What does Rohan have to say about innovation?
Another interesting interview to a living force of innovation in Dublin!
Tell us about yourself, Rohan!
My name is Rohan Perera, I’m a consultant, facilitator, and educator at Lean Disruptor. I facilitate Design Sprints as well as train Design Sprint facilitators both in Ireland and internationally. I also teach on several Entrepreneurship programmes across Ireland, ranging from University and College programmes to several Startup initiatives. The focus of my teaching is around Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Business Modelling and Design Sprint.
What’s innovation for you?
It seems that everybody has a different definition! Can you give a few examples?
I feel a lot of people see innovation and innovative people as people who have breakthrough original ideas that have never been taught of before. I like to see innovation as the connecting and combining of ideas. Stanford Professor Tina Seelig’s Innovation Engine captures this perfectly. We don’t need to have original ideas to be innovative, we just need to be able to see a potential synergy that may work. This can result in game-changing Innovation. Look at the Design Sprint process. A great Innovation. Jake Knapp has connected and combined other successful concepts and created one brilliant process.
Why it’s so hard for established companies to innovate?
Procedures, Policies, and Politics.
In larger organisations, it’s very difficult to be nimble and try and fail and switch direction as there are generally a lot of policies and procedures that need to be followed. Startups have excelled so much due to the sheer amount of flexibility and the ability to change the direction that smaller teams have.
Design Sprints
I know that you are running Design Sprint workshops. Where does the Sprint fit in a corporate strategy?
New product or Service creation. Testing new ideas before spending ample resources in creating them. That is where the Design Sprint can best utilise the Sprint although it can be used other ways, such as redesign existing features/products and services.
Is the Design Sprint something that will remain in an organisation after the early adopter/facilitator moves to another one?
Yes, I see this as a process that will be used for any future products/services or adaptions to existing products that may be a large cost to the organisation. As once a company starts implementing Design Sprint, they don’t stop. It’s an addictive process that provides excellent, potentially business changing, results.
The key is that the organisation is choosing the right time to run a Design Sprint as it is not something you should be running on a weekly/monthly basis. There is a right and a wrong time for a Design Sprint.
Change Management
You are in a pub with 5 top CEOs but very conservative ones. You are pitching about innovation in a middle of a few pints. What would you say?
Innovation needs to come from the bottom up. You can’t just create an innovation team and expect amazing innovation to follow. It needs to be ingrained into the culture. It must come from the ground up. It’s not just the C-level who create great innovation!
What needs to change in established organisations to be more easy to deliver innovation?
The theory that the more senior you are, the better ideas you will have!
It is critical to making failure acceptable, fail quickly and fail fast (and cheaply). If the organisations had a more concentrated approach to Customer Development this would aid greatly in delivering successful innovations.
About the IT department, are those guys ready to innovate? How?
Every department is ready to innovate, it just takes one champion to kick everything off!
Can you tell us a story about innovation?
Alibaba — Jack Ma. A Chinese language teacher in rural China. Goes to the U.S to do translation, finds an internet café, searches Chinese beer, all that comes up is standard beers from Europe and America. Following that he has the Eureka moment, ‘’we have all these amazing products in China and the rest of the world don’t have a clue’’. Goes back to China and creates Alibaba (no tech background). Connecting and Combining.
Will your job be obsolete in 50 years?
They say that 60% of the jobs the next generation will be working in is have not been created yet. Hands-on consulting may be fully automated and hence the competition will be incredibly high.
What’s your favorite quote?
More about our guest
Opinions are my own.
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