Let’s kill Innovation

Health warning: Sacred cows have been slaughtered in the process of writing this article. If you have a weak constitution, please stop reading now.

Innovation needs to die. The clue was in the title. Having unloaded my main premise allow me to elaborate.

Gather together 1000 miscellaneous executives for an Innovation discussion. For a start the fact that this wouldn’t be unusual is instantly troubling! It seems like everyone feels a need to be involved in an Innovation discussion. Ask them beforehand what they’re expecting, I guarantee you’ll find 1000 widely spread thoughts spanning from a big new promotional idea to next years’ new products, how we work with start-ups, culture change perhaps. They may mention manufacturing, process improvement or stage gate process. Open Innovation, partnerships with other companies, agile scrum methodologies, red and blue oceans and disruption. You’ll probably get a few mentions of AI and blockchain because…well why not. The Venn diagram simply has too many bubbles.

No other corporate function suffers the same paralysis of breadth. An HR discussion will probably involve people. objectives, compensation, appraisals or discipline. A finance discussion will certainly involve the numbers, margins, top line, EBITDA. Marketing should ideally involve the 7 P’s (with an irritating bias toward promotion). Other functions are professional. People have been trained to do them properly. Innovation has become so broad and confusing that it’s basically become meaningless.

It’s all about growth

Whenever I enter into an Innovation conversation, if I ladder the needs of the business to a higher level it always comes down to growth. All companies want to grow. Many companies struggle to grow. This is the problem with Innovation. It’s conflated with growth in the boardroom but many innovation activities don’t lead to the incremental, sustainable growth that businesses are so hungry for. There are a lot of activities which inspire creativity or make a culture more appealing to work in. Whilst these are laudable and excellent they often do not ladder up linearly to meaningful growth. They may be enablers of growth but that’s a different thing. Those activities become blurred together with genuine growth focused activity. When executives are asked if they think Innovation is important they are actually answering the question ’do you think growth is important?’. They’re not 100% sure that you can get growth without beanbags and creativity so they tolerate it stoically, even as it consistently fails to deliver results.

When concepts blur

So we have a blurring of concepts. Creativity, fun, ideas, experimental culture and encouraging colleagues to be braver with their thinking…and cold hard growth. Billion-dollar meaningful points on the board. They may rely on each other somewhat. But the skill sets and experience to deliver them are very different. You’d also budget them very differently. A promise of meaningful 10% top line growth is worth investing in. Cool new ideas that consumers love, but with little detail on feasibility or business fit is worth a little investment, but the scale would be very different. Proponents of the ‘creativity is essential’ school of thought blithely sign up for commitments that they don’t understand the gravity of. When they fall short the business resets with a new team and the circus begins again. Cold hard growth is tough and elusive. So it is with people. In an ideal world only the best would sign up for the monumental growth challenge. The problem is that it’s been made to feel elusive and impossible so many of your most talented people are dodging the innovation brief preferring a safer path to the top jobs.

The language of Vegas

When executives discuss Innovation it can feel more like the floor of a Vegas casino than a boardroom. Let’s make some big bets. Should we double down on this idea? We need to cash in our chips. Let’s roll the dice. Gambling analogies abound when discussing Innovation. It’s lazily accepted that nine of ten things you launch will fail with the successful one covering the loses (any gambler can tell you that this strategy is not a good one in Vegas!). In the Innovation casino the extensive agency network is ‘The House’ winning whichever way the dice roll. But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if the growth of your company could be more predictable and less like a crap shoot? The conflation of Innovation and creativity has contributed to this in a big way. It’s led to a troop of people woefully ill equipped to be successful generating new concepts (or ‘ideating’ my least favourite portmanteau word) in isolation of business realities. On the odd occasion they get lucky, but I’d estimate 99.5%+ of the concepts and products developed never see the light of day. A huge industry prospers from testing and developing half assed ideas for a hungry corporate audience in tacit, complicit knowledge that it’s all going nowhere.

Long live growth

So Innovation as a function must die. In its place let’s have growth. Rather than Chief Innovation Officers presiding over a ragtag loosely connected collection of activities, let’s have Chief Growth Officers. Leaders dedicated to using all of the machinery of business to achieve sustainable, incremental growth and measured on that alone. Growth executives with clear exciting mandates to excite the brightest and the best towards an organizations most important challenge. I’m not arguing that a culture of Innovation and experimentation is not a good thing. Only that it might not lead to growth. I’m also not saying that there’s no place for creativity, dreaming, and thinking the unthinkable. But be clear that this too might not lead to growth. The good news is that growth becomes a habit quickly. Crazier ideas become much more palatable when they’re created as genuine growth engines for the business. The language of growth can actually foster much more bravery and open mindedness.

For my part I’m pivoting away from Innovation to talk the language of growth. It’s a more powerful platform from which to preach. One which everyone can agree on and one with a much tighter Venn diagram and smaller meetings.