« Forecast: Partly Cloudy | Main | The Vertical Web »

June 20, 2010

Innovation and Information

When it's important to assure that things run the way they are already supposed to run, supervisors are on the critical path of success. But what if you need things to change? At that point, managers start looking pretty good, assuming it's clear what really needs to change.

This is where "innovation" gets tricky. It isn't the ability to manage the change that starts the trickiness. The tricky part starts with the decision about "doing innovation" in the first place. Innovation can take place in a way that amounts to being very good at something unnecessary, and it is exactly that risk that challenges would-be innovators -- unless there is a compelling logical justification of the innovation beforehand.

Generally, there are two compelling scenarios: competition, and recovery. Either one drives the desire and need to change rather than to stay put. The temptation is to immediately ask the questions, "competing with who?" or "recovering from what?" but having those answers does not make the value of an innovation assured. A predisposition to change will begin to influence a variety of things, which in effect need to respond not to the high-level goal but to related objectives.

The closer examination of needs seen in the framework here addresses the difference in perspective between what is important and what is also urgent. Circumstantial urgency often has the look and feel of importance, but there should be a deliberateness that is not overly reactive at the expense of being smart. Furthermore, the intent should not be merely to be different, but to be better. Better should mean greater satisfaction of prioritized need.

All innovation, by definition, introduces something new. But the complexity of even an ordinary business means that there are many different things that might be included -- and effort spent on the wrong things can easily translate into economic and political difficulties instead of benefits. Drilling down to more specificity, the following points out the basic types of opportunities to innovate. The role of the innovator is to produce something different, so the key terms that point to innovation opportunities are likewise terms that indicate the value of "products". 

Information relates to innovation by establishing the intelligence needed for deciding -- that is, targeting, describing and validating -- the production of the necessary changes. While any particular change can quickly invoke large amounts of diverse but related data, there are really only four categories of information that matter for innovation.-- because innovation means designing something new against expected future requirements. This perspective becomes the framework for testing the candidacy of any potential innovation.

Typically, innovation is heavily promoted as an industrial virtue, and business success stories are particularly notable when the success is attributed to a clever and courageous innovation.But that sex appeal easily diffuses in the difficulty of managing innovation through to significant benefits,  Understanding why to innovate, what to innovate, and how to represent it amongst the organization's workload protects against the risk of counterproductive speculations that give innovation a bad name.

 All text and images Copyright 2010 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra

 

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at June 20, 2010 8:35 PM