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Managing innovation's obstacles
Innovation is never easy. There are always individuals or factions that cling to premises, processes and perceptions. Resistance to innovation can encounter insurmountable obstacles from top management to front line sales people. Inclusion and management of representatives of negative perspectives at the earliest stages of innovation is one strategy for nurturing successful initiatives. Since it is rare that an organization can accurately predict the results of true blue ocean innovations, it’s especially challenging to manage the process making it acceptable to the entire organization.
Innovation is not limited to products, but includes services and processes as well. As Tom Davenport explains in an article titled Managing a Broad Innovation Portfolio, organizations generally don’t manage or coordinate their innovation initiatives. They do not effectively control how they source, fund, monitor and assign responsibility for innovation.
The coordination of innovation should be managed under a new role of a Chief Creative Officer. If marketing is unable to educate the market, if sales in unable to properly represent the value, or if customer support is not capable of needed support, the innovation fails. Without central coordination, innovation is doomed. The naysayers win.
There's a lot more to innovation than meets the eye. Take Henry Ford as an example. He didn’t invent the assembly line, or the automobile. But, he was the innovator who connected the two and transformed one-off custom automobile manufacturing into a high volume commodity industry.
Innovation is a series of integrated processes. But, when Ford hit his breakthrough idea, the processes either didn’t exist, or had never been integrated on a grand scale. He discovered endless new problems to solve. Management systems were not structured to address all the new interdependencies. Supply chains were not in place to deliver components. The new, average income buyer (not the wealthy early adopters) didn’t understand how to use the product. The potential of the auto changed from pleasure or novelty to practical transportation.
But, the infrastructure didn’t support thousands of new drivers on the road. There was no universal system for distributing gasoline, no interstate highway system, no roadside repair station, no tire store, no car wash, no drive-through dry cleaner and no fast food.
Some of these cascading innovations were essential to make Ford’s vision work. The rest were consequences of the breakthrough – additional industries that spun off to enhance the customer experience.
A century ago, there was more latitude for trial and error. But, the essential fact remains: Innovation, on any scale, requires long range, flexible planning to test new ideas and respond to market reaction. Inventors are not always the ones who capitalize on their own inventions. That’s often the domain of others who follow and see alternate applications or processes to make an idea profitable.
How many breakthroughs have been discarded because the scope of processes involved was beyond the comprehension of its innovator? It takes a village to raise a child. How many people does it take to launch an invention? Passion alone isn't enough.
Chas Martin
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Best,
Anita