Think about it? Is your innovation process highly prescriptive or very organic?

Is your innovation pipeline delivering a balanced portfolio of projects
and products or is it skewed to being incremental or hedging on high
risk disruptive innovation?

With all of the capability to
connect and communicate with other people and data, creating a balanced
and fruitful innovation ecosystem in today’s world has been made easier,
wouldn’t you agree? Or maybe not!

There are several issues that
we need to acknowledge, which are spoken privately but not always
openly discussed as you will see why. There are also two strategies that
we need to embrace, understand and implement.

Innovation Issues

Innovation is about being creative, creating that new “thing” that nobody else has thought of and adds value.

Below are some of the common innovation issues in the form of barriers
and constraints that I have come across whilst working in various
sectors such as the construction, pharmaceutical and biotech industry,
albeit with varying degrees. Think about how many of these you have
experienced within your organisation.

Standardisation – you are
working in a business and a world where you have to conform to
procedures, policies, legal requirements, so much so that creativity is
virtually non existent

Linearity – from standardisation you have
business processes, work flows, whereby you believe if you follow the
process you will get the right results. I believe it was Einstein who
said Insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting
different results.” There is a time when you need to go off-piste.

Diversity – within your business and organisation you will have a set
number of people with certain skill sets, training and knowledge based
on what you believe to be correct. There are over 7 Billion people in
the world and I would bet that there is someone, somewhere who is not in
your organisationthat has the block-buster idea or know how to develop a
transformation and disruptive innovative solution.

Passion –
how passionate are you and the people within your organisation about
your work, how it contributes to creating and developing new products
and services. Are you high performing organisation?

Creativity -
do you promote continual learning and development through dynamic
collaboration across your business and with outside organisations that
can help you to think creatively?

Visualisation – having
visibility of your innovation pipeline, that can be shared with anyone
and supports divergent thinking is part of creativity.

Poor
decision making – you are constantly being bombarded with data,
requests, distractions that it is becoming more difficult for your to
make informed decisions and is taking longer to make.

Fear
culture – fear of being wrong, getting a negative result and sharing it
because of what people might think of you or how it will affect your
career to get to the “top”.

You will notice in most of the items
above there are only one or two points that are system and technology
related while the others relate to people – you and me. And yet what I
have discovered is that businesses will typically focus on the
“tangible” assets such as the business processes, systems, equipment and
not on the “intangible” assets, which include people, the organisation
and knowledge (including data and information) that contains the highest
part of an organisations value and innovation capability.

Why is that?

Probably because processes and systems are easier to understand and
therefore easier to optimise. But are you optimising the right part of
your organisation?

People working collaboratively

I
recently attended a presentation to listen to the person who led the
engineering and construction delivery of the London 2012 Olympic Park.
It was truly amazing how leadership where able to pull so many people
together, deliver innovative designs and construction solutions and
still meet and sometimes exceed the key milestones and metrics that were
set, by working together as a team – a very big and diversified team.

The other key attribute that the presenter identified was clarity.
There was clear visibility of what the objectives where, how they were
going to do it, roles and responsibilities.

There were several
main points to the successful delivery of the London 2012 Olympic Park
but two in particualr resonated with me.

Collaboration – people working together to deliver an agreed outcome

Visualisation – the use of integrated visualisation tools such as BIM so everyone understood. Total clarity.

Helping people to collaborate with clear visibility can support and enhance your innovation capability.

Creative Innovation

Regarding the issues listed above I have considered their effect on
creative innovation and how collaboration and visualisation could
faciliate change and improvement.

Standardisation

If you
work in a highly regulated industry you will veer to the safe, low risk
position and more often or not you are driven there out of fear. Fear
of getting it wrong can lead to very serious consequences such as a
safety issue. This standardisation is further endorsed by people in your
organisation who make sure you follow the linear process so that you do
not step off the “proven path”.

This is further complicated
when you have other people trying to create something new and are
continually trying to step off the proven path. Both are working
separately and to a degree, in opposite directions. But isn’t amazing.
When a mistake is made or something does go wrong there is great
learning. When these groups gather to analyse and work out
collaboratively what went wrong, innovative solutions are created.

It takes an issue, for people to react and come together. What if you
were to “fail” in a controlled way – fail quickly, continously, learn
quickly and do it cheaply.

Celebrate that failure as a new
learning and do it as a group rather than specific departments or
individuals. What would that do to help increase your innovation
capability?

Measuring people

People work differently;
they have different skills and capabilities for learning and being
creative. When in a group do you consider their performance from that
perspective or do you revert to the dreaded Personal Development Plan
and measure them individually. You can have fantastic individuals but
unless they are team players, team collaboration will be low and will
stunt your innovation and growth. Look at any team sport and who are the
winners.

Aesthetic collaboration

Is your organisation
and people being bombarded with data, information, emails – demands for
immediate answers and responses? You probably have emails for example
that you do not even bother to look at – you have become anesthetised to
this communication. Similarly, if your innovation follows a linear,
prescriptive process and is a continuum of targets and milestones,
following procedures religiously, completing work that you know to be of
no innovative value, but carry on for fear of non-compliance, you have
an anesthetised process.

You need to create a culture and
environment for aesthetic collaboration by developing a visual and
social process that captures ideas through social critiquing,
communication – collaboration acts as a catalyst for transformational
innovation. This creates a “lens” for you to focus on. This is when your
senses are at their peak and will help you and your colleagues become
more creative such that you gain insights and ideas that create new
value for your organisation and supports improved and quick decision
making.

Key to aesthetic collaboration is to be more visual and
have the ability to visually collaborate (socialise) with a diversity of
people both internally and externally. Having this unfamiliarity of
people and uncertainty of not knowing what will be said, what divergent
questioning, thinking and answering will occur creates a high degree of
excitement, alertness and focus. It is genetically built into us. I am
sure you have experienced this haven’t you?

Visualisation

To support aesthetic collaborations the ideasneed to be dynamic and
interactive. Typically you will capture these onto spreadsheets for
analysis, develop a presentation to visualise and email it to
communicate to other people. Sounds familiar?

You only have to
look at the use of BIM (Building Information Management) within the
engineering industry and the positive effect it has including an
increase in innovation. Being able to visualise a complicated “boring”
drawing into a 3D, fully rendered visualisation of what a building will
look like allows a diversity of people to interact, create ideas and
solutions that the engineer would never think of.

This I
remember vividly when reviewing hospital bedrooms with nurses during
their coffee break using visualisation to walk “virtually” through and
see the wards that they would be working in. There was a long list of
design points that us engineers just did not even think about. This
co-creation was a new experience and developed a passion within the team
to succeed.

Creative Innovation

I hope this has helped
you to think how you can develop a creative innovation culture within
your organisation using collaboration and visualisation as potential
catalysts for change and creative innovation.