On 'Departments of Innovation' and japanese knotweed

I've been a consultant for a number of years now, so I've had the good fortune or unenviable task (depending on your perspective) of spending an inordinate amount of hours examining the inner workings of a range of large organisations. Unintentionally, I am always analysing everything about the companies I enter, whether it's relevant for the particular project I am working on or not.

At a simplistic level, I am just really fascinated by why some businesses succeed and others don't. As a teenager and young adult, while my friends were watching Gossip Girl, my favourite programmes were Dragon's Den, Mary Queen of Shops and The Apprentice. Every time a new small business popped up on my ever revolving local high street, I would subconsciously assess their chances of success and then find myself doing a post mortem in my head when the shutters inevitably came down a year later.

Given this fascination, the subject of innovation enthralls me because of how critical it is to business growth. I'm not an innovation consultant, but I'm always very interested in how companies approach the concept of innovation. I'm particularly tickled by how in 2019, it still flummoxes more traditional leaders or leaders in traditional organisations who mischaracterize innovation as a technology issue, rather than a culture one. Or as something to be tackled more or less in a silo by an "Innovation Team" of some sort.

I'm struck by how these innovation teams, despite being made up of very sparky, enthusiastic people with great ideas, often end up not delivering anything at all, or delivering solutions that are not very innovative at all.

The usual culprits of resistance to change, lack of funding, and a fear-based culture usually stomp all the innovation right out of them and they just end up doing what everyone else is doing, so that they can go home to their families at a reasonable hour.

I don't believe in innovation teams or departments of innovation, everyone has the ability to be innovative in the right environment. In the best organisations, innovation should be as pervasive as japanese knotweed. There should be structures in place such that every person in every function develops a mindset and has sufficient freedom (and budget!) to develop and test new and better ways of doing things.

There are thousands of articles and books on how to build a culture of innovation, so I won't labour those points here about needing clear goals, limited bureaucracy, a willingness to fail etc. A couple of recommendations are linked above!

Until next time.