Bringing innovation in from the cold

 I've been thinking a lot about innovation and it's "place" in a corporate structure.  Innovation is often so different, so unique and so unfamiliar that many companies aren't quite sure where to place it.  Does it belong with product teams, since some innovation is logically focused on new products?  Does it belong in a strategy organization, since innovation is often focused on growth?  Does it belong in R&D, since R&D creates a lot of new technologies?  Or does it belong in its own organization?  Where does innovation actually belong?

Innovation is like a wise but cranky old uncle that many companies keep up in the attic, out of sight, until the need is so great that they bring that uncle front and center of some of their biggest problems.  Or, innovation is a practice or capability that exists on the periphery or the edge of the business, in many groups and forms, without a coherent overall strategy or plan.  Even companies that have robust innovation capabilities or organizations are careful to keep innovation in carefully defined lanes.

It's time to bring innovation in from the cold, to the center of the organization, and embed it in the fabric, culture and practice of your business.  Honestly, most companies have some flavor or aspect of innovation floating somewhere in the electron orbit of the company, circling the nucleus, sometimes swooping closer and sometimes well out in an elliptical orbit.  What is really needed is to bring innovation into the nucleus, embedding it in the very core of the business.  What Prahalad and Hamel would have described as a "core competency", or what Drucker would have noted as one of the two functions of a business:  marketing and innovation.

Why is this so urgent now?

Why should innovation, a difficult horse to ride, become one of the most important ponies in the stable, one of the most frequently ridden?  There are more reasons than I can possibly list here, and none of them will be new.  None of them alone makes the case for moving innovation to the core, but the preponderance of all of them make the case for innovation quite compelling.  To whit:

• The increasing speed of change in every business
• The rapid increase in investment in science and technology and subsequent rapid adoption
• The rise of truly global operations and competition
• The reach of the internet
• Customers who are constantly learning, absorbing new products and services and unsatisfied with what they have

When conditions were stable and change was slow, and barriers to entry were higher, innovation was an occasional need to solve a momentary problem.  Soon, and very soon, innovation will become a necessity, a core competency, and not just creating new products.  The real ability will be to innovate new products, and services, and business models.

What does it mean to bring innovation into the core?

A good friend - Paul Hobcraft - and I were talking about this topic recently.  He asked what I meant by saying innovation needed to be a core competency, and what that would look like.  Except I'm sure he said it more eloquently.  My answer was:  consider any executive or senior manager in a business confronted with a business challenge.  Today, they will reach for trusted methods, tools and people that are based on how the business operates, and those tools will focus on efficiency and current operations.  What's needed, and what will signal that innovation has become more important, is when any of these people, confronted by a business challenge, is comfortable considering innovation methods and activities as equally valid and potentially useful, and knows how to implement either an efficiency action or an innovation action with equal skill.

Currently, a lot of companies have a lot of programs that provide some aspect of innovation.  This could be a brainstorming group, an incubator, a market research team that conducts ethnography, an open innovation scouting team, or other innovation activities or components.  All of these companies can claim to be doing innovation, yet none of these activities is core to the business, or a core capability.  All of them are occasional activities and on the periphery of the business.  There, like the cranky uncle in the attic, if we really need them in an emergency, but not part of day to day operations.

Why is innovation on the periphery?

Innovation is out in the cold, out in the hinterlands, beyond the pale, so to speak, because most executives don't learn innovation in school, didn't require innovation to advance in their progression to the top, and view innovation as dark magic that overpromises and under-delivers.  And, since innovation is often conducted by poorly trained people who have limited time and budgets, their sense of what peripheral innovation can deliver is usually accurate.  

There's little that is more frustrating to the corporate practitioner who sees the value that innovation could bring than working against a management team, a philosophy and a culture that distrusts innovation.  In many firms, there is simply too much aggregate resistance to new ideas, divergent thinking, taking risks, experimenting and exploring.  And what so many corporations fail to understand is that these are exactly the attributes of companies that will survive in the new competitive, global, fast moving economy.

OK, so what?

Now, you could ask:  is it innovation that makes me fast, agile, adaptable and creative, or do I become more innovative if my culture and operations adjust to become more fast, agile and insightful?  This is an interesting chicken and egg question but it misses the point.  Companies now, and in the near future, must be faster, more agile, better able to use data and insight, more creative and more innovative to simply survive. These attributes aren't "nice to haves"; they are table stakes. 

