Innovation in Practice Blog
The LAB: Innovation in Real Time
The readership of this blog has steadily grown, and it’s time to start demonstrating how innovation works…in real time. Once each month, I will post The LAB. This is where we will use a specified innovation tool on a product or service that is suggested by one of you, the readers of this blog.
Once I have received a suggested product or service (posted in Comments) from one of you, I will use a specified innovation tool to create a new-to-the-world innovation. I will show results in a subsequent post with a description of how I applied the tool and used each step of the process to create the innovation. In some LABS, I may be able to include a drawing or rendering of the innovation.
For those people interested in the innovation space, my firm belief is that we need to make a regular habit of innovating so we can perfect the craft and set the pace for others. It is not enough to talk about and read about innovation. It is essential that we all do it.
M&A Innovation
Relying on mergers and acquisitions for growth sends a signal that you don’t know how to innovate or how to manage it. M&A has other problems, too. Companies tend to overpay which actually destroys shareholder value. At best, firms end up paying full value, neither better or worse off financially. The firm grows in size, not value, and pays in the form of distraction. What if you could use the tools and processes of innovation in mergers and acquisitions? How could it help? Would you select acquisition targets better? Could it help understand the valuation
better so you get a better deal? Might it help you implement better? I believe innovation techniques could be applied to all three. Here is one example: targeting – deciding who to buy.
Innovation Diagnostic
Professor Keith Sawyer makes a useful connection between innovation and learning when he writes, “What both innovation and learning have in common is adaptability and improvisationality.” He connects this idea with authors Joaquín Alegre and Ricardo Chiva from the Sloan Management Review. They identified five core features of high organizational learning capability (OLC) companies: experimentation, risk taking, interaction with the external environment, dialogue, and participative decision making. Keith has found that these five characteristics also hold true of organizations that use the power of collaboration to generate innovation. He believes that organizations high in learning ability are more likely to be innovative organizations.
The Dream Catalog
For many companies, the catalog of products is the strongest statement of brand positioning a company can make. It is your arsenal of commercialization. So imagine you could peek into the future and see a copy of your company’s product catalog five years from now. What would it look like? What if you could design it now? What would you put into it? These are the questions that confront you when you use a clever innovation tool called the Dream Catalog.
The Dream Catalog is a hypothetical company catalog from the future…well into the future, beyond just the next business cycle. It is far enough out into the future that it captures the innovative thinking and imagination of today’s managers. It stretches a company’s thinking about its future, and it provokes a healthy discussion about possible company direction. A good Dream Catalog causes tension.
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