PMexpo 2018 - 26 Ottobre 2018

1. WHO KILLED INNOVATION?
…AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT
Prof Darren Dalcher
PM Expo 2018, October 2018, Roma
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2. Session Plan
• A murder mystery in four acts
• Hopefully with audience participation
• Together we will try to solve the mystery
• With a little help and evidence…
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3. ACT I: MURDER AT MIDNIGHT
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4. Setting the scene
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5. What is innovation?
• John Bessant: Innovation means creating
value from ideas
• So,
– Start with an idea
– Refine it, develop it, test it
– Long journey
– Reflect and improve
– Focus: Create potential value from the idea
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6. The future of management
• Long term success comes from management
innovation
• Time for management to join 21st Century
• New ways of:
– Mobilising talent
– Allocating resources
– Building strategies