Beyond Innovation
Articulating the intangibles of the latent demand that mysteriously appears when we dare to be different
What is innovation?
We say it’s a new idea that adds value.
New ideas must be novel, or different. Otherwise, you’re doing process improvement.
They must add value. Otherwise they are inventions, not innovations.
Value is the difference between what you get and what you give up to get it.
Value works by adding and subtracting. You can create value by removing products, services, and previous innovations; you can destroy value by creating new things.
This makes academic sense.
But why does an average day on our innovation team look so different from our definition of innovation?
Sure, we do all of the above. We’re critically focused on value. We built a whole proprietary index around value perception, dimensions and drivers!
But somehow it feels like the above definition of innovation leaves something out. Like we’re selling ourselves short.
What are we doing, then?
How and in what ways have we outgrown the definition of innovation?
How can we better articulate intangibles and ‘Je ne sais quois’ of the latent demand that mysteriously appears when we dare to be different?
We’ve talked about the ‘barbell’ approach to innovation. We spend our time at the fringes of time and pace and let the organization operate at a normal pace in the middle.
On the far and slow end we’re thinking on geological time scales about the future(s) over the horizon, spotting signals, crafting scenarios, and building strategies.
On the near and fast end, we’re spinning up concepts and stories to test, learn and kill.
Too much time spent in the middle muddles your reason for being – and causes consternation amongst the ops/sigma/agility people.
That concept is enough for LinkedIn fodder, but not here. We need to go deeper. What then, might a truer vision of what we do look like?
If I had a magic wand to rebrand our team, I’d pull a Prince and choose a word equation instead.
Futures>Stories>Strategies>Structures>Concepts
Enlightened by Design, animated through Systems.
Futures: Seeing beyond the horizon. As a team, we’ve transcended futures as a discrete activity. Instead, it powers everything we do. It’s our unique competitive advantage. Since we always have a rough sense of what tomorrow could (and should!) look like, we can anchor in making decisions today. Futures, foresight, and long-view thinking is like a muscle that strengthens with use. Because we do it every day, it infuses the way we think and naturally leads to…
Stories: Heroes, journeys, triumphs, and tribulations. The future is more than a list of signals and trends. It’s why the last 10 reports you saw on the ‘future of X’ were so forgettable. The future is not an abstract ‘thing’ in itself. The future interacts with actors, real and imagined. Who are these people, what are they thinking, how have they cleverly circumvented your ‘bulletproof’ policies? What are the dominant modes of thought? Who are in power, and who wants to tear it all down? What matters, what drives us, and what brings us joy? Translating the future into relevant and resonant stories sets you apart when you’re thinking about…
Strategies: Making choices. Strategy is about choices; what to do as much as what not to do. When you have a strong understanding of the future, and a keen ear for the stories that weave it together, you’re in a good spot to choose your next move. The line between story and strategy is fuzzy. “What would need to be true” is as much fiction as fact. At the strategy level, we start to bring things back to earth. Most teams that start here are either dealing with an incomplete and back-rationalized view of the future or find it hard to make the strategy ‘stick’ because it’s an austere analytical exercise. Many expensive strategies have languished on a shelf, for lack of…
Structures: The how and the what. Now we can pull the levers that make for a beautifully run business. The metrics, culture, people, incentives, operations, platforms, and processes required to operate scalably and repeatably. This is an overlooked and underappreciated domain for innovation. Our ops team mas masterfully crafted the innovation infrastructure that allows us to operate at pace. Getting the groundwork right at scale allows us to ‘productize’ our team: everything we do can be turned in to ‘______ as-a-service’. Helpful, when you’re coming up with…
Concepts: Where ideas meet reality. This is the sharp end of the spear. Concepts, defined broadly, are what most people think of when they think of innovation. Experiments, hypotheses, and tests spun up quickly and cheaply to validate an idea. You need all the above working in lockstep to bang out concepts that make a difference. Ideally, this connects back to your strategy, in the form of ‘what would need to be true’s that you can design and test. We do this explicitly when working with other teams, and implicitly when we field-test concepts in conversations and forums like the Crystal Ball.
(Enlightened by) Design: “Devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” We just did a whole article on design, but will summarize it here. Everything we do is informed by the philosophy of design. We all consider ourselves designers. It’s who we are. Design is a mindset that is active, participatory, inclusive, and creative. Design at its core is about agency and hope. Design is knowing that anything can be designed – a product, service, strategy, experience, a slide, a movement, system etc. You CAN change things. Maybe not overnight, or in your lifetime, but must believe you have a chance. Sometimes that spark alone is enough to light a fire.
(Animated through) Systems: Everything is connected to everything. Stocks and flows. Agents and objects. Feedback loops and leverage points. And of course, Wicked Problems. A deep appreciation of system dynamics is the only way to create lasting change. This is the world of unintended consequences and 3rd order network effects. It’s also the realm that innovators fall short on, more than any of the above. Any backlash against technology or design usually stems from failing to anticipate broader social reactions or systemic consequences. Most political policies are classic failed system archetypes you can spot from a mile away. We’re far from perfect at this, but this is why we’ve designed our platform differently. Putting service design, concept design, operations design and business design with design research, member insights and futures all together in interchangeable and overlapping projects builds a natural resiliency against things we can’t see.
There is no other way.
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So, now that you know all this, we’re cool if you still call it innovation.
We’re also cool if you think that we’re not ‘doing innovation’ at all.
Whatever you call us, know that we didn’t create the latent demand for all of the above – we were the lucky ones to stumble upon it. Newton didn’t invent gravity, he discovered it, and used the words he had close at hand to describe it. The power and beauty of the underlying force remains the same.
It doesn’t matter what you call us, only that you call us.
We’d love to work through any challenge you can throw at us – innovation or not.
If we’re not innovating the definition of innovation, we’re not innovating at all.
Onward.
What we’re reading (and listening to)
Extinction Isn’t an End: Mining Ancient Innovation for Future Solutions – “Four billion years of struggle to survive means four billion years of living experience, of biomolecular tinkering, of exploring novelty and possibility that defy current conventional logic. It would be impossible to accumulate this magnitude of information through laboratory experimentation.”
Is Innovation Career Suicide? – Depends on the company…
Designing for the unknown – How ‘provisional specificity’ can clarify ambiguous problems
Overcoming the Pervasive Analytical Blunder of Strategists – There can be no dat about the future.
Design for the Future When the Future Is Bleak – Amid pandemics and environmental disasters, designers and architects have been forced to imagine a world in which the only way to move forward is to look back.
Last word
“Between the stimulus and the response there is a space, and in this space lies our power and our freedom.”
- Viktor Frankl