Innovation, but mostly not.

I had planned on a different subject today but Steve Mann’s bit on innovation in Able Brains touched something off. Read it, and then spend some time with his other writings, it’s been too long since I shilled his blog which is one of my regular reads.

There is a considerable gap between many company’s stated dedication to innovation as a competitive and growth lever and the eventual execution and product offerings. What passes for innovation in many places is too diluted to recognize. Steve offers some yellow flags:

“…if you work at an organization that doesn’t have a culture that (1) values innovation and (2) places governance, budget and resources around innovation – not that it never will but it may be a cold day in hell before Innovation becomes mainstream. Further, many top managers agree that corporate policy actually tends to offer limited incentives to innovation or limits it by placing an innovation team in a risk averse organization or business unit or having no plan to deal with failure other than to junk the team and start over. Some say this is a talent issue, other execs say its a cultural issue. The answer is “yes.””

Couldn’t agree more. I worked in e-business organizations which were walled gardens. We were kept at arms length so as not to infect the general population and once a product was deemed to be sufficiently cootie-free it was sliced out and transplanted into the business. Today, increasingly regulated and scrutinized operating environments makes innovation look more like a risk to be managed. I’ve seen the talent issues run both ways. We may have leaders and managers who have been conditioned to drive risk out, but at the same time we experience few skillful innovators and far too many who claim to be visionary but end up being undisciplined or ineffectual at matching innovation to business benefits.

The aversion to innovate affects more than competitive advantage and growth. I often work with clients whose IT has sufficient control over how apps are deployed to push them into vanilla deployments because they’re managing risk in terms of not wanting to manage code bases or introduce customizations that add complexity to upgrades. The result is business heads who don’t get what they need out of systems, with functional professionals who are relegated to awkwardly aligned processes, managers and employees who need to perform basic tasks and are presented with systems that require hours of training to use. The aversion to innovate at even this simple level – let’s make our systems easier to use by our own – is a direct cause of this pain. Risk needs to have a 360 review process so a fuller measure of is made before a decision that leans towards benefiting a single area is taken.