Innovation, yes! But How?

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. Business books I pick up in the airport, all the mainstream magazines (Fast Company, Fortune, Industry Week, etc.), trade publications – and yes, even blogs. And there’s one theme I’ve been reading about with increasing frequency – innovation.

Then there’s the enormous number of companies that have something in their taglines that point to innovation, either directly or indirectly (look at GE, Motorola, Siemens and so many others).

So here’s what’s troubling me: no one talks about “how” to innovate. Sure, they talk about how important it is. They talk about how it is driving their business strategy. They talk about changing business dynamics, providing more value, beating the competition and so on. But no one is talking about HOW to innovate.

The overwhelming majority of innovation consultants are tilted toward helping companies with the softer side of culture building. But it’s the harder side that challenges companies, perhaps more so. It’s the real product and service barriers – the “technical barriers” – that stand so prominently in the way of true market-changing breakthrough.

Creativity + structure = innovation success
Gone are the days of neon colored walls and pinball machines in the cafeteria, all designed to foster a more “creative” environment. Seems to me that these programs just created new ways to spend investors’ money. Today we need reliable, predictable and replicable approaches to innovation – not loosy goosy ones.

This demands a new approach—or at least an approach that’s new to most of us. To be reliable, predictable and scaleable (another word for replicable), we need to follow the same rules we follow for everything else expected to exhibit success. Basically we need a process and a methodology for innovation.

In a recent edition of Business Week Online, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt said “I look at Six Sigma as a foundation on which you can build more innovation.” Right on, I say. We need more structure to innovation, without sacrificing the necessary soft side – just like Six Sigma brought structure to quality improvement in the same way.

Immelt would agree that Six Sigma works best when it’s deployed through a structure and under conditions that build improvement culture along with improvement skills.  It appears he’s also saying that Six Sigma is a great stepping stone or springboard for Structured Innovation.

Innovation is for all to learn and do
I recently completed a book entitled Insourcing Innovation. I wrote it with some colleagues because the achievement of continuous innovation is dependent upon certain “critical Xs,” as we say in the Six Sigma world. It’s not enough to state the goal (innovation). You have to define the chain of causation that enables you to achieve your goal.