Innovation

Short post today…but powerful (at least I think so). Great post over at Carpe Factum today titled “Are You Botox-ing Your Organization?“.

Not much I can add to what Timothy has already said other than to ask you the following question:

Do you allow your employees/teams to fail?  Do they know they have the right to fail?  If not, you aren’t really allowing innovation and change and you are “Botox-ing your organization”.

Scot Herrick over at CubeRules had a very interesting post today titled “Innovating Like Crazy; Executing Like Crap“. Great title and great thoughts in his post, including this one:

Innovation is essential to your work. Yet delivery of the innovation is the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace that you provide to your work.

As Scot says, Innovation is essential. In fact, its critical….but execution is as critical (and dare I say more critical) because without the ability to deliver your innovations to a market, the innovation has been nothing more than an exercise to see what cool stuff can be developed.

Need an example of Innovation needing execution?

Easy…one word: Xerox.

Many innovative ideas that have shaped our world today came out of Xerox PARC….but none of these ideas were turned into marketable products that made money for Xerox. Think about the following list of innovations…and think about how poorly Xerox executed the delivery of these products to market

• The Graphical User Interface (GUI)
• Mouse
• Laser Printing
• IPv6 (arguably a standard and not commercialized by anyone)
• pervasive computing
• and many more

The GUI was commercialized by Apple and has become the standard for interacting with computers…as has the mouse.

Xerox PARC was (are they still?) the research and development arm of Xerox but very little of the innovative ideas that were developed there became mainstream because of Xerox. They lacked the ability to excute on delivering these ideas to market.

NOTE: I’m sure that there are those readers that disagree with me about Xerox PARC and Xerox’ inability to execute to deliver marketable products….and you may be right. My knowledge of the situation is from reading many articles, books and speaking with people who were around at the time, but I’m not an expert in this field by any means.

The moral of this story is this: Before you innovate (or at least while you innovate), make sure you think about how to execute and deliver the new ideas you are cooking up.

Thanks for the idea for the post Scot.

Technorati Tags: Innovation, Execution, Delivery, Xerox PARC

Articles and books about Innovation are everywhere. Every organization talks about increasing innovation…and they talk…and they talk.

Instead of talking about ‘how to innovate’ and trying to implement ‘innovation groups’, perhaps organizations need to just let their people work on topics that interest them. There are many organizations touting their ‘innovation networks’ and ‘processes to improve innovation’ but these same organizations show very little innovative output (at least any that is visible).

Innovation and invention doesn’t come from a process…it comes from hard work and luck. As an example, look at the recent news article about John Kanzius’ attempts at finding a cure for cancer which turned into the amazing discovery of how to burn saltwater by sending radio waves through the water. The resulting ‘burn’ provides flames hot enough to melt the glass test tubes (some reports show the flames at 3000 degrees F.

I’d bet money that Mr Kanzius didn’t write a bunch of articles nor read a bunch of books about ‘innovation’…I bet he went to his lab day in and day out and worked his butt off. With the hard work (and a bit of luck) he was able to do something that many researchers with doctorate degrees and many ‘innovative’ organizations haven’t been able to…provide a new scientific break-through that might have significant repercussions for this world. The only question for Mr Kanzius now is how much energy does it take to get the saltwater to the burning point….if its significantly less than the output heat than he’s got a winner on his hands.

Innovation is a great thing for organizations and is vital to their long-term success and stability but I think some people are losing sight of the fact that talking about innovation isn’t going to cut it…you need to actually do something. Oh yeah…and have a little luck on your side too.

A few more blog posts about Innovation that I found interesting:

• On Measuring the ability to Innovate at The Webquarters
• Apple and the cost of Innovation at BusinessWeek
• Google’s API Greed is bad for Innovation at Micro Persuasion

[tag] Innovation, Invention, Google [/tags]