Innovation is About Creating Value not Things…
We had an interesting question come up at our Blue Sky Innovation Center a few weeks ago and boy did it get the conversation going.
Q. What is “Innovation”?
Seems like an easy question right? Well not so much. We got a bunch of different views and answers. It got so lively it threw us off our agenda for a good 15 minutes. But that’s the beauty of Blue Sky, agenda’s generally go out the window, when real engagement ensues.
Anyway, everyone contributed some great thoughts and we put things like: “creating”, “improving”, “ideation” , “invention”, “evolution”, “differentiation”, “disruption”, “competitive advantage”, “value creation”, “designing gadgets”, “a culture”, “a mindset” and a bunch of other things up on our whiteboard. It was good to compare notes on this subject, and I think everyone learned from each other, and then sort of picked out the words and phrases they liked best and created their own definition in the end.
But I remained curious even after the session. I mean it’s so easy for me, spending so much time at Blue Sky, to get caught up in all the cool “whiz-bang things” we design & build — and lately I’m getting even more interested in HOW we design and build stuff; what with so many designers and PhD’s walking around, it’s hard not to get blinded by the “science” of it all. But based on the discussion earlier that day, I realized innovation was far more than science and gadgets and inventing things/products.
So, I decided to do some more research and make sense of this powerful word.
And powerful it is. In fact, I discovered the word “innovation” in 9 out of 10 annual reports I randomly picked up and leafed through. Apple and Google, for example, mention the word innovation 22 and 14 times resp. in theirs! Many organizations, including the ones that have been around a very long time, have realized that cost-cutting is NOT a growth strategy, and are turning to innovation as a key strategy; instilling this word into their internal and external narrative, ingraining it in corporate culture; forming goals around it and measuring for it, and some have gone as far as naming Chief Innovation Officers. Innovation has truly become the fuel that’s moving many organizations forward. In fact, at this stage I would call it the lifeblood of a company.
Anyway, I uncovered a number of interesting articles on the topic, but the article I liked best was an MIT article written in 2006, entitled “12 Different Ways Companies Innovate”(1). A must read.
I gleaned 3 major points on innovation from this article:
1) there is much more innovation going on than just “product innovation” in companies
2) innovation shouldn’t just be a “science project”; innovation should be grounded in creating net new “value”
3) innovation must be systemic.
Starting with point 1 — can you believe there are 12 different types of innovation? I had no idea! Have a look at this great chart from the MIT article, and specifically check out the examples:
The 2nd point was common sense, and instinctively knew this, but glad the smart people at MIT put this down on a piece of paper to remind people.
The 3rd thing I learned around innovation being systemic also comes through in this chart above, in that if one element of the value chain is innovating, however the others are not; things just won’t “take off”. For example you are pumping out product innovation at a brisk pace, but your supply chain management is old and antiquated (i.e. still managed on spreadsheets), it will, without question, affect the delivery of that new product and hence value to your customers. So the point of #3 is, everyone has to be innovating and moving together. Hence, ingraining innovation into corporate culture and setting goals and measuring for it, becomes so important if you are going to do it right.
But how? How do you know what to innovate and when? According to the book “Innovation Hardwired”(2), its important to set innovation goals for every part of an organization. And that each goal must be centered on customers (current and potential). They go on to say that to truly discern innovation opportunities a company must understand and know their customers so intimately that they can sense what a customer will value now and what they will value in the future even before they can articulate it and respond.
There are many ways of gathering this information and gaining this customer knowledge efficiently and effectively, but that’s a blog for a different day.
The net/net of this blog is, that innovation is not limited to product development and R&D, and it’s certainly not just about products, i.e. “things”. The focal point of innovation should always be “value”, as in what value will it ultimately deliver, to whom and why? Or what problem are we solving for a customer or a market? Are some of the key questions that should always be asked.
At Jabil, we are proud to facilitate one of the world’s most incredible platforms for innovation: Blue Sky. Blue Sky is located in Silicon Valley and if you haven’t been, you will find it loaded with smart people, a ton of engineering capabilities, an E2E Intelligent Digital Supply Chain, and all the resources needed, including our Radius Product Design studio, to help engage the senses, dream big, and innovate, in order to bring superior value to your customers.
See you there!
Resources
(1) The 12 Different ways for Companies to Innovate — MIT Sloan Management Review — Spring 2006
(3) The 20 Worst Product Failures (lots of good lessons learned here): http://saleshq.monster.com/news/articles/2655-the-20-worst-product-failures
