If you have innovation in your title, the idea may be to support your innovators.
That your job is not to innovate, to do the thing called innovation, but realy to
support the people call innovation. It's not about outsourcing innovation or
saying, okay that's not my job that's R&D's job.
You know, those people over there, they're the one's who're supposed to
innovate. You know, I have no responsibility.
But, as a person in an organization who has innovation my title who's trying to
build an innovative organization, I need to support the innovators.
An maybe it's about finding resources for them.
Maybe it's about giving them a process. Maybe it's about serving as a process
facilitator. Maybe it's about bringing them new
information. But giving them all the things they need,
in order to push this thing called innovation along.
An to the extent that they develop a process.
You're able to help them do that, then youre doing your job which is to get more
people to innovate. So that it's not just one person's job
and not just R&D's job to this thing called making the world a better place
inside the organization. In so far as supporting the innovators,
basically as, as I just said, removing constraints, providing motivation,
encouragement proving that the organization is actually serious about
innovation. And, and pushing it forward in that way.
We want to also provide advocates to help people find out where they should pitch
their ideas. So if I have a great idea, where do I go
in the organization? Maybe the innovation people, the people
who are managing innovation function can be the place that is the wave finder.
That say okay if you have an idea about this.
This is where you should go. If you have an idea about that.
That's where you should go. We will help you.
We'll run interference for you. We'll help you cause get, get those
people to really listen to you. And really understand what your ideas
area and the potential value of those ideas for us.
Now this other idea I think is really interesting is my, one of my favorite
people in the world, Bob Sutton. Robert Sutton said, has this idea that
you reward failure and success equally, but what you want to punish is inaction.
And that people will make it, they won't see it as their obligation to innovate.
And that's because if i innovate and it fails, if i try to innavate and it fails
then i get punished. But if I don't do anything, I'm fine,
right? And the longer I stay in this
organization, the more seniority I get, the more pay I get, I get a cost of
living allowance. Why should i go out o the way to risk
innovation when in fact I'm going to get punished for it?
There's a high likelihood if the things fails I will get punished.
So his idea is that if we say people who are not doing anything, they're the ones
you need to punish, they're are the ones you need to push forward.
If people are making intelligent guesses or if people are doing intelligent
learning, even if they don't succeed the way that you want them to, certainly we
need this, to reward that. And we need to celebrate that In fact.
And so making sure we leave people clear instructions about how it is that they
you know, what is a meaningful failure? That's the failure that we learn from, is
from an important part of this. But if we can do that then we can
actually get people moving forward and take on the obligation of innovating for
the organization. One thing, also, is to let creative
people do creative work. In many organizations, we ask people to
something creative or innovative and then we bombard them with forms in triplicate
and that's going over your budget. And why do you have to show up to this
meaningless meeting that you show up to every week?
And we don't protect people from the rest of the organization.
So recall the story of A12 when Locke was building this, this aircraft they had as
skunk works. It was this place off by itself and it
was really protected from the traditional things of the organization.
And so the innovation leader, as a person bringing innovation into the
organization, it may be your job, it is your job, to actually buffer the creative
people from this. Because creative people you want them to
do their creative work. Its not that there's a certain type of
creative people but the people that you've asked to do this thing called
innovation. They really need to be protected from
this the organizational antibodies that I would call it.
It's part the organization let's say that send something foreign is going on and
come in and try to kill that thing. Your innovation resources, also, you have
people and understanding how to divide up the people.
We talked about just touched on this briefly in the technological constraints
area, talking about sequencing and coordination.
But really sort of figuring out how do I divide up projects, how do I take pieces
projects apart and have people do meaningful parts, meaningful task.
You don't want it so broken up that they pieces that people work on are
meaningless. But you do want them sufficiently broken
up, that they can actually make progress on em, and come back together, and make
progress and go apart. You have resources, the resources are
money, time, and people. So be sure to just think about, how can I
put these things in relationship to each other.
