Page 109 - Free the Idea Monkey

You can see the proof of that in three approaches companies
typically take to try to show the world they’re innovative:

1. The big sweeping announcement.
“Five years from now, we will get 50 per-
cent (or some other big number) of
our revenues from products that
don’t exist today,” the chairman
announces with great fanfare.
Everyone applauds, and then
absolutely nothing changes about the way the company does business.

2. Let’s make a list. The company hires an ideation company
to help it brainstorm all the things it might want to add innovation
to, and then nothing happens primarily because of people who say
things like “I would have loved to do something with that list, but I
had to keep doing my day job.”

3. The innovation drive-by. The organization hires a company
like ours to help it create a new product quickly. But like anything
new within the company, it ends up being mired in internal politics,
bureaucracy (“Whose budget do we charge for this?”) and turf wars.

4. The kinda-rogue department. Company leadership empow-
ers a single department to innovate on an island. The challenge is
that typically they will only create concepts that they have the power
to enact. For example, in insurance, innovation often needs buy-in
from claims, underwriting, etc. These are typically different depart-
ments. If they were not part of the original idea, their only remaining
power may be to say “no.”

Why don’t companies make innovation an essential part of the
way they do business? Because it’s hard. Because it requires an
unwavering, wholehearted leap of faith—backed by a major invest-
ment, not only of money, but of people, processes and infrastructure.
It requires audacious goals, evangelism, consistency, education,
training, diversity, expert tools, expert processes and an environ-
ment conducive to creating sustainable innovation results that are
aligned with financial outcomes.

94 I F A I L , T H E R E F O R E I A M ( A N I N N O V A T O R )