Despite the countless books and articles written about innovation, we don't have a good understanding about what drives innovation within organizations. Instead, we have multiple, often conflicting, theories about what makes innovation happen. We follow the one that resonates best with us or is in vogue. As a result, innovation efforts at many companies suffocate as they stumble along, thinking they are on the right path but not really knowing where they are headed.
The way to build an environment where innovation happens consistently is to make certain that the foundational building blocks that drive innovation are present. Few companies have built such an environment, what I call an innovation biome . The companies that have built this environment are the ones we admire as they are the ones that bring the most innovative offerings to the world.
In the rest of the companies, though, the most common reason that innovations fail is this: others reject an idea because they don't have the right tools to evaluate the idea.
Overcoming disbelievers and naysayers
In most companies, when someone has an idea it has to climb up several layers of management, requiring a yes at every level for it to keep climbing.
A single no going up the management staircase can kill an idea. Since no one is ever penalized for saying no (you only get hurt for saying yes to the wrong thing), companies often develop cultures that are conservative and not conducive to innovation.
Just about every major innovation in history was rejected by the experts of the time.
Whether it was the earliest people who believed the earth is round, or Darwin's theory of evolution, or Pasteur's theory of germs, disbelievers and naysayers have always shown up in full force. This has never stopped. Experts thought the Personal Computer would not be successful, nor the automobile, nor the telephone (presumably the telephone was never supposed to catch on because there was no shortage of messenger boys).
This still happens every day in companies around the world. Managers reviewing an idea often don't see its value. But conventional thinking never results in innovation. Viewing tomorrow's ideas through today's lens will always lead to great ideas being rejected. Just because one person does not see the promise of an idea does not mean the promise isn't there.
Company leaders have to create environments where managers are incented to say yes more often, even if not every yes succeeds.
Only in very rare cases do people continue to work on an innovation after their management rejected their ideas. Tide and Nespresso are two examples of successful innovations where individuals persevered, developing them despite their managers telling them to abandon the projects. How many more of these successes could we have had, how much more could society have benefited, if companies gave freer rein to innovative ideas?
The methodical yes
I have been guilty of passing up on great new ideas that have been presented to me. Most business leaders are guilty of this. And for good reason. They are investing real dollars and resources on ideas that they may not believe in and that have no certainty of success.
However, when managers have a method that lets them say yes to more things, the rate of innovation in a company will increase.
One way to judge the value of an idea is to demand a clear articulation of how the customer experience will change. In other words, what is the experience delta. What is the difference in a customer experience between how something is done today versus how it will be done with the proposed innovation?
If managers get in the habit of viewing all ideas based on how they alter customer experiences, and if they invest in the ones that provide the biggest experience deltas, then companies are more likely to bet on the right things. This will make innovation efforts more successful.
There is always a real chance that any innovation effort will fail. However, as an individual manager, if you believe that an idea positively enhances a customer experience, that's a good first step. And if a proposed innovation is truly something that you would recommend to your friends or family, then you should say yes to it. If you focus on experience deltas, then you are more likely to have a winning innovation on your hands, and that means that you'll be in a better position to create the game-changing breakthroughs that we are all chasing.
