The Big Myth of Innovation Posted on October 1, 2012 by Braden Kelley
For my last article for the American Express OPEN Forum I thought I would go out with a bang and attack a controversial topic, something that people are starting to believe as an empirical truth. Something that I don’t believe has to be true.
It seems like most people are starting to believe that it is inevitable that formal innovation efforts begin with high energy and wane over time. And that this is true even if you’ve built robust innovation processes and have strong support for innovation at all levels of an organization.
I must say that what many people are portraying as inevitability is a myth, and falls prey to the age old quote:
“There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
The reason why we have this myth is that people misinterpret a key artifact of most formal innovation processes as a representation of reality. The artifact in question is that typically when organizations begin a formal innovation effort and start soliciting ideas from their employees or even their suppliers, partners or customers, they get a huge spike in the numbers of ideas at the beginning and then the volume of submitted ideas tapers off over time.
The reality is that when you begin a formal innovation effort and begin soliciting ideas, there is a backlog of ideas just waiting for an outlet to input them into. A few weeks ago I wrote an article called What’s in Your Innovation Black Book? that describes the mechanics of this artifact in detail. In countering this myth I would like to offer an alternative suggestion – a potentially controversial one.
Innovation efforts do not naturally start with high energy and wane over time as if ideas equals energy. In fact, organizations with robust innovation efforts and really great communications and follow-through around their efforts will experience quite the opposite.
People are naturally skeptical, and while the backlog of ideas may trick you into believing that innovation energy begins high and naturally falls, in fact innovation energy begins low (but noisy) and – with proven follow-through and consistent commitment – organizations can actually RAISE the innovation energy in their organization over time. Walking the walk and earning people’s trust is how you make continuous innovation possible and it makes obtaining innovation excellence a worthy and achievable goal.
Also, when you talk about the innovation energy in an organization, idea generation is only part of the story, and often the only part that people measure. The truth is that there are huge, important opportunities for people to get involved with evolving ideas and making them stronger before they reach the idea-evaluation stage.