Five by Five’s Manifesto
Innovation has become a creed
An institutionalized practice, with the expected trappings: dogmas no one questions, gatekeepers that stand watch, and rituals that mechanically repeat without any recollection of their original purpose.
At Five by Five we think it’s time to end this mystique around innovation and bring it down from its pedestal.
We no longer believe in extolling the virtues of disruption. We have long since stopped venerating innovation as a spark of genius. And we are finished with the interminable cycles of innovation competitions.
Innovation is a collective business, of practicality and reason. And it doesn’t have much to do with the size of your organization, the average age of your collaborators or your ability to recite from the tomes of Digital Transformation.
Innovation is a praxis, exercised and determined by action. And the good news is that anyone can make it their own.
The bad news is that it’s not enough to cut-and-paste an existing methodology— even if it has been proven elsewhere — to automatically obtain results. You need to ensure that the graft takes hold.
And this — this is exactly what we do.
We work with innovation as a living, breathing thing because your organization isn’t a machine. It’s why our teams are multidisciplinary, capable of conjugating the social sciences and business design.
In short, there isn’t a ready-made method for innovating but we innovate methodically, always.
And this perpetually implies that, somewhere, the established rules are being shaken up.
But changing habits are easier said than done. Companies that have been around for a century still have thousands of employees that thrive, and this mere fact should instill some humility considering that 99 startups out of 100 will never reach a stage anywhere near that.
At the beginning of any large enterprise, there is an entrepreneurial founding energy. It’s now a question of rediscovering it and orienting it towards new directions.
To innovate is to take a new look at the underused assets of the company, tangible and intangible, in the infrastructure or the organogram. Untapped knowledge and know-how pervade in all open spaces, in all workshops, in all R&D offices.
Everything that you’ll do tomorrow is already here.
Our job is to create safe, free zones where experimentation is encouraged and populate them with multiple teams to create viable businesses.
Our job is to also find the innovators, even the ones who haven’t yet realized they are, and equip them so that they can form the ranks of a new avant-garde.
Our job, finally, is to bring this vanguard back into the heart of your organization today.
The businesses of tomorrow already exist within your company.
