Innovation: Simple or Complex?
The success of your business lies in its simplicity to understand and the due complexity of the way you and your company approach innovation.
Today I would like to talk about something that practically guides my life: innovation. Innovation is one of the activities (or discipline) that has been most studied, practiced and pursued in recent decades in the business world. We can say that in the same way that it has been treated by many scholars, practitioners, and specialists, it is often overlooked by many professionals in “more mundane” areas. Why does it happen?
Well, to start talking more about this, I’m going to bring you a bit of my (platonic) love story with innovation. I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Rio de Janeiro State University and, like almost every good engineer who lived in Rio de Janeiro, I sought to pursue a solid career in multinationals in the Oil and Gas sector. For more than 10 years I worked developing new products and equipment for extraction and production of oil. This all changed when I started to migrate from the Product Development area to work more directly with innovation. At the time it was quite scary, as I saw a lot of people talking about the topic, but I knew little about its meaning, how to promote it and, above all, manage this innovation.
They say there is only one way to learn things, right? Well, I started to innovate and study it to be able to fulfill the objectives given to me. I even did an MBA in the area and, despite starting to learn several solid techniques and processes, I had the feeling that innovation seemed increasingly complicated.
After reading a lot of books (believe me, I read more than 50 per year), some very good and others not so much, I started to realize that innovation only seemed to be so complicated because people liked to make it that way. Therefore, try to perform a google search on “innovation concepts” and you will get a hundred different concepts, from different people, famous or not. Do you know what’s the funniest thing about all this? None of them will be completely right or completely wrong. Worse, I believe we will never be able to be completely sure about this.
Ufa!! From this moment on I began to feel calmer about the saga I was facing to understand a little more about the “love of my life. The most difficult part that we need to learn to deal with when we talk and work with innovation is that, although it is not a new concept, it’ knowledge is in full expansion, i.e., is very difficult for us to learn new concepts, techniques and utilities related to innovation knowing that likely it will be modified or questioned in the very near future. For this reason, many people end up rejecting innovation in their daily lives. After all, our brain does this quite naturally, to avoid the constant learning effort that innovation, as a rapidly expanding discipline, requires. We will talk more about this way of thinking and how to escape from it in another story.
You might be wondering: “this guy puts up a title saying that innovation is simple, but so far he’s only said that innovation is difficult and makes people afraid…”. Okay, you’re right!! Therefore, I ask the question: after all, what is innovation?
There are many myths related to innovation and we will address some of them in another opportunity, but we often see people associating innovation with genius ideas that should completely change people’s lives. In fact, innovation doesn’t have to be something unique and “fantastic”. Let’s think this way: imagine that you have an idea, and that you even think that your idea is really cool and that it can help a lot of people.
Can we say that this idea is an innovation? I’m sorry, but if you still haven’t been able to prove some points related to your idea’s ability to really add value to people’s lives, be profitable, as well as the final product or service being considered perfectly feasible, your idea is nothing more than an idea, or an invention…
Source: Grand Designs Inovação
As shown in the previous figure, we can say that innovation depends on a “tripod of factors”. For an idea to become an innovation, we need to take all measures to ensure that it is financially viable, executable in terms of technologies and other intangible resources such as knowledge and, most importantly, that it is desirable to the customer. It seems so obvious, but the vast majority of new business initiatives are much more concerned with the first two factors of this tripod than the last one. It’s no wonder we often see “fantastic products” that don’t add anything to someone’s life or even solve the wrong problems.
If we look calmly, we can analyze the interrelationship of this tripod that can keep an innovation standing:
· Viability + Feasibility — Desirability: You will probably create a solution that no one wants.
· Viability + Desirability — Feasibility: You will probably not be able to bring your product to the market due to technical problems, for example.
· Feasibility + Desirability — Viability: You will probably not be able to provide the necessary resources for anyone who can help you build your idea.
Source: adapted from Nick Skillicorn (https://www.ideatovalue.com/inno/nickskillicorn/2016/03/innovation-15-experts-share-innovation-definition/)
As suggested by the experts above, innovation is closely associated with value creation, but what is value? Well, value is anything that can be considered a benefit to the customer. So, in short, whatever we are trying to do to open a new business or even leverage an initiative within the company, we can say that it will have an objective as elementary as my simple definition of what innovation could be:
“Innovation is about doing something new, that has or generates value, and works.”
Therefore, we can say that innovation must be simple to understand, however, it must be considered as something complex to be practiced successfully. That’s why there are many methods to make, manage and continue making innovation.
See you in the next text, where we’ll talk about the differences between invention and innovation and of course, we’ll unravel some “innovation myths”, ok?
