Six Innovation Constraints
Strategic Innovation Toolkit for Managers
Курс 4 из 4 — Specialization Business Essentials for Managers
Does your business culture nurture innovation, or stifle it? Are you looking for ways to build your business creatively but finding daunting constraints at every turn? This course is designed to help you understand the forces that limit innovation, identify those barriers in your own business culture, and break free of them to realize the full value of your imagination. You’ll learn new skills and strategies that you can immediately apply to drive innovation in your group or organization, and you’ll build an understanding of the six most common constraints on innovation in both individual and group settings—that is, the six ways that creative thinking is often sabotaged before it can produce results. You’ll also learn to recognize stakeholders who are actively invested in stopping your ideas in their tracks. Finally, you’ll examine societal and technical constraints that you’ll need to overcome to foster a forward-thinking culture. Through case studies and interactive exercises, you’ll learn how to: - Generate, assess, and implement great ideas in your organization - Build your organization’s capacity for innovation, including creating an innovative culture - Lead innovation projects, processes, and teams - Recognize big issues lurking on the horizon before they become constraints - Drive adoption of great ideas - Develop and manage an innovation portfolio - Innovate to stay relevant and competitive in a fast-changing landscape
Introduction: Why Everyone Wants Innovation But No One Wants to Change
Creative People Must Be Stopped15:50
Academic Theories of Innovation7:27
Constraints Framework13:40
Why Constraints Matter14:31
Six Innovation Constraints13:23
David A. Owens, PhD, PE
Practice of Management and Innovation
So what we're going to do is
we're going to take one of these constraints each week.
We're going to take it apart, we're going to look into inside of it,
we'll try to understand how does that constraint present itself.
How are different ways that people have suffered from it?
What are things we can do to overcome it?
And we use language to overcome a great deal to talk about constraint and
then talk about how to overcome it.
And these stories, that the stories that I've collected in the book,
actually are ones that I'm going to share with you about how it is that people
overcome these constraints.
Week one, we're going to start with the individual constraints.
Individual constraints are really about individuals enlarging their toolset.
How do we actually get to know more different kinds of ideas,
more different ways of thinking?
I'll share this with you later.
This is a Google Labs Aptitude Test.
So Google wants creative people and at one point they were using this as a job
application screening device to find out who those creative people are.
Look at question number 8.
How many different ways can you color an icosahedron with one of three
colors on each face?
What kind of question is that?
How is that a creative question?
What colors would you choose?
Maybe that's creative.
And look at question number 9.
Question of, this space left intentionally blank,
please fill with something that improves upon emptiness.
Well, what do you put there?
So how is it these kinds of questions are something that could lead us to understand
how to have better ideas, how to be more creative?
because remember, innovation starts with the idea, and
somehow we're going to map this kind of thinking into creative ideas.
Individuals at this level are going to be talking about how do we see things,
how do we know things?
How do we understand things, and how things may help us?
Because, in fact, if we're going to bring things into our life,
we're going to change our life around things,
these are questions that actually have to be answered.
The model we're going to use is a model of perception.
If I want to be creative I need to get new information in,
if I have ideas it comes from the stuff that's out there.
So get new information in, and we're going to talk about how to do that.
Intellection, different In ways of thinking about things.
And we're going to talk about expression which is getting our ideas back out.
Because you can have great ideas, but
if they're stuck in your head, that do no good to anyone.
They have to be able to come out.
And so we're going to talk about these three things,
ways of overcoming individual innovation constraint.
help ideas become better, that it requires a certain amount of risk actually.
And we have to take some risk in a group in order to be able to make things happen.
In fact we have these things called a trust fall.
So this is where you get people on a team together.
They all stand like this and the person falls willingly backwards and
trust that the people are going to catch them.
There's no net there, they're going to catch them.
Well it strikes me, that I've often seen,
is that some people would rather do the trust fall and
risk a skull fracture than share their ideas with other people in groups.
Why would this be?
They're afraid of being made fun of, maybe what they're saying is taboo.
Maybe the kind of things they're saying,
that they're thinking, they don't think that other people would agree with them.
These are all things that have to be overcome in order for
innovation to move forward.
The kind of questions that go on in a group.
And these are questions that are conscious and
obvious but they're questions that nonetheless have to be answered.
How does this make me feel?
If I'm with a group of people and I feel scared or
I don't feel safe, that's problematic.
Groups will ask, is this how we do things?
