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July 3, 2008
| By Chuck Frey
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The chaos theory of innovation
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In their new book, The Innovator's Guide to Growth, authors Scott Anthony, Mark Johnson, Joseph Sinfield and Elizabeth Altman explain how many companies believe the way to unleash innovation is to let chaos reign. According to this theory, managers need to be encouraged to "think outside the box" - and therefore, innovation should not be constrained, so they can dream up the best possible new ideas (sound familiar?). But the lack of boundaries for innovation can be a problem for several reasons:
First, managers can spend a significant amount of time pursuing fruitless paths. Precious time and resources get wasted in all sorts of ill-considered pursuits.
Secondly, without a clear direction and goals for innovation, managers may be screening and filtering ideas based on their own assumptions about what is a good fit for their company. "When senior management asks, 'Why do we never see any good ideas?' a likely answer is that middle managers are screening out or discarding ideas that they think are out of bounds. The natural inclination of these middle managers is to reject something that doesn't fit what the company does today. In other words, line managers may impost sharply stricter mental constraints than what senior management intends."
Third, without a clear set of innovation objectives, the authors point out that companies tend to "bet the farm" on any idea that seems to deviate from the core business. "They then layer risk after risk on an idea until it has little chance of being successful. While companies should avoid being constrained by their current definition of the core business, deviating too far from (it) can be dangerous, too."
To avoid these problems, the authors recommend that companies should clearly define what's on and off the table along key dimensions of their business, in areas such as target customer groups, acceptable distribution models, revenue and margin targets, geographic areas and marketing tactics.
So how focused is your company's innovation strategy? |
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7/11/2008 by: Jack Hipple
There are many tools to eliminate the need for chaos and randomness to produce new and breakthrough ideas. Traditional brainstorming or other psychological techniques tend to generate a large quantity of unfocused ideas whereas as left brained approach such as TRIZ brings not only focus but the predictability of patterns of invention from the global patent literature. For example, a focus needs to be the known trend of products and systems to integrate upwards, as well as systems evolving along known field lines (mechanical, thermal/acoustic, chemical, electronic, electromagnetic). An example of the first is the addition of functionality to hardware, eliminating the need for separate pieces. Image capturing and communication are examples of the second (drum beats, smoke signals, letters, phone, wireless). My point is that innovation does not have to be chaotic if we study the patterns of invention that keep repeating themselves over the history of 7 million or so patents!
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7/7/2008 by: alex keenan
All innovation has limits. In this case you will either apply limits upfront before you collect ideas. Or you will filter all the ideas generated and thus limit them after they are generated.
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7/5/2008 by: Derek
Let me provocative also! Why does focus limit creativity? Creative processes are not just expansive and there are ways of selecting creatively too. Also there is a huge difference between personal creativity and organizational creativity. It seems to me that you have both described the ideal characteristics of an innovation system, i.e. chaos or creative friction which generates ideas, encouragement which drives intrinsic motivation and is a driver for creativity and management (or should it be un-management?) which provides the framework or system in which we can add value. I'm sure that we would all recognize the ideal system if we were inside it but language seems to be the real issue when we are all trying to describe it.
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7/4/2008 by: Jon-Arild
Christian, you have a good point, but idea management and innovation are to different things. Ideas need to be encouraged, but innovation is ideas which create value in the market, and they have to be managed not encouraged.
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7/3/2008 by: Christian
Let me be a little provocative here. Is the issue that there is too much innovation, or rather that innovation ideas that do not bear fruit are pursuit too long? In my mind, focusing innovation limits creativity, so I would rather go for the chaos, but put an extensive process in place to evaluate the innovations quickly and eliminate the least productive ones. Where the real added value is, is in being able to think very wide, but then zoom in into the blockbuster ideas very quickly.
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