• Innovation for a Purpose (big)

Herein I describe my current writing projects. If you are interested in updates, use one of the icons on the top-right to follow me on Twitter or send me an email. The big/medium/small labels next to each item express my perception of the level of effort that will be required, not my expectation of the impact. I’ll include links to the work once the bits become presentable. For most of the bigger items, my plan is to break them into sections and publish them separately here. Where appropriate I try to demarcate how I plan to split things up.

Innovation for a Purpose (big)

If you know me this might sound pretty cheesy, but I promise I’m not writing a satire on innovation (although that might be a cool project too). Since I ran a very successful Silicon Valley innovation center for a very large corporation, people sometimes ask me questions about innovation. I’ve found that my answers are fairly well-packaged despite the fact that I have never written them down per se. Thus I came to the conclusion last year that I should do just that.

Overall what I have to offer is a lot of practical guidance on how to avoid common pitfalls and ensure that you get what you want out of an innovation program. I think my advice applies to any large organization, not just corporations with planetary missions. Currently the sections break down like this:

Prelude: Understanding the importance of purpose

Every enterprise starts with a well defined purpose. In time, as organizations scale and consolidate to meet the demands of the environment, the legacy of growth confounds the original purpose. Often, what’s left is merely a vestige that is nonetheless depicted to internal and external worlds as an origin myth that unexpectedly becomes a powerless mantra. Enterprises face a crisis of purpose as a result and in spite of their success.

Even before this crisis sets in, every effective manager understands that a clear and strong sense of purpose is necessary for growth, productivity and worker engagement. However, leaders are often surprised and frustrated to find that purpose is neither simply a slogan, nor an a la carte item you can heap into your burrito.

While a crisis of purpose is commonly only a problem for the largest, oldest, and most successful of enterprises, some see events of 2020 as accelerating the development of this crisis for the world of work at large. Many workers are demanding more than just a paycheck, often without knowing what they are asking for. Ultimately, a greater sense of purpose is always a part of these demands. For many organizations, the traditional extrinsic processes and policies for motivating employees are breaking down: cultivating intrinsic motivation is becoming a critical problem. A strong sense of purpose can be an effective mechanism for doing this.

My view is that purpose follows from a practice of adhering to the principles you establish when you initiate disruption and renewal in your organization. Since disruption and renewal are the ultimate aims of innovation initiatives, in my view innovation activities provide the most natural and effective mechanism for re-establishing purpose in an organization. Because of the power of innovation programs to create authentic purpose, we need to understand purpose before we start designing, implementing and evaluating any innovation initiative.

The beginning: What do we mean by innovation?

The term “innovation” is hopelessly overloaded. I have a simple taxonomy for the concept, but focus on a single aspect when discussing innovation initiatives. My experience is that when leaders come looking for advice on innovation, it is because they have recently become aware that the success of their mission depends on outcomes that are inaccessible to them through their current organizations. So, my first question to anyone who is looking for advice is: “What are you missing that brings you here?” In order to get started on your innovation initiative, all you require is to understand the range of concrete outcomes you need. After that, the rest is just tactics.

The middle: Designing your program and pulling it off

Born out of my experience, I have a lot detailed advice for specific questions, such as:

• Where should the innovation team sit in the org chart?
• How many people do you need?
• What skills do they need?
• Where do projects come from?
• How are projects managed?
• How much should each project cost?
• How should internal and external partnerships work?

I intentionally leave out one of the most pressing and common questions: “How do you measure innovation programs? What are the KPIs?” Answers to these questions are contemplated in the final section concerning the end of the initiative.

In addition to these questions and more, I also usually articulate some principles that help guide the design and implementation of the plan. I usually organize these items as “what they didn’t tell you about your new job running an innovation program”:

• The scoping rule: when you are handed a job to run an innovation program, whether you realize it or not, you are being asked to do something that the rest of the organization can’t. As a result, you are effectively being asked to be everything the parent orgs are not. You ought to feel daunted. You also ought to only work on things that you alone can do better than the rest of the organization.

• The “it’s gotta be somebody’s job” rule: The iron law of large enterprise is that if it’s not someone’s day job, it never gets done. As a result, since the outcomes sought by innovation initiatives are by definition unachievable by the organization, this means that whether you realize it or not, this means that it’s your job, and your’s alone, to get them done.

The end: Success and the myth of innovation in everything

In my experience, it’s uncommon for leaders to plan sufficiently for the end of their innovation initiative. I believe this comes from the fact that, to the owners of an enterprise, the only acceptable state of affairs is that “innovation is in everything”. The initiation of an innovation program is a tacit acknowledgement by leaders that the default state has been disturbed: a new team has been created that is somehow been tasked with being “more” innovative than the organization as a whole, and each worker individually. Because innovation initiatives are caught in this story arc, it’s critical to understand that like all good things, they must come to a timely end. This doesn’t mean that they need to constrain their ambition: like everything else in the organization, they too can and should be subject to renewal.