Children have a brilliantly simple outlook on the world – nothing is taken for granted and everything is there to be questioned. When William, my 6-year old son, asked me about the composition of bees, he was assessing all sorts of different things – why are bees furry, why do they buzz, do they taste of flowers, does the bee make the honey or the honey make the bee?
Why? is a very powerful question – one that kids (mine at least) use fearlessly. But why then do we seem so reticent to question the world around us in our day to day in business operations?
As working adults, are we afraid to question the modus operandi of a company because the hierarchy of an office environment teaches us not to? Or is it because our pursuit of ‘togetherness’ as employees lends itself to groupthink? Perhaps it’s simply because we lose the ability to question the status quo because we created it in the first place.
Curiosity is something we are all told to nurture as knowledge workers – we are urged by consultants and commentators to embrace new ideas, love change, question why we do what we do and foster innovation to make it better. But I have a fundamental issue with this. The ‘innovation’ we all strive for is – in general – very poorly defined. Some people confuse innovation with invention (the creation of new things), some call it creativity (an act that in itself does not add value because it cannot be measured) and others use the phrase willy-nilly to make themselves sound more strategic. “Strategy” as a finance director interviewee told me in my journalist days “is a term used by marketing departments an excuse for woolly thinking.”
But still, innovation is something we strive for. Innovative companies are successful, they are disruptive, they develop new businesses models and sell more stuff. In short, they question the world and then change it for the benefit of customers and their own bottom line.
But what is innovation? At a debate this morning sponsored by Microsoft and Management Today, a consultancy called ?WhatIf! came up with an interesting formula:
Innovation = Insight x Ideas x Implementation
I’m not a big fan of formulae in general, but I liked the premise that you can only create a measurable change in a business if you marry your understanding with market needs with good ideas and the ability to execute those ideas in a practical way. If any of the integers involved is zero, the equation equals zero.
Yes, this is very simplistic, but the approach to innovation is much more useful than throwing money and resource in a random way at the uncontrolled pursuit of change. Innovation, in this context, is not just about asking the right questions, it is also about aligning ideas to real problems and then making them work in a tangible and valuable way.
There were lots of interesting and quotable soundbites from the debate panel – which included CIOs, CEOs, consultants and technologists. Comments ranged from the theoretical (“innovation should not be just different but ‘suitably’ different”) to the practical (“The worst thing you can do when innovating is wrap a new technology around a broken process – you’ll end up being inaccurate to 7 decimal places rather than 3)
However, the most interesting comment was made– almost off-the-cuff – by an entrepreneurial engineer Bijal ‘Bee’ Thakore. “How good does better look?” Bee asked. Does she mean that innovation must be measurable, that improvements to products and services must be planned out first before attempting to innovate, or did she simply get her words mixed up? To be honest I don’t really know, but then again I don’t know what bees are made from. The point is that it makes you stop and think – something we should all do a little more of.
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