The innovation manager on the phone sounded distraught. "There's so much distraction in our firm right now," he explained. "With the credit crisis and the economy in such shape, I'm having trouble keeping the focus on innovation." What to do? There's no question innovation initiatives are under pressure right now more than at any time during this decade. And innovation managers are definitely earning their stripes. Keeping these programs on the front burner can't be easy. Getting face time with the CEO becomes a creative challenge in itself. But it can be done.
Communication is Critical
Communication is critical. Making the case, and remaking the case, for continued investment of talent and resources and learning is essential. To be effective, the innovation team needs the persuasion skills of an evangelist, the skills of a diplomat (to navigate the inevitable issues of turf and budgets and rewards), the patience of Job, and the tenacity of a dog trying to bury a bone in a marble floor. And that's just for the good times, when innovation is easy. Actually, innovation is never easy. Never has been and never will be, even in the most innovation-adept organizations. Peter Drucker used to say that nothing gets done in organizations except by monomaniacs on a mission. Push back, foot dragging and outright pressure to wind down the innovation program will come, sooner or later, regardless of the larger economic environment. Getting distracted is nothing new.
Moving Beyond Boom & Bust
Innovation has always run in cycles. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter observed in a recent Harvard Business Review article, waves of enthusiasm inevitably give way to waves of neglect. During periods of neglect, budgets for innovation would get slashed. Creative people would get reassigned or shown the door. The firm's innovation engine would be allowed to rust. Until one day somebody high up in the organization (the chief) slaps his or her head and exclaims, "Oh my gosh! We've got nothing in the pipeline. This is a crisis!" And a new cycle of innovation would commence. This time it was supposed to be different. The Global Innovation Movement that blossomed in the early years of this decade urged an end to the boom-bust cycles. This loosely aligned group of thought leaders and corporate practitioners advocate a fundamentally different approach to inventing a firm's future. The Movement's big idea was that innovation should be embedded as deeply in your firm's DNA as quality or safety or environmental compliance.
You wouldn't practice quality in boom or bust cycles or in an ad hoc, piecemeal fashion would you? As Simon Spencer, BorgWarner's first innovation champion, once commented, "We had a process for everything else around here except for innovation." The good news is that, distractions aside, things do seem to be different this time. The troubled economy in the US, which has now spread to Europe, India and many other parts of the non-oil producing world, has not set off a bust cycle as it might have in the past. So second quarter, 2008, I'm cautiously optimistic. No question innovation initiatives are under strain. Budgets are being cut in more than a few firms. Some companies are throwing in the towel, and reverting to hunkering down as a strategy. Yet we hear constantly from organizations exploring the innovation terrain. Consultants in the field are seeing only a small pullback in demand for our services. Time will tell for certain. But I believe the Innovation Movement has brought about a paradigm shift in how innovation gets accomplished. There's no going back to the old ways of producing new products, services and business models. The world is moving too fast. Innovate or evaporate.
Robert B. Tucker is president of The Innovation Resource, and an internationally recognized leader in the field of innovation. Formerly an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Tucker has been a consultant and keynote speaker since 1986. Clients include over 200 of the Fortune 500 companies as well as clients in Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Australia. He frequently contributes to publications such as the Journal of Business Strategy, Strategy & Leadership, and Harvard Management Update. He has appeared on PBS, CBS News, and was a featured guest on the CNBC series The Business of Innovation. Learn more about Robert's latest work, Innovation is Everybody's Business, at:
http://www.innovationresource.com/index.htm
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