrong results. Leaders should decide on the type of innovation needed, assemble the right team and, most important, facilitate the work in ways such that each participant gains the needed self-awareness to understand and leverage each other’s contributing roles.
This phenomenon can be observed in organization after organization. One company, a large federally funded defense research contractor, was working to provide an ongoing pipeline of breakthrough innovation. Leadership was consistently disappointed that the ideas being brought forward were almost exclusively evolutionary or expansionary at best.
This group of world-class scientists and engineers was incapable of generating innovative outputs of a revolutionary nature. The reason: The organization selected individuals and deployed teams to work on the problems who lacked diversity of thought processes, and they were almost all geared toward more evolutionary approaches to innovation.
After realizing that the need was for a different type of insight — the kind that did not necessarily fit into current paradigms, they began to assess individuals’ approaches to innovation and deploy teams made up individuals who were more pioneering in thought and action.
How to manage for innovation
During good times and bad, organizations rarely lack good ideas or access to methodologies for identifying problems and generating ideas.
Organizations continue to use design thinking, lean start-up and value proposition design. But rather than attempt to manage innovation, they should instead manage for innovation by creating the conditions that make innovation possible.
Stan Gryskiewicz, chair emeritus of the Association of Managers of Innovation and retired innovation expert for the Center for Creative Leadership, summed it up: “Organizations must align strategy, culture, systems, and people’s talents and preferences in order to optimize innovation outcomes.”
Companies need to apply the right talent to the right problems — targeted innovation. Targeted innovation is an approach to developing solutions to a specific need. Companies can achieve this by organizing teams of diverse thinkers and teaching them how to value and apply differing styles to approach innovation and work. Then they can assemble teams designed and facilitated in a way that achieves the desired innovation outcomes.
Ultimately, the goal of innovation is to deliver to management a maximum quality of ideas (evolutionary, expansionary and revolutionary), generated primarily by employees, that strengthen the company’s position for the future — financially, strategically and brand-wise — through the creation of new business opportunities.
Successful innovation requires understanding and incorporating relevant aspects of individuals and the organization. Organizations don’t create innovations; people do. And as a result, it becomes important to understand the needs, motivations, skills and abilities assigned to create and implement innovation in organizations.
APL has done this. “The framework has helped staff members, from new hires to senior experts, understand how they and their work fit into innovation and the innovation strategy of the organization.”
The role of learning
To better understand and deploy individual talents, learning leaders and innovation practitioners need a better understanding of their style and approach to innovation and how it matches up to the needs of the organization. By understanding and applying knowledge of these approaches, people can become innovation leaders and individuals can better make constructive use of individual differences by understanding and applying how differing approaches to solving problems can yield different outcomes.
Numerous tools and assessments can be used to make these invisible elements visible. The key is to use them constructively to better understand how individual attributes can help to leverage needed strengths and mitigate potential blind spots.
People generally possess the skills to be creative, generate novel thought, solve problems and interact with each other synergistically. While it is true that we each have unique ways of addressing problems, very few of us know how to capitalize on this orientation or understand and leverage differences between various individuals. The key is to understand and leverage the unique capabilities in each of us by understanding the different approaches and deploying the needed skills appropriately.
In conclusion
Innovation is a clear value to any business plan and profitability. And it also strengthens the organization because it demonstrates and establishes that it’s not just idea originators who make the difference. It’s each member of the team that makes the idea work. The people selected for certain tasks should depend on the project and the goals of the organization. It is important for the innovation leader to leverage the natural strengths of people to improve the outputs of individuals and the team, as well as the innovation of your organization in the long run.
