Easily among the most used and abused words, innovation always poses a challenge to anyone who seeks to really understand it instead of just mouthing homilies. Whether by design or chance, ever since this word crept into common currency, its use has been largely confined to business, with other areas not acquiring the limelight they deserve. But let me not get ahead of myself.

Let me begin, recognizing even as I do that I could have begun in some other way. There is no privileged starting point. I prefer to think of any opening as part of a strategy or strategies of understanding.

Breaking free

This quote is attributed to George Bernard Shaw – A reasonable man adjusts to the world. An unreasonable man expects the world to adjust itself. Therefore, all progress is due to the unreasonable man.

Gary Hamel (FT January 25, 06) was blunt: “Trying to get an organization to innovate is like trying to teach a dog to walk on its hind legs.”

In a fundamental sense, this explains innovation and why it is resisted and feared even. In some way or the other, any innovation disturbs the existing order which means it becomes a threat to certain vested interests who benefit from things continuing the way they are. This is how we do things here – how often have you heard this? Never forget Newton’s First law of motion. Especially in business, if you could successfully continue to do what you have been doing for long, why bother to do anything else.

To some, the primary step to innovate could be to forget not so much what they have been doing but rather how. Often, an intellectual and organizational sclerosis is a serious obstacle to doing something new. Especially if there has been significant success in one area. It becomes natural to think and act in a particular way if it has ushered in consistent success. Perhaps, this could be one reason why Indian IT services firms have not succeeded in developing software products.

The desire to innovate comes with a willingness to change, to adapt. Not just change but adapt, which is not easy. Adaptation involves making internal changes which could well disturb many people in their roles, positions in the hierarchy, individual futures and so on. Equally important if not more, innovation by one may also demand changes in others, including customers. In his book ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’, which is on the disk drive industry, Clayton Christensen (https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=46) discusses why this industry did not innovate – because its major customers discouraged it. And why? Because, it meant they would have to make a lot of internal changes and were reluctant. This was the key insight in the book – ‘that you were unlikely to innovate if you listened to your big customers’. Unfortunately, this key insight got lost in the euphoria over ‘disruptive innovation’, a term that he used to describe the kind of innovation that radically alters an industry or business or anything for that matter. How a certain phrase from a book takes on a life of its own is itself a subject worthy of study; almost everyone who uses this phrase ‘disruptive innovation’ would not have read The Innovator’s Dilemma.

When we describe a company as innovative, we are actually saying two things: one, that individuals within the company create something new and second, that the organization lets them do so. It is this combination that produces innovation. Everything else is a device. If the device has limitations, innovators think of how to create a better device.

Not by intelligence alone

You need guts to be innovative because innovation can be intimidating. An innovating culture is therefore also an accommodating culture. Accommodating of failures, that is. Which is one of the reasons why quite a bit of the work on innovation also deals with organization theory. There will be mistakes. You just have to make sure that mistakes are ‘caught’ early. There are individuals who have a strong and perpetuating innovative streak. But this will come to naught unless they are housed in an environment that encourages, intensifies and rewards the spirit of innovation. Yet, since we don’t want an unintended division of ‘us’ and ‘them’ within an organization, we have to also focus on creating a learning organization. This is also an organization’s insurance.

If an innovation falls within the ambit of what an organization does, acceptance should not be a major problem. Should it lie outside the business of the organization, we are calling for initiating a new business. Now, that’s not easy. For example, years ago, a Boeing employee discovered a new ‘Slipper pallet’ that would more than double the capacity of Boeing’s C-17 to transport ammunition for the US Army. The US army was enthusiastic about the idea, but the Slipper pallet almost slipped out of Boeing because it did not fall within any of the business lines. Finally, the Airlift & Tanker unit recognized its potential. Definitions can be crippling and trap you in a tunnel vision.

This episode as so many more like it debunks one of the myths about innovation: that you need more ideas. As Mohanbir Sawney and Robert Wolcott point out (BusinessWeek, September 2004), what you need is a mechanism to receive and develop the potential of ideas.