Innovation

As winter turns to spring in Sydney, we have been hard at work reviewing an area that has become so important recently that The Business Council of Australia commissioned a special report on it. Innovation. A simple word and we all think we know what it means. But the truth is that you only have to read the BCA report to realise that everyone means something different when they apply Innovation to their own business and markets.

Undaunted, we looked at our own clients and experience. The outcome was the same, they all defined Innovation differently. One client even had declared next year to be their year of Innovation only to cancel it when it was pointed out to them that Innovation involved risk and their whole culture was risk adverse!

So, let's look at the experts we thought ... again they all approached it differently and each seemed to have something missing in the mix. Undeterred, we went back to basics and started with a clean sheet of paper. What is this thing called Innovation? Just about the only thing that everyone agreed on was that Innovation meant doing something differently ... and hopefully better.

Now, most models end up as simple 4 quadrant affairs, and much of the text on the subject attempted to make Innovation models fit this matrix. Try as we may, we could not get this quite right. Then it hit us, Innovation is driven by 3 elements, not the usual 2 in the 4 quadrant model.

The drivers as we concluded are

1. Focus - internal (changes inside the business) or external (mostly changes to the interaction with customers);
2. Orientation - past/current or future (is the business predominantly looking back and making changes based on past experience or looking forward and creating a brand new future) and
3. something we call Chunk Size - the scale of the change and therefore the degree of risk involved.

This six segment matrix allows us to be clear about what Innovation means for any client and address their needs accordingly. We have written 5 Manager Tool Kits (self help guides) that collectively set out the processes involved in these segments, as for some the process is very much the same.

Using the tool kits, we can

• help clients reduce their risk,
• keep everyone on track and
• identify the culture changes necessary to support innovation - whatever that means to them. (We have a culture change tool kit module too!)

Three different training programs have also been outlined, with 14 new activities, so that our unique brand of experiential learning covers all the ground implied by the matrix.

Ah well! Back to the writing. The next step is a complete Innovation Inventory Check List, so whether we are supplying our clients with the tools to do it themselves, or facilitating the process for them, we have a complete package to help them make Innovation a success on their own terms. This in itself is an innovation!!