It’s a well known quote of “Innovate or die” from Peter Drucker and others. And strikes fear into organizations. If we don’t innovate, we’re toast! 😞
But unfortunately, I see innovation done badly to the point where it hurts organizations.
Here’s how not to do innovation:
1) Everyone Innovates
This leads to frustrated customers getting contacted by different teams, wasted time, duplication of effort, and slower delivery by overstretched people.
Solution: Coordinate your innovation in a central team, appoint a leader for innovation and track all innovation ideas (see #2).
2) Lots of innovation ideas
Spending too much time collecting and reviewing ideas means very little gets delivered.
Solution: Evaluate ideas quickly and start delivery in short sprints. Frequently review progress and if it’s not going to work or there’s a better, more viable idea, change course.
3) Innovate without your house in order.
Good innovation requires focus, people and funding. But don’t neglect your day to day operations teams. Otherwise you risk resentment from people not on the ‘innovation team’. Worse, your operations suffers and innovation will fail.
Solution: Be clear with your all teams that innovation is needed but so is efficient operations and you can’t have one without the other. Provide support for all your teams.
Don’t just “do” innovation! Run your business with innovation.
