You can’t do something if you don’t know what it is
[click to open transcript]
Do you ever get in one of those moods where, maybe you’re in a meeting or you’re at an event, and people keep saying the same word over and over again and you just think… What does this mean? Why do we keep saying it? I had that experience recently with the word “innovation”.
Look I’m obviously familiar with innovation in the context of the hard work we do to design and build technology. I’ve also read the books, I’ve taken business school classes, I know the jargon… but seriously what does it mean?
So, being who I am, I headed over to Google Scholar to see if I could find any high quality research that defines “innovation”, and what I found was interesting!
So first of all, a 2018 piece by Kenneth B. Kahn did a really nice job providing a framework for disambiguating this word. He calls out that the term innovation is used to describe three very different things: the outcomes, the process, or the mindset.
So in any conversation, people could be talking completely past each other. One person could be using innovation to mean outcomes like (pulling again from this paper): changes in product, changes in marketing, changes in supply chain, or changes in business models. Another person in the same conversation could be using innovation to mean process, or changes in how the business is organized and how the work gets done. And then a third person could be talking about mindset, or changes in how people can think and perform.
Now obviously there’s a lot of grey are between outcomes, process, and mindset, but I think conversations about innovation are actually important. And that means everyone needs a chance to be understood, which I think merits a stop-and-think moment about how each person is using the word innovation.
To build on that point, I also liked the framework that Kahn provided for what product innovation is. He says there are seven different types, and stay with me here because I do have a point to make. There’s cost reduction of existing products, improvement to existing products, extension of features or options on existing products, expansion of existing product to new markets, new uses or new positioning for existing products, and then new-to-the-company products and new-to-the-world products. What I like about this is that it really paints a clear picture of how innovation can mean anything from tiny, incremental changes through to completely new inventions.
So when companies are asking employees to embrace innovation, when we as leaders are asking people to be innovative, what are we asking for? And does anyone understand us?
I did find a few more interesting papers in my search for clarity, but I’ll stop here for today. Thanks for listening.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0007681318300119 (I recommend searching online for the full PDF, it’s a good read)