Aga Szóstek, PhD is an experience designer with over 19 years of practice in both academic and business world. She is an author of “The Umami Strategy: stand out by mixing business with experience design”, a creator of tools supporting designers in the ideation process: Seed Cards and the co-host in the Catching The Next Wave podcast.Innovation as a organizational mindset
Innovation is something any organization that wants to thrive today needs to have figured out. Countless bags of cash are invested in it but you might think that the success rate is somewhat unsatisfactory. Is there a way to make it better? Is there a trick to make your entire org think in innovative ways? Let’s hypothesize something.
The last season of Catching the Next Wave podcast was themed: innovation. There is something in this word that triggers attention and vigilance, isn’t there? After all, so many organizations strive to call themselves innovative. They build innovation departments and these departments are then supposed to deliver ideas the rest of the org is supposed to implement so that it becomes the new challenger of the given domain.
But what typically happens is that these innovation departments are challenged and their ideas often rejected. Which is only natural, in fact. If you think about it, 95% of any organization is in the business of keeping it afloat. This means that they try to find ways and niches to earn as much money as possible now. And the space for earning that sort of money is with late majority. There is one unintended consequence of having that focus though. Late majority is not interested in any innovation whatsoever. Actually, they resent it. They don’t want to be surprised. They don’t want to try new stuff. They want safety and predictability. So, whatever any innovation team proposes will not land well with that group.
moves, from left to right, and affects more customers until if finally
reaches the entire population. On the x-axis you can see the different groups
the idea affects over time. The y-axis shows how many people belong to each
group.
Where is the space for innovation then? It is with innovators and early adopters. They are the people willing to test new ideas and, which, if landed well, will be then promoted and propagated towards the pragmatic early majority. As good as it may sound in theory, it is extremely hard to turn into practice in an org that is expected to grow 20% yearly. This is for this one simple reason: the money is not with the innovators. It comes as you reach the other customer segments.
Some organizations try to hack it somehow. One example was a Swiss bank UBS that for some years divided the company into the part responsible for running the business and the other one asked to reinvent the business. As good as it sounded in theory, in practice the part responsible for running the business, chewed, swallowed and digested the one trying to reinvent it.
What went wrong then? A number of our podcast guests argued that innovation is not about creating new solutions (which is the very thing often expected from the innovation teams). Innovation is, in fact, a way of thinking, a mindset that needs to span across the entire organization. This observation was crossed with another discussion about the importance of linguistics, the wording we use calling the things we focus on. These two triggers led me to wanting to share a hypothesis with you.
What would happen if, instead of calling your marketing department, a marketing department, you would call it a marketing innovation department? What if your sales dep was renamed to become sales innovation dep? And so on. How would their thinking change? What would be the difference in the things they proposed?
Would there be a need for an innovation department then? There might be. But the role of such a department, instead of creating new solutions, would be to help all the other departments to learn and maintain their innovative thinking. In a way, they would become the shapers of the innovation culture not the deliverers of the solutions likely rejected by the others.
If then you challenge your teams to have a certain percentage of new ideas prototyped and tested (and some rejected) you might be onto something: onto making your organization conjointly reinventing your business ideas while still keeping it profitable and healthy.
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Aga Szóstek, PhD is an experience designer with over 19 years of practice in both academic and business world. She is an author of “The Umami Strategy: stand out by mixing business with experience design”, a creator of tools supporting designers in the ideation process: Seed Cards and the co-host in the Catching The Next Wave podcast.