Yesterday we did this way, why are we doing it this different way today?
And we have to answer that.
That's what people ask, I'm in a group of people, what do I need to do?
How can I be productive?
How can I help this group?
Groups also wonder about goals.
You're saying we're going to do something in a different way,
you're making this proposition for change.
Is it consistent with our goals?
Is it where we're trying to go?
I joined this group to go here and now you're saying we need to go there.
And so again, the kind of questions we have to answer.
The way we're going to think about it is we're going to talk about culture, culture
in groups, and how groups sort of come to understand how it is they're together and
what it is they need to do together.
We're going to talk about emotion, what's going on emotionally for
people in a group.
When we're afraid, when we're being criticized,
what goes on there, what happens.
We're talking about the environment within group, within which groups operate.
So are we in a room, or in a small room or a big room?
Or are we meeting virtually, are we in a place with whiteboards,
with no whiteboards?
All these things tie in to our ability to express our ideas to each other,
to come up with new ideas, to document what we've done.
And then finally, we're going to talk about process.
The role of process, what do we do first, what do we do second, and
what do we do third?
Because certainly groups have to generate ideas, and
certainly groups have to select ideas.
These are very different processes, and if we try to do them at the same time,
it becomes very problematic in groups, and we're going to see why that is.
So here are the kind of questions you're going to have in the diagnostic.
The kinds of things that we want to ask to understand,
is it emotion that's going to be problematic?
Is it the environment that's going to be problematic?
Is it the culture of the group that's going to be problematic?
Or is it the process the group uses to get through the innovation that's going to be
problematic?
And so again, if we can isolate which one of these constraints is going to affect
us, we're much more likely to become successful.
The next layer we're going to talk about is the organizational layer,
the organizational constraints.
So organizational constraints are those things we know to be true about structure.
How it is that we build the organization.
We're going to talk about, go back to the case of the digital camer,
the first digital camera, what happened there?
Why is it that Kodak was not able to capitalize on this thing?
Or maybe Kodak had a strategy to protect film.
And this thing represented through the opposite of film.
Digital camera is not film, right?
So, the film, and we have a film not.
So the organization of course is not going to just drop everything and go do this.
But we now know with retrospect we should probably note that they probably should
have paid some attention to it.
And so there was some kind of strategic failure in this organization
that did not allow them to see the value of this thing.
So we'll talk about how organizations think about strategy,
how they do strategy.
What should be there in order for
us In our organizations to put together an organization, or to cause
our organization to pay attention to ideas that are meaningful, that are strategic.
And build a structure around allowing those things to happen.
Organizations ask, is this consistent with our strategy?
In the case of Kodak, it was no.
Is it within our capabilities?
Can we do this thing?
In fact, in the case of the first digital camera, the quality wasn't quite there.
Not as good as film was, and
so maybe they thought this is not within our capabilities.
Also, do we have the resources, and
are we willing to put the resources to that kind of use?
So we'll spend a lot more time with Kodak later, and
the way we're going to think about it is structure.
How's the organization structured?
We're going to think about strategy.
What are the different intentions, what's the strategic intent of the organization?
And we're going to talk about the resources,
kind of resources that the organization has and
how it allocates them across the people in the organization.
Those three are what I'll call the internal constraints.
So those are constraints that we have a little bit more control of, right?
So what I do as an individual,
how I generate ideas, the groups that I work within.
Even the organizations, to a lesser extent, but still to some extent,
I may have control over.
I have a higher locus of control,
that is, I can actually assert more control over those kind of constraints.
The second set of constraints I want to talk about are what I'm going to call
external constraints.
So these are ones that are outside, we're going to talk about the industry,
society and technology.
Let's just quickly, the industry constraints.
And the industry constraints are about the market, and
how the market sees utility and value in our ideas.
So we'll make a proposition for change, and
the world, the market has to say, yes that makes sense to me.
I will change, I will adopt, I will think about it in a different way.
So there was a proposition, back in the day, about the music industry.
So for example, in the music industry, at least in the United States,
had a great deal.
20, 30 years ago the music industry was, basically,
buy 12 songs you hate to get one song you like and for about $20.
And people did it, you bought music, I bought music, and we all bought music.
But then this guy comes in, into this market, so it's a market of organizations
and he writes a program, Napster, that basically trashes the whole thing.
Because what is his proposition?
His proposition is, get all the music you want for free, any song you want for free.
