Let's not Reinvent the wheel
Jack Hipple
failureand/or success are well known as documented. An example of which
is a study of 15 dailed coroporate innovation leaders (we would call
them "innovation officers" todayl ) Issues that we are "reinventing"
such as co-location, syles of innovation leaders and their managers was
summarized in 11/01 issue of Chemical Innovation, and subsequently
published in Leadres In Action (from CCL) and Research and Technology
Management a while later. This was the summary of art almost 15 years
ago at the bottom of the last cycle. The only thing we have learned
since that is widely implemented is the use of global and
multifunctional teams vs. the previous focus on R&D. That's all that's
new. We are re-learning the people issues and all of this at very
expensive conferences and in reading new books. Just as in history, we
fail to go back and read history and think that all problems are new.
Solutions such as separate locations and funding, calculating the
funding required to produce a given amount of new growth, broadening
the particiation with the innovation effort (not just R&D people),
carrot and stick budgeting, a supported champion who is more than 2
years from retirement, and a SUSTAINED effort that does not get turned
on and off with the business cycle, pro-ative use of personal behavior
and problem solving style assessment.
The enviromoent in which we have to apply these tool HAS changed--we
have global ompetition not only in manyfacturing, but in innovation.
Internally to corporations, we have global issues that did not exist,
but applying the principles is no diffeerent.We now have the capability
to use inventive technoogy across other fields that we did not know how
to do before. We have technologies such as TRIZ that allow rapid
problem solving knowledge across companies and industries, elliminating
the need for classical guessing and brainstoring. In a recent study of
newly appointed innovation champions acros many industries, 54% had no
WORKING DEFINITION OF INNOVATION (isn't that like not having a job
description?), 68% had no well defined process for innovation (NO WELL
DEFINED PROCESS TO DO WHAT WE ARE NOT SURE ABOUT WHAT IT IS WE ARE
DOING), 71% had it as one of their key job perfomrance metrics (BEING
JUDGED ON ACHEVING A RESULT THAT IS NOT DEFINED AND HAS NO PROCESS TO
ACOMPLISH, but 67% said they aere "allowed" to work on new concepts
(HOW WOULD YOU KNOW WHAT TO WORK ON? ) One does need to get an MBA or
read a Jack Welch or Clayton Chitiensens book ro find simple and
straightforward answrs to these issues.
We must stop reinventing the wheel and spending a lot of money
rediscovering what we already know about innvoation and JUST DO IT!
Michael
symptoms in what are called new deficiencies are rebranding of old
issues. On the other hand, as you've also mentioned, we do have to be
careful about reductionistic abstractions since things HAVE changed and
we'd be foolish to not keep current with the new environment we find
ourselves. Do you have a link, or details (i.e. author, sponsor, date,
etc) to the report referenced from your post?
Thanks again for your thoughts!
Michael