For a few years now, the word “innovation” has been on everyone's lips. As is the case with all the topics that become management fad, innovation is being assaulted in every way. Innovation, due to the tendency to confuse it with R&D, all the more so since the traditional management gurus have now been joined by politicians, who have assumed that the only way to combat the flight of jobs to countries with cheaper labor is to invest in R&D (which is what they refer to most of the time when they talk about innovation).
This superficial treatment of innovation is helping to pave the way for the most skeptical to shine. For now, and for now, thanks to cases like Google or Apple, inno-skeptics have it complicated. But if we continue to distort what innovation is, mercilessly confusing it with R&D, treating it superficially and presenting it as the cure for all ills, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Innovation, in the context of the company, must be treated as one more capacity — just like planning, marketing, or risk analysis — which must increasingly take on an increasingly important role. Just as companies have their planning, marketing or risk analysis departments, in the future they must have an innovation department. But what should be the role of this department? Well, in our opinion, the role of the innovation department should be to define the company's innovation strategy and processes and then to define and implement the most appropriate mechanisms to achieve the involvement of all the organization's resources in innovation processes. In other words, the innovation department must have the role of defining and activating, not that of innovating itself. This represents a substantial difference with most of the functional departments that exist in companies today. For example, the marketing department defines the marketing strategy and then takes care of downloading that strategy into detail, converting it into specific advertising campaigns, promotions, etc. On the other hand, the innovation department does not have the purpose of innovating in the company, but rather to create the appropriate processes to achieve maximum participation of all employees and then “activate” them to participate and contribute to innovation. To define the processes and mechanisms that should make innovation possible in the company, the innovation department must focus on dealing with the THREE KEY THEMES OF INNOVATION:
- How we managed to increase the number of innovations;
- How we managed to increase the success rate with respect to innovation projects started and;
- How to increase the impact of successful innovations
To define how to approach and respond to each of these issues, there is a broad base of first-level academic research that has defined the “theories” that govern innovation. Yes, innovation, like fluid mechanics, has a series of theories that govern cause and effect under various circumstances. If we are able to understand what theory applies to each circumstance, we will be able to remove - or at least minimize - the “chance” of innovation and thus multiply its positive effects. We will refer to how to respond to each of the THREE KEY ISSUES of INNOVATION by applying the appropriate theories to each circumstance in future posts of this Blog.
