I sometimes wonder if the Innovation Industry isn’t looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The Innovation Industry consists of

Is it worth my while to tell you my idea?

several thousand mainly smallish companies that will gladly teach your company how to be more innovative. Many of them focus on the front-end of the process: how to have a good idea. You can find courses on how to lead brainstorming sessions, how to creatively whack yourself on the side of the head, how to do mash-ups, what to do with silly putty, and so on.

That’s all well and good but, frankly, creating the idea is the easy part. The hard part is doing something useful with it, especially in an established organization where turf is already defined. Let’s look at what happens once someone has an idea:

• Idea creator has to propose the idea to someone else — it’s easy to kill an idea at this stage. All it take is a little sarcasm. That not only kills the idea, it kills the person’s desire to create ideas.
• Proposer has to marshall evidence to support the idea — somebody has to write a formal proposal. How many customers will buy this? How much money will we make? Will the idea cannibalize existing products? These are tough questions. The more innovative the idea, the harder these questions become. Business plans are based on the past. A truly innovative idea has no past.
• Proposer has to present the idea — “Geez, now I have to take my idea, present it to senior staff, and get grilled by all the top executives. A root canal sounds like more fun.”
• Proposer has to wait — decisions on innovative ideas don’t happen quickly. The proposer waits and waits and waits … often with no information about process or progress. It’s easy to get cynical at this point.
• Nothing happens and proposer gets cynical — “Geez, they said they wanted ideas but they sure didn’t want my ideas. They said we should be creative and think different. But what happens when we do? Nothing. I did my regular job plus this special project and I have exactly zero to show for it. I’m not going to do that again.”

The process is complicated, time-consuming, and more than a little scary. It makes you wonder why anybody would ever propose anything. And, indeed, that’s what happens in many companies.

It’s possible to make your company more innovative. Teaching your employees to be more creative can help — but it’s not sufficient. Creative employees become cynical if they never see their ideas put into action. Before you ramp up the creativity, be sure you have the processes in place to put new ideas to work. The first step? Train your Idea First Responders. More about that tomorrow.

Janis Joplin used to sing that “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” I wonder if the same isn’t true for innovation.

Take another little piece of my innovation

That’s certainly the case that Joe Nocera made in his Saturday column in the New York Times, “Has Apple Peaked?”  Apple, as the whole world seems to know, shipped the iPhone 5 last Friday. Though the sales have been phenomenal, a consistent gripe is that Apple has pulled Google Maps out and substituted its own “vastly inferior” Apple mapping system.

Nocera takes this switcheroo as evidence that Apple has passed its peak and is losing its innovative edge. That may seem harsh but it’s an intriguing argument. As Nocera points out, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company “had nothing to lose”. There was no point in being defensive because there was nothing to defend. Might as well “think different” and try something new and innovative. Today, of course, things are different — Apple has lots to defend. Perhaps it’s better to defend against Google than to deliver “insanely great” solutions to customers. Nocera points out that it happened to Microsoft and now it seems to be happening to Apple.

This is an important point to me because many of the software companies I’ve worked with are desperate to defend their maintenance revenue stream. Maintenance is high-margin revenue and relatively predictable. As a steady stream, it can offset the peaks and valleys of the volatile software license business. I can’t tell you how many CEOs I’ve heard say, “Our first priority is to defend our maintenance base.”

So, how can a software company defend its maintenance turf and still be innovative? The best answer I’ve found so far is “The Ambidextrous Organization” proposed by O’Reilly and Tushman in the Harvard Business Review back in 2004. The idea is to create two organizations in your company. One organization focuses on “exploiting current capabilities” — defending your turf, in other words. The other organization “explores new opportunities.”

The question is how to balance thee two organization effectively. How do you compensate people in each side of the house? How do you prevent a “dinosaurs” versus “visionaries” culture clash? These are tough problems to solve but they are solvable. I’ll be writing more about this over the next few weeks. In the meantime, you can find the original article here.

You want me to innovate?

I like to walk our dog, Bella, with our friend Susie, the dog trainer. Susie has taught me a lot about what goes on in a dog’s head and why they behave the way they do. I like Susie but I think Bella likes her even more. Bella loves the attention and, especially, the rewards she gets when she does what Susie asks her to. Rewards range from dog biscuits to a simple pat on the head and a “good dog”.

We see a lot of dogs when we walk and Bella usually gets along well with them. One day, however, we met a bigger dog whose human was holding him very tightly on the lead. The dog clearly wanted to sniff Bella but the human kept tugging backward on the lead. The human seemed nervous; the dog did, too. Bella started to get nervous as well. She shivered a bit and, instead of nuzzling the dog as she would normally do, she back pedaled and moved away.

As we walked away, I asked Susie what that was all about. Susie explained that dogs like to run with a fairly loose leash. When the owner pulls hard on the leash, it’s a signal that he’s afraid of something. There’s danger nearby. The dog looks for the danger and, not seeing any, begins to get nervous. What’s he supposed to defend against? His scent changes and other dogs pick up the fragrance of fear. They too get nervous. Their scent changes and the first dog picks it up and gets more nervous. It becomes a vicious circle and can, in fact, lead to some nasty, aggressive dogs.

So nothing good happens when a group of dogs is afraid. Seems to me that the same is true of people. When a department manager holds the leash too tightly, it sends a signal of fear. Employees sense that something is wrong and they look for the source. If they don’t find anything, they get nervous and worry about what they’re not seeing. Why is the boss acting so weird?

It’s hard to be creative when you’re nervous. I wouldn’t offer up a good idea if I were nervous about how my boss would react. Indeed, I probably wouldn’t even have a good idea. Instead of focusing on creating new projects or products, I’d dissipate my energy worrying about impending doom. My gloom would make my colleagues depressed. Their gloom would further depress me. It’s not a pretty picture.

Ultimately, innovation is based on trust. If I trust that I’ll be treated well, I can spend more time thinking up fresh new stuff. If I think my boss will ridicule my ideas, then I won’t present any ideas. Sarcasm has probably ruined more good ideas than any other single factor. On the other hand, if I trust that my boss will help me develop my ideas, then I’ll present my best stuff, even if it’s not fully baked. It’s pretty simple — if you trust your colleagues and employees, they’re free to do marvelous things. If you want more innovation, just loosen the leash.