Constant Innovation – What needs to happen first?
I am extremely fascinated by Andrew McAfee’s paper on “Investing in IT that makes a competitive difference“. As I wrote previously, I believe that IT can only be an enabler in terms of providing competitive advantage and I believe this is the same for innovation. The reason why they are the same is that after all, the computers can only perform whatever we feed it. Yes to a certain extent a computer can “think” and calculate however, ultimately humans are the ones who controls it and, at the moment at least, its only as good as the person who operates it.
By the way, Susan Cramm wrote a good post on the Harvard Business Publishing blog titled “Meet the Challeneges of Consistent Innovation“
I believe that there are some problems organisations need to solve before encouraging constant innovation.
1) Information asymmetry – what my boss knows is not what I know. This is a constant problem within organisations and even though Enterprise 2.0 hopes to solve this problem, it will always be there. Tacit knowledge is not easy to capture. Human emotions and relationships is even harder to document. Not understanding the full picture can make some kinds of innovation very difficult and the recommendation might not be very good.
2) Rejection of innovation. So employees put in the hard yards and went above and beyond to innovate on something. Something they are passionate about. However, if the boss doesn’t like it or its just not good enough, they were rejected and told to either improve on it or in the worst case, to bugger off. Such kinds of employees are valuable as they have went over and beyond and the last thing any company would want is to piss them off.
3) Quality of employees. For innovation to happen, generally, employees needs to be enthusiastic, motivated and generally being happy at work. Why is Google getting much more innovation as compared to the average Joe company? Other than having 20% of the time to work on innovative ideas, you can say that employees are happy working at Google. Its easy to say make people happy at work but getting there is a nightmare.
I am sure there are more work organisations needs to get to before constant innovation can happen. Constant innovation has benefits that can lead to higher employee satisfaction, job satisfaction and loyalty. Its something organisations must look at.
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