Now of course, it was illegal and that's a problematic thing there.
But, my point here is that these companies,
these record companies knew about digital.
They understood what would the possibilities were but
they didn't do anything about it.
And so why would that be?
Why in the industry have all these different organizations, each organization
behaving and making different kinds of assumptions about the world but
they couldn't get it together?
And they decided not to pursue this thing called digital which
allowed this teenager to basically destroy the whole thing.
Why would that be and how does that work?
So that's what we're going to look at.
We're going to ask some questions at the industry level of,
does this give us more power?
By doing digital do we get more power?
Is it fair, do we expect our competitors to play fair?
Are they going to do things that make sense?
Does it take control from us?
What does it take from us?
If I do digital now, what do I lose in the process?
Also, industries are very interested in what they can control.
And so, if I'm doing innovation can I actually control it?
because if I can control it I'm more likely to do it, but if not,
I'm likely to suppress or try to avoid undertaking that innovation.
We're going to talk about competition,
that is what happens in the field of rivals.
We're going to talk about suppliers, the people are give things that the employees,
the professionals and what goes on there.
healthcare, we're going to talk about politics and government.
We're going to talk about those things that are very important for innovation,
and that happen at this level.
And we're going to talk about markets, what goes on in markets?
We're going to talk about disruptive technologies and
lots of innovation things that you may have heard of before, and
situated within this model that allows us to generate power.
Let me say that differently.
By using this model, we're going to be able to diagnose problems of innovation,
understand which way forward we should probably take.
The fifth level, societal constraints.
What we know to be true is about society and
how society has to say that thing is legitimate.
And so we talked about human cloning, and
why it is that society says that's not a good thing.
Society says there's potential for harm, and so therefore it's not safe.
It's not our aspiration,
we're not aspiring to have clones of all of ourselves.
None of us would believe the world would be a better place if everyone on Earth
were a clone of us ourselves.
Also, when we look at innovations, we are talking about our identity.
And we say well, if I change my life around that, If I buy that Range Rover,
if I buy that new iPhone.
Does that reinforce me to myself?
Does that makes me more of who I am?
Does that make me better?
Also, does this thing help us grow, or does it destroy us?
So in either case if we perceive it helps us grow,
we're more likely to allow that innovation to exist among us as a society.
We're going to talk about values, we're going to talk about social identity.
We're going to talk about regulation and how it is that society stops things.
Because something we have to be aware that society has power in terms of laws and
things like that.
We're also going to talk about history.
What came before actually does create obligation for what comes afterwards.
Because the world was the way once,
it doesn't mean that you can make it in any new way again.
And so we have to sort of acknowledge that history of what came before as we move.
Finally, we're going to talk about technical constraints,
what it is that's hard.
And this case I'm not going to talk as much about, and
we talk about the development of the technology.
I'm not going to talk about as much as like how do you do brain surgery,
how do you keep that body alive?
But the kind of things I want to talk about are sort of the way that we
think about technology.
Technology, in a sense is easy, does it work?
The way we're going to think about that is knowledge.
How much do we know about the technology?
How much do we know about how the human body works, for example?
So if we know more and we know about it,
the more likely we are to be able to drive an innovation that works.
Also time, think about windows of time.
If you have a product and you're trying to sell lots of that product maybe
before a big holiday, Christmas holiday or Easter holiday.
Some big time when gift giving is important.
Well, there's a window of opportunity and
you have to have the innovation done during that time.
So we talk about the nature of time and how it is that coordination,
windows of opportunity, those things actually matter.
And can be considered when we think about whether an innovation is going
to work or not.
And then finally, we're going to talk about the environment.
What goes on in the environment around us as we make innovations,
as we make changes that may actually be adverse to the environment?
That may actually pollute it, and may kill us,
may make the world a worse place as a byproduct of our innovation?
And sometimes we want to think about,
will the environment actually support the existence of this innovation?
And if this thing is successful, is that a good thing or bad thing in the long run?
And so we'll want to see that as well.
So, we think about inside the box, we're not going to think about outside the box.
I can't say that enough,
thinking outside the box has nothing to do with what we're working on.
What we're working on is trying to understand the constraints.
We're going to understand which of these constraints we need to change in order to
make our project successful.
The project being the project we're working on for this class.
The school project I'm working on,
anything that's an innovation is going to be subject to these.
And so we want to be able to diagnose which one of these things is the problem
that we're going to get past.