Relentless innovation business as usual

Why you must create an “innovation business as usual”

Doing what we do best
The vast majority of firms have honed operating models and processes and trained people to work at peak efficiency
This efficiency is achieved with a balance of documented processes and informal methods and workflows
Taken together, these form a powerful operating model.

Business as Usual
Every firm relies on a set of well-defined and well understood business processes, expectations, perspectives and decision making policies that become the basis for how the business operates. This “business as usual” model ensures work is done efficiently and effectively.

Highly Efficient
Business as usual ensures that the business hits on all cylinders, driving greater efficiency and effectiveness. Middle managers work to ensure the business as usual operating model is constantly improved and reinforced.

Second Nature
As the business as usual model becomes ingrained, these processes require less and less oversight. The more efficient and ingrained the business as usual model becomes, the less oversight and management it requires.

No room for Innovation
The business as usual process breaks down when it confronts innovation. Business as usual is consistent and predictable. It doesn’t allow for variance or uncertainty. Innovation is unpredictable, risky and uncertain. Innovation conflicts with business as usual, and is the proverbial square peg.

Innovation is unusual
Many firms attempt to manage innovative ideas in their “business as usual” frameworks. But these frameworks reject everything about innovation. Innovation detracts from the efficient, effective model that has delivered consistent quarterly results.

Everything is Different
Innovation requires different perspectives, different tools, different skill sets, different risk profiles and different timelines than business as usual. In short, everything is different. But corporations have a lot invested in business as usual, so it is easy to simply fall back on these methods rather than seek new skills or capabilities.

Two choices Attempt to manage innovation within existing Business as Usual processes Use unfamiliar innovation tools and methods to manage ideas Ideas forced into existing Business as usual processes become incremental at best, but effectively managed People forced into new methods and processes struggle unless they receive training Existing Methods New Methods Unless a new method or process is defined and people are trained for new methods and tools, ideas will be forced into the “business as usual” model and simplified or rejected.

Expecting different results
Two great quotes from Einstein are relevant here. The definition of insanity:
“ Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results ”. And: “ We can’t solve new problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them .” Using business as usual tools to define and build innovations is the very definition of insanity.

More Radical, More Divergent
In fact the more radical your goal, the more disruptive the idea, the less likely the idea is to be successful in the existing business as usual framework. That’s why “skunkworks” evolved – to provide a hothouse for ideas that simply wouldn’t survive in the existing BAU process.

The Third Way
Between frustrating your innovation teams by managing ideas in an existing BAU process and isolating your ideas in a skunkworks or hothouse, there is a third way – adapting the BAU process to embrace innovation. Stop modifying the ideas and start modifying the processes .

Create an Innovation Business as Usual
Here’s what we know with relative certainty:
Every company needs more innovation
The existing BAU will produce existing products with high efficiency and reject innovative ideas that are risky or uncertain
Isolating innovation or creating parallel but separate processes is costly, cumbersome and not scalable.
Forcing innovative ideas to fit within the existing BAU process reduces the value of the idea and the impact in the marketplace
The existing BAU is not cast in concrete – it evolved and is still evolving. It is based on formal and informal rules, perspectives, compensation schemes and culture
Therefore the BAU can be changed, and can achieve an appropriate balance between innovation and efficiency

Creating an Innovation Business as Usual
Where do you start? With the things that motivate your team. Communication and compensation and culture . People will do what they are led to do (communication), what they are paid to do (compensation) and what the environment indicates they should do (culture).

Communication
Call it strategy, or vision, or strategic intent. What matters is not only what executives say, but what they measure and what they reward. Merely asking for innovation isn’t enough – it needs to be part of a strategy, reinforced over time and consistently rewarded. Getting executives involved in innovation can’t hurt, either.

Compensation
Asking for innovation but compensating and rewarding for business as usual is exceptionally frustrating to your team. As rational actors, people will naturally revert to their “day jobs”, since innovation is risky anyway, and not part of their compensation or reward systems. If you want innovation, change compensation and reward structures to recognize it.

Culture
One of my favorite sayings is “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. In other words, corporate culture is more powerful than any individual or strategy. If your corporate culture is structured to favor business as usual, innovation will always be difficult. You must change the culture to create an innovation business as usual.

Innovation Business as Usual
The Relentless Innovators understand that innovation must be a component of business as usual. Unusual work simply doesn’t get done in organizations tightly managed to achieve high efficiency. Yet strangely enough 3M, Google, Apple, P&G and other Relentless Innovators are as efficient as their competitors, while much more innovative.
Innovation Efficiency Mutually Exclusive?

Become a Relentless Innovator
A small handful of firms, including 3M, P&G, Apple, Google and Gore, understand that long term advantage springs from consistent, sustained innovation
In Relentless Innovation, I outline the important changes that are required to make an efficient BAU become an innovation BAU

Learn More
To learn more about Relentless Innovation:
Read the book , available on Amazon or other sites online
Visit the book website (relentlessinnovation.wordpress.com)
View the Slideshare presentations based on insights from the book (www.slideshare.net/relentlessinnovation)
Contact OVO:
www.ovoinnovation.com
[email_address]

Relentless innovation business as usual

by Jeffrey Phillips on Dec 12, 2011

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