E30: How Can You Avoid Becoming a One-Hit Wonder?

How can you avoid being a one hit wonder? Welcome to Invisible Solutions. I'm your host Steven Shapiro. Each week we tackle your most complex problems using the lenses from my book Invisible Solutions. If you need the lenses, go to get the lenses.com and with that, let's get started with today's episode. This week I bring you chapter two from my book Best Practices Are Stupid. If you're not familiar with the book, it was published in 2011 by Penguin and it was selected as the best innovation and creativity book of the year by 800 CEO Reed, which is been rebranded to Porchlight. It also was a number one international business best selling book. So I'm honored to be able to bring this to you in this podcast. So what I'm going to do is every other week, or in some cases maybe every week, I will release a new chapter from the book here on my Invisible Solutions podcast. There are 40 chapters in total, so this is going to be dripped out over the course of a little more than a year. In chapter one, which was released last week here on the podcast, I discussed the three levels of innovation. Innovation as an event, innovation as a capability, and innovation as a system. This week we dive into creating an innovation capability, that second level and what it means. So with that, let's get started with chapter two from Best Practices Are Stupid. How can you avoid becoming a one hit wonder? Do you know the bands Lips Inc. The Sugar Hill Gang or Hattaway? You might know the songs that each of these artists made famous, Funky Town, Rapper's Delight and what Is Love respectively. These artists were one hit wonders. They climbed to the top of the music charts once and were never heard from again. This is not too dissimilar to what happens with many businesses. They generate one great idea to gain momentum but quickly fall from grace. What can you do to prevent your organization from becoming a one hit wonder? Make sure your innovation efforts are predictable and sustainable by treating them like any other capability in your organization. As an example, think about your finance capability. It has skilled experts, for example certified public accountants, measures that they use such as days sales outstanding. They probably have supporting technology. Could be Oracle, SAP or some other technology. They have processes. For example, there are processes for closing the books at the end of the year. They have an owner such as the chief financial Officer, and a strategy. Your innovation capability requires all of these elements and more, including skilled innovation experts, innovation measures, innovation management technologies, an innovation process, an innovation owner, and a clearly articulated innovation strategy. With these in place, you can begin to make innovation a repeatable and predictable process where creativity is encouraged throughout the organization and the best solutions are implemented. This is that second level of innovation described in the previous chapter. Innovation as a capability. And there are five key components that are required for successful long term innovation. The first one is you need a strategy. A strategy is needed to decide when, where and how innovation will be used within the organization. Most importantly, it should address why. Why you want innovation? What are you looking to achieve? Are you primarily looking for a new pipeline of products? Do you want to serve your customers better? Are you looking to create a nimble, flexible, adaptable organization? Back when this book was first written, a client of mine had a Mantra which was 2 by 10. It was to become a $2 billion business by 2010. This made it clear to all employees why innovation is needed, what it means to deliver innovative ideas and another company is solely focused on their customers with a mantra. Innovation is anything that makes the lives of our customers better. So that why is so important. Next, we need innovation measures. Innovation, as with any capability, needs to be measurable and measured. You'll want to measure the value of your innovation pipeline. Who will be measured? What kinds of measures will be used? How will you measure less tangible values such as adaptability? How will you relate innovation to to your overall business outcomes and results? These are some important questions to ask yourself when looking at measures. Next, we need innovation processes. Innovative processes are great, but we need processes for innovation. Innovation requires an end to end model for targeting, generating, selecting and implementing innovative solutions. And as you will discover as we go through this book, the recommended innovation process is one that starts with a challenge and ends with the value created for the organization. And I'll say that again because I think this is really important. The process starts with an issue, problem, challenge or opportunity and ends with the creation of value. It is not about ideas, it is actually about solving problems. The next component are your people because your people are your culture. And if you want a culture of innovation, your employees must embrace action, actions, values, beliefs, skills and language that are consistent with this objective. Everyone at all levels must appreciate divergent points of view. Creativity must be encouraged and valued. And you need the right organization and leadership models in place. Because let's face it, at the end of the day, innovation is for people, by people. So we need to tap into that people component in order to be successful. The last component of the capability is technology. Innovative companies use collaborative tools to enable communication between employees, customers, suppliers and external experts. Solutions are captured in ways that facilitate the dissemination and replication of innovative thinking. These technologies enable communication at all levels, across all organizations and across business boundaries. And if you followed my work, you will know that I'm a big fan of using technology as a way of enhancing collaboration to drive innovation. This could be done through internal crowdsourcing as a way of solving problems with your internal team. It could be leveraging external crowdsourcing. It doesn't matter. Technology, though, becomes a key component of managing and driving innovation. You will notice that this book is for the most part organized around each of these components, providing even greater detail on how to implement an innovation capability in your organization. For too long, innovation has been relegated to the darkest recesses of research and development departments and to conference rooms of well meaning brainstormers. But now is the time to bring innovation to the forefront of your business. Now is the time to make innovation a capability with the same level of status as finance, sales or marketing. Doing this will prevent your innovation efforts from becoming a one hit wonder. And as a footnote to this chapter, let me give you my definition of innovation because I think this is actually quite important. When people ask me when I hear the word innovation, what does it mean to me? Well, what it means to me is relevance. It is about relevance. It is about staying relevant in the minds of your customers, your clients, your market. Because if you don't offer them what they want and need at the price they want with the service they want, they'll go somewhere else. So the reason why so many companies become one hit wonders is because they assume their past success is going to lead to their future success. And this is wrong. Past success will lead to future failure. Adaptability, as we talked about in the previous chapter, that is the key. And in order to do that we don't just adapt randomly. We adapt towards relevance, offering people what they need and want, even if they haven't explicitly said they want it. We need to find ways of offering what is needed. And with that we are at the end of this week's episode to submit problems you want solved on this podcast. When we're doing our problem solving version, go to invisiblesolutionspodcast.com and remember to download the lenses. Go to getthelenses.com I look forward to being with you next week. And until then, Happy problem solving.