YakShaving

According to Gary Hamel (whose book I have yet to finish reading), you can teach an old dog new tricks. His assertion that corporate leaders invest very little on training of innovation methods may well be true: even truer might be that corporate expenditure on innovation might be wasted in bizarre ways. Rather than allocating funds for the formation of effective prototyping and pilots projects that might actually work–and understanding problems in the first place, companies spend vast amounts of money on TRIZ and putting cross-functional collaborators in a satellite office somewhere with cool red lounge chairs and asking them to be more “creative”. Let’s also not forget about the vast amounts of money spent on idea management with little to no return [It seems like Stage-gate is only slightly more popular than Stargate]

Hamel makes a good point here (read below)– Often times it does appear that managers lack the right training. Training yields confidence in a prescribed methodology:

Today, innovation is the buzzword du jour in virtually every company, but how many CEOs have put every employee through an intensive training program aimed at boosting the innovation skills of the rank and file? Sure companies have electronic suggestion boxes, slush funds for new ideas, elaborate pipeline management tools, and innovation awards—but in the absence of a cadre of extensively trained and highly skilled innovators, much of the investment in these innovation enablers will simply be wasted.

Hamel goes further to suggest that companies need to target 4 key areas.

• 1 Unchallenged orthodoxies—the widely held industry beliefs that blind incumbents to new opportunities.
• 2 Underleveraged competencies—the “invisible” assets and competencies, locked up in moribund businesses, that can be repurposed as new growth platforms
• 3 Underappreciated trends—the nascent discontinuities that can be harnessed to reinvigorate old business models and create new ones.
• 4 Unarticulated needs—the frustrations and inconveniences that customers take for granted, and industry stalwarts have thus far failed to address.

I’d agree that 1 and 4 are badly needed within organizations, and that the analytical and synthesis-based methods of Design can lend themselves to these endeavors. 2 and 3 seem, however like low hanging fruit that organizations should be obligated to using the tried-and-true methods of strategic planning and market research.

What I’d like to learn from Mr Hamel is about competing innovation initiatives. I envision these “4 U” buckets coming from different places in an organization- which might be a problem when it comes time to decide the “best” concept to move forward with. You can train people to innovate but it’s hard to train people to play well together. At minimum, it’s a nontransferable skill.

Hope he responds via trackback!