Is there really such a thing as an innovative company?
Innovation is one of those words that everybody likes to use. We all like to see ourselves as innovators, to fantasize that we work for innovative companies, to feel that innovation is part of our daily lives, or to believe that we are capable of stimulating it in our organization. Innovation always comes with idealized connotations, near magical: it’s a quality that we believe is able to convert companies into something special, into a place that the world will remember with a positive connotation.
The reality, however, is very different. In real life, the vast majority of directors and workers in companies live grey lives, routine, and far from anything we might understand as innovative. The overwhelming majority of companies, if they are not mere subsidiaries whose job is simply to sell and that have never come close to anything remotely related to innovation, at best might once have been, and most were never so at all. The number of companies that we might consider minimally innovative and that are concerned about anything other than their image, is desperately low.
But does it matter if a company is innovative or not? Many senior directors seem to think not, and that a professional life consists of repeating the same processes over and over again until they are near perfect, optimizing them to the maximum, and that all this stuff about innovation is fine for others, instead taking a “we’ll see what we can do, or how we respond” approach. Taking into account the speed with which just about every business sector has changed during our lifetime and the extent to which those changes can affect all business activities, the idea seems absurd, but nevertheless, the mentality of many companies and directors is “let them invent it”.
Innovation is one of the main factors when it comes to defining whether a company is a good place to work or not. Innovative companies tend to find it easier to attract good professionals, and to be able to retain them over time. This is the main factor in avoiding professional alienation, one of the key fundamentals that make companies able to attract people who live to work, instead of simply working for a living. But above all, innovation tends to be seen as a fundamental element in establishing that elusive sustainable competitive advantage, the real secret ingredient that all companies are searching for.
In some companies, innovation is built in to its DNA: companies that start off by exploiting an innovative idea, that have based their success on doing something differently, and that over time manage to maintain innovation as part of their competitive advantage. In effect, there are companies that have clearly had it, but far fewer that have managed to hold on to it. Human societies, whether a family unit or an entire nation, all tend toward a balance, the restoration of homeostasis, to create an environment that all activity can work within. And this means, almost naturally, that innovation in most companies is something exceptional, relegated to a few isolated occasions: what we might call unicorn moments.
Some companies use innovation simply as a kind of advertisement. Inspiration is about “being modern”, and can lead to such moments of pathos as when a government announces its budget by using a QR code to do so, because somebody has told it that this is “modern”, when it would be much simpler, more transparent, and more easy to access by a simple shortened URL. These kinds of supposed innovations are perhaps the saddest examples: I know my organization is not innovative at all, so I’ll try to make it look like it is instead.
Other companies create innovation departments where presumably the management tries to place people with the ability to be innovative, but who almost always just end up being isolated and considered weird, hidden away from the daily life of the company. If a company has an innovation department, the question to be asked is: when was the last time that it made a real contribution to the quarterly results, or to the way that things are done in the company: something that really stood out? Does the head of innovation talk regularly with the managing director or other directors? Where in the management structure is the position of innovation director? Does he or she attend meetings, making crazy suggestions or pointing new ways forward? Companies tend to innovate incrementally, trying to find more efficient ways to do the same thing they have always done, instead of proposing radical changes or new ways of doing things: improvement instead of innovation.
Not that the blame lies with innovation departments. They can be accused of sins such as not researching into their clients and what they do with the firm’s products and services, or for not being up to date on what their sector’s leading companies are up to, or for not knowing when a change can affect their sector, but there is a greater responsibility that goes much further, and that begins when an organization ceases to be innovative and is obliged to lock away its innovators in a special department, as though it were a cupboard. Responsibility here lies with the company having developed administrative processes and procedures that prevent innovation expressing itself.
Think about it: if an innovative idea were to surface in your organization, how would it express itself? Would the person responsible for it have any way, or forum, to explain it? Would they be rewarded in any way? Or would they be obliged to pursue a series of channels and obey rules such as “never go above your boss”? Or would the company’s hierarchy stifle an increasingly needed “networky”? Perhaps what is really needed is a bit of good old-fashioned anarchy…
What information feeds your company? Innovation means being open to new ideas happening in other places, and that openness must take place in a way that allows news to be shared, stored, and discussed. When somebody spends their time reading the news in their company, are they doing their job, or will they be seen as wasting their time? Does your company still buy magazines and newspapers, which first of all only publish general news, and do not offer any way to do anything useful with the information other than to cut it out and photocopy it? Printed editions are nice to have in the waiting room, but in innovation terms, it is so 20th century. Is there anybody in your company who really follows what is going on and that can come up with something innovative, and that subscribes to specialist web pages, or who at least can be considered “up to date” with subjects relevant to the company’s business? Does the staff discuss these issues, these sources of innovation, during a coffee break, or does the conversation tend toward football and politics?
How many times in recent memory have you heard about an idea within the workplace that threatened your comfort zone? How many times have such ideas come from somebody within your organization? And how many times have such ideas ever gone beyond conversation to the development stage, rather than being sent into the dragon’s den? And if it were decided to do something with the idea, and that might require technology, does your company have an IT department able to give it form, or would you find yourself talking to a bunch of dinosaurs who understand nothing and that would start talking about development phases lasting months — if not years? The transformation of IT department and directors into defenders of the status quo, enemies of new ideas, is one of the greatest dramas that reflecting the death of innovation in companies.
And is there really such a thing anyway as an innovative company? Or are there simply companies that once were, and that since they began to “focus” and to “mature” simply ended up like all the others? Why do the majority of innovators who created a company end up moving on to start another, rather than fighting to keep the original’s innovative attitude alive? Why, in most cases, are projects that still have something innovative about them pulled out of the main structure of the company, as though innovation and structure were mutually incompatible? What needs to be done in a company to be able to keep on recreating those “moments of truth” in innovation, those distillations that appear when we submit to education, when we expose ourselves to new ideas and experiences, when we travel or live in a different country, or when we interact with people who pull us out of our comfort zone?
In short, why are there so few companies able to manage innovation as something sustainable, as a real source of value? What are we doing wrong in our business schools, which in our way contribute to perpetuating structures unable to support real innovation? How much value, in every sense, including motivation and the workplace environment, could be generated in companies around the world if we were able to scratch the surface of the innovation potential hidden in them?