The sooner you recognize that having fourteen little innovation teams on the periphery of your business doesn't mean that your company is innovative, the better off you'll be. It's more important to work to create a core capability and competency focused on innovation from the center out, if at all possible.  Few changes of this magnitude happen from the periphery in.  To do this, you need an executive team that not only acknowledges the importance of innovation, but invests in it,  You need a senior team that reinforces an innovation option at every decision point, a leadership and management team comfortable with the tools and processes of innovation.  Very few companies have the management team I just described, so getting started on changing the thinking and skills of senior leaders, and changing the culture and philosophy of your company is vital.  Do it now.  Bring innovation in from the cold.

The new pioneers

 Time was, a few hundred years ago, that a pioneer was a person who left the civilized areas and moved to new lands in search of a better opportunity or a new way of life.  When we in the States think of pioneers, we think of people like Daniel Boone, who led people into Western Virginia and then on into Kentucky to find new opportunities and new lands further west.

The reasons pioneers went west (in this case) were several.  First, the land near the coast was often very expensive and in some cases in the hands of aristocrats or wealthy families, passed down from generation to generation.  Even though the US was only a hundred years old, land and its value had the same connotations as it did in England.  Second, the coastal plan, and increasingly the Piedmont, was getting populated, and many pioneers wanted more space.  Third, by going further west, they could open up new lands and bring new settlers in, which would allow the pioneers to replicate some of the things that happened on the coastal plain.  The pioneers could be the landed aristocrats eventually.

The pioneers, however, as anyone who knows their history, were often violating the law (going beyond the Blue Ridge mountains) and encountering people who already considered the new lands their home and heritage.  The pioneers had to brave difficult mountains where there were no roads, and had to be relatively self-sufficient.  This meant they could plant their own crops, kill their own game, make and weave their own clothing and so on.

Thanks for the history lesson

The recap above is familiar to anyone who knows their history, or who watched Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett on television.  What's all this got to do with a blog that is nominally about innovation?

We are seeing a new opportunity for pioneers in the so-called metaverse, yet the pioneers entering and staking out claims in this new frontier are dramatically different from the pioneers of old.  We ought to stop and ask what's changed, and why it has changed.

New "pioneers"

There is a new "land" rush happening, and it is happening for perhaps the third time, in what is now called the meta-verse.  This isn't the first time that the phenomenon of virtual reality has raised its head.  I had the good fortune to work with a number of people almost a decade ago using virtual worlds like Second Life to solve problems in real time for corporate customers.  At that time, there were discussions about claiming a particular location in Second Life, or designing avatars or clothing, or earning money by designing virtual buildings or locations.

The concept of virtual reality has been with us for a while, and there have been several very good attempts to create a continuous virtual reality.  What makes this attempt a bit different?

Oligarchs

This new virtual reality is sponsored by a completely different set of pioneers - what I'll call the oligarchs - that is, Facebook (Meta), and a number of other companies who are salivating at developing a virtual reality that moves platforms like entertainment and gaming into a 3 dimensional platform that until now really wasn't achievable.  In earlier virtual realities like Second Life, much of the interaction was still done on a computer screen, so while you were represented by an avatar, you were still watching from an observer's perspective.  With the advent of low cost virtual reality headsets, faster internet and new computing platforms, we can now feel relatively completely immersed.

The problem is that the people and companies who are staking out the claims are the same GAFA (Google Apple Facebook Amazon and so on) that control much of the traffic (and advertising, and content) that is on the web.  In reality, their likely goals are to recreate all the earning potential of the web in the metaverse, and lock down advertising channels and other mechanisms to make money.

Early pioneers (the ones in the coonskin caps) had visions of making money but also seeking new lands, new opportunities and bringing people to a new place.  There were definitely speculators - including our first president - but there seems to have been a deeper, personal investment and less crass mercantilism.  Now, it seems, the opposite is true.

Why does it matter?

This all matters because the metaverse as currently envisioned will rapidly converge to the "web 4.0" without any experimentation or divergence.  We'll lose an opportunity to explore what the metaverse could be, and attempt a collective development.  Whereas the States are independent "laboratories" of democracy and learning, where differences can occur, I think the metaverse is likely to end up controlled by a few powerful corporations who will dictate how it works, and we will all have missed an opportunity.

The new "pioneers" in the metaverse have resources far beyond what any early pioneer could imagine, and far more technical advantage and control.  There is no patriotism or sense of manifest destiny, just another way to put more advertisements in front of eyeballs.  If this is what we allow the emerging metaverse to become, we consumers and participants will lose, and Meta and others will win, leaving us a little less engaged, a little more saturated with ads, and having missed an opportunity to explore what could be a much richer and more fulfilling opportunity.