Why you shouldn’t send bankers to Design Indaba
When it comes to innovation — there is no standard approach as to how to do it; which is somewhat amusing because as practitioners who facilitate the process of creatively unlocking future growth in companies — its often the one size-fits-all approach that organisations crave.
But in the same what that you can’t teach a goldfish to count to ten, asking a hierarchical corporate organisation to innovate like Pixar is pointless.
Untold amounts of money gets wasted in sending corporate executives to innovation and design conferences in the hope that some of the inspirational creative thinking on display will somehow ‘rub off on them’. That by some magical transformation, their decades of structural thinking will simply evaporate and that they’ll all come back as the next Es Devlin and completely revolutionise the prospects of a flailing, outdated system.
The way in which you innovate then, needs to be rooted in your culture.
As much as innovation is presented to the world as a very creative and magical process — it also doesn’t have to be.
The route to innovation can absolutely be via R&D, but it can also happen thanks to the development of an incubator and accelerator strategy, corporate venture capital (CVC) as well as mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
Even Google and Microsoft don’t rely on organic innovation growth alone.
So your innovation strategy requires a strategy that is appropriate to your industry; as well as your internal culture. Don’t force white men in chinos to dance.
