Innovation has been a rallying cry in manufacturing for years. And many manufacturers believe they are doing a good job at engaging their employees in the innovation process and coming up with new ideas. The problem, though, as evidenced in a number of Managing Automation reader polls in the past few years, is a gap between good intentions and the processes and follow-through necessary to turn good ideas into a sustained innovation effort over time.
The MA polls also reveal that a key, root cause of the gap has to do with organizational issues at many manufacturing companies. These issues often involve a lack of cross-functional integration in many companies as well as a lack of assigned roles, accountability, and success metrics. In addition, many manufacturing companies don’t put their money where their ideas are. The polls clearly show that many manufacturers lack the resources and training necessary to take ideas to a next level.
In a recent series of articles, the Harvard Business Review explored some of the organizational issues associated with innovation.
In “The Innovator’s DNA,” authors Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen say a six-year study to understand the origins of creative business strategies in innovative companies resulted in the identification of five “discovery skills” — associating, questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking.
According to the article, questioning enables innovators to escape the status quo and see new possibilities. Observing, the authors say, has to do with the ability to detect “small behavioral details” in the activities of customers, suppliers, and other companies that point up new ways of doing things. By experimenting, innovators explore and try new things, and by networking they diversify their perspectives. Finally, the ability to associate, or to “successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields,” is the key to the innovator’s DNA.
A second article, titled “How Open Innovation Can Help You Cope in Lean Times,” by Henry W. Chesbrough and Andrew R. Garman, outlines five so-called “open innovation moves” to enable companies to pursue innovation initiatives outside their own four walls. These moves include letting others develop non-strategic initiatives; better leveraging intellectual property; growing an ecosystem of customers, partners, and others even when your company is not growing; and creating “open domains” of research and innovation with other companies.
Lastly, the authors recommend what they call becoming a customer of your former internal projects. This strategy addresses a situation in which a company neither can afford to develop an innovative idea or concept itself nor acquire it on the open market. Instead, they suggest joining with others outside your company to fund, develop, and launch the idea and then become a customer of it yourself.
The third article in the HBR series, “Create Three Distinct Career Paths for Innovators,” focuses on the people side of the innovation equation, particularly when it comes to breakthrough innovation. Authors Gina Colarelli O’Connor, Andrew Corbett, and Ron Pierantozzi say that their research has shown that many companies mismanage their innovation talent. “Typically, large companies rotate high-potential managers in and out of the innovation leadership role on a regular basis,” they say. “That may give the rising stars broad experience, but it deprives the company of any real innovation expertise at a senior level. Even more damaging, companies don’t provide meaningful growth opportunities for their innovation professionals. So although there are plenty of great jobs in innovation, there are no careers.”
The authors recommend developing innovation talent in each of what they outline as the three phases of breakthrough innovation: discovery, incubation, and acceleration, in order to recognize specific talents of individuals associated with those phases.
The three articles appeared in the December 2009 issue of HBR.