Obstacles Welcomed: The Seed of Your Organizations Next Big Innovative Break Through
How do you drive innovation in a large organization? For those of us who are entrepreneurs trapped in a corporate body, this is a challenge. I have heard many of my colleagues both current and former say to me “Paul, why should I innovate if my company does not take any of my ideas seriously? This thought that your leadership team will not consider your idea may be one possible outcome, however it does not explain the larger underlying problem. Although many organizations have the desire to be innovative, they do not know how to effectively manage innovation from their broader employee workforce. Before we jump to premature conclusions, I think it would be advantageous for us to consider the causal relationship of operating a global company as it pertains to driving innovation. In order to reframe our thinking, let us consider the definition of economics. Economics is the allocation of scares resources which have alternative uses. What does this have to do with driving innovation within your organization? Everything. Organizations, both large and small, are daily forced to make tough trade-offs in order to respond to competitive forces operating in the global market place. In this article we will learn how to overcome three main obstacles we encounter in the innovative process. Furthermore, we will also discuss how to strategically align your innovative endeavors with your company’s global interests. Let us now unpack the first of the three obstacles to innovation, our own minds.
Often some of the biggest hurdles to innovation do not come from outside factors; rather they come from the effects of internal cognitive sources such as confirmation bias and choice overload. In other words, when we come up with an idea we tend to only look for data that will support the case for our idea. Also, if we have too many ideas to process through, we will fail to take action as a result of analysis paralysis. Why does this happen? According to pioneering behavioral psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, this is a result of simple, efficient rules which people often use to form judgments and make decisions known as heuristics. Kahneman and Tversky observed that our minds use heuristics as a way to cope with the overwhelming amount of data we are force to process in our day to day lives. For example, when given a choice between a small, medium or large ice cold cup of Coke, most people will pick medium. When asked why, the response is often that the large is too much and small is too little; this is known as an anchor heuristic. So what does this have to do with overcoming obstacles in the innovation process? Like many of you, I have asked the question, what is the point of innovating? Then I decided to challenge my thinking and what I found when I did, was that I was focused on the wrong question. I now ask instead, “what are the barriers that are preventing my company from taking my ideas seriously?” It turns out that the answer is not so simple. It is not about us and them. It is not even about good ideas or bad ideas. Both employees and employers, operate with the same cognitive limitations and abilities. With our new understanding of heuristics we must now ask a different set of questions. Employees should ask “What problems can I solve so that managers can hear my innovative ideas?” Likewise, managers should ask, “What task(s) is preventing me from listening to my company’s next million dollar cost saving idea or billion dollar innovation?” Let us now consider our second obstacle, premature innovation.
Innovative thoughts can come across as too disruptive. However in many cases the timing of an idea may be devalued because the pain that the idea was meant to alleviate has not yet been felt by enough people. What does this mean? Innovation has as much to do with the timing of an idea as it does with the idea itself. Here is where structured innovation really helps. Structured innovation prioritizes what problems need to be solved on a must, should, and nice basis. It captures raw or premature ideas and allows you to consider which ideas to develop based on what would give your company a competitive advantage. It also enables you to identify what ideas best align with your company’s global interests. One way to increase the probability that your innovative ideas line up with your organization’s strategic goal is to search for pains that you have the skills or experience to solve within your companies 10K report. Once you identified the pain point, find out what has already been done to solve the issue then add short, concise recommendations to improve upon the existing idea. If nothing has been done, begin to think of potential solutions and test your assumptions. For example, think of the geographical and cultural concern that affects your company’s interest in your part of the world. Put yourself in the environment of the end user, whether internal or external, and identify the most important thing that needs to be addressed in order to achieve the desired outcomes or business need. Let us now turn our attention to the last of the three obstacles, capital.
In business and in life you’re almost guaranteed at some point to have to make hard choices about the allocation of your own scarce resources. Do I go on that vacation that I have been saving up for, or do I remodel my outdated kitchen? This is also true about large organizations. An investment in one project often means a cut in another. So how do you know which innovative idea you should invest in? Investing in an innovative idea can be highly risky. If you think about it from an ownership perspective, you want to make sure that you can get a healthy return on your investment. What Structured Innovation allows us to do is more effectively allocate our time and resources to optimize the adaptation of our innovative ideas within our organization. This is not to say that there is no place for disruptive game changing innovation, rather it brings focus and discipline to the process of getting ideas from the back of a napkin to reality. Therefore test your assumptions, reduce the risk, prove it scalability and you will increase the probability that you will secure the necessary capital.
As I conclude this week’s article, let me leave you with a final thought. Don’t become so in love with your own ideas that you don’t see the value in someone else’s. It’s more important to do the right thing than it is to always be right. In our next article we will unpack how to capture creative ideas from the field and turn them into reality using Structured Innovative methodologies.
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Dr. Paul Campbell is one of the co-founders of Brown Venture Group, LLC. Launched in 2018, Brown Venture Group, LLC is a venture studio venture capital firm exclusively for Black, Latino, and Native American technology startups. Brown Venture Group is writing a new playbook for both those interested in launching a minority-owned technology startup and those interested in investing in new technologies. For more information go to brownventuregroup.com.
