Thoughts on Innovation

It is not easy to foster a culture of innovation in a corporation. Ironically, I have not always felt this way. I have spent the great majority of my career at start-ups, entrepreneurial charged companies, and software makers. Each of these environments relied on the creativity of their people to remain competitive.

When I joined my current firm, we were a small and hungry software supplier in the HealthCare industry. We served a particular niche market and our growth was dependent upon finding new and inventive ways to sell more products into this niche. In my first year with the firm we doubled our number of offerings.

Something happened to that culture of invention when we were swallowed by a bigger fish. It's hard to put a finger on it, but maybe it's our build vs. buy strategy that favors buy over build. Maybe it's our market dominance and entrenched legacy customer base. Maybe it's a culture that meticulously tracks where each hour of engineering time is spent.

You can start with the existing method of starting a project around a new idea. A rigid and exhaustive procedure was established to analyze projects for funding. The firm sets aside money especially for these projects. But the process is long, bureaucratic, and daunting. Only those employees with the greatest perseverance can weather the multiple stages, detailed requirements, and long delays of this process. The process itself, then, serves to prevent innovation.

It's not that the company is not interested in innovation. This year the firm initiated a council of thinkers who are charged with encouraging the submission of creative ideas. On the surface you might think the initiative could be very successful, but I see some fundamental flaws that could stall our efforts.

First and foremost of the flaws is the establishment of yet another process. And what happens when an idea passes through the process established by the idea team? The idea is handed off to the same process as before, but possibly skipping the first stage. In affect we have put a new process in front of the old process. If the old process was a deterrent to innovation, then the new one is doubly so.

Add to the mess of procedures, a subtle lack of focus. This lack of focus was exposed by our firm's COO who made it apparent her goal is innovation in operations. The Japanese auto industry of the 1980s was cited as an example. This is fine enough, except the council had established criteria around the analysis of new product ideas. In other words, we were looking externally for innovation, when the COO expected us to look internally. The criteria to judge projects of these two types are dramatically different.

So far, the results of our council are disappointing. No idea has successfully come to fruition. And the promotion of an innovative culture is stalled.

Of course everyone holds up Google as the standard. Even among my staff, I've tried to encourage the idea of spending 20% of our time on new ideas. The key to the Google concept, though, isn't necessarily the allocation of time. Instead it's the thinking that with a new idea, many people "won't get it", at least not at first. The idea has to go through some element of trial and error before it can be tabled or killed. This is in direct contrast to our approach, which puts rigorous paperwork between the idea and a prototype.

If we really want innovation to take hold at our company, we'll need to change the model. We'll need to empower people to spend time building working versions of their idea, instead of filing a form. We'll need a little of the "just do it" attitude, instead of waiting for approvals. I guess we'll need to regain a some of our entrepreneurial mojo.