His overriding view is that good or bad, the new management mantra is “do more with less” and that given Innovation should be pushing the boundaries, then we should be ‘doing the impossible for nothing’.
Now we would all like to have large budgets to spend on innovation projects, I know, I have tried to get one, but to get a business to fund and resource speculative innovation projects is always a tough job. When times are tough it’s easy to argue that the additional investment isn’t worth the cost. When times are good, spending time on innovation projects risks distracting the team from its core purpose or takes funding and resources away from the money making products and services. It’s always easier to make the argument that innovation costs too much or distracts too much in almost any market condition. Yet firms that fail to innovate will fail to survive and this is something all of us have to start to understand more.
I have added my views to the author’s main points:
• First truth: Innovation does not have to cost a lot of money. We can do a lot of brainstorming for ideas and exploring of ideas with next to no money. Network more and we find ideas from other areas of our companies or other organisations. Remember ideas don’t need to be new, they need to be new to your client or business area
• Second truth: Your team can do a lot of the work, if you’ll allow them to. How often do we challenge our teams or ourselves to think creatively about problems? We all probably have lots of creative people within our businesses that can contribute great ideas if we only ask them
• Third truth: Your teams should “own” this work. At Logica, I purposely didn’t set up a central innovation team as I believe being innovative is the role and responsibility of everyone and we shouldn’t look to other people to do it for us
• Fourth truth: You have to assign the “right” people and give them the best tools and training. By the ‘right people’, we shouldn’t assume that this is a select few who are technically brilliant. By tapping into different groups of people, such as our graduates, we can get a different view of client problems and working out how to solve these is a great development opportunity for everyone.
• Fifth truth (and the one that is self-serving): Find a trustworthy innovation partner who will guide your team and train your team rather than asking them to “go it alone”. This is where our Innovation Catalysts model we implemented at Logica comes into play. This virtual team doesn’t necessarily innovate themselves, but are able to bring ideas from other parts of the business and help move ideas forward.
Given the current economic environment we all find ourselves in, doing the impossible with nothing is something we should all think about