Managing and innovation do not always fit comfortably together. That’s not surprising for in a great business you will have to understand the differences between the disciplines required to make you great.
Operations….
- generates today’s value
- relies on order.
- likes forecasts to come out as planned.
- is an established process driven by existing knowledge
- managers are often judged on how much order they produce.
Whereas Innovation…
- creates tomorrow’s opportunities
- is often disorderly.
- is a learning process, the product of which is new applied knowledge
- does not turn out as planned and
- should have failure as part of the culture
- produces tension between managers and innovation
Managers & Innovators
- Managers succeed by following the rules….
- Innovators succeed by breaking the rules
Managing innovation is quite different from managing operations as:
- you always have less information available to make choices than you’d like
- innovation has not a single goal, but multiple and unclear goals, and
- each of these goals can be reached through multiple routes.
Innovation eludes planning, prediction and containment. However it can be embedded in a business by ensuring creativity and routine are intertwined throughout the process using tools such as S.I.T. The routine tasks have little value by themselves however; their purpose is to support the knowledge discovery process.
Uncertainty and Ambiguity
The primary difference between operations and innovation is uncertainty.
The most effective way to deal with uncertainty inherent in innovation is to have a learning process that “systematically confronts the unknown with new hypotheses, tests them, and eventually creates a new knowledge”.
When innovating, you cannot figure it all out and ahead of time and stick to one plan;
All said and done it is critical to realize that it’s not a choice between either/or, for at some time you will need to be good at both and as such understand the ambiguity between the two disciplines.
so, don’t wait – just go for it, learn and adjust as you go. That’s why “successful innovators get used to moving forward, backing up, going sidewise, chasing parallel paths for a while, consolidating, and then going forward again”.
Credit: 1000 Ventures
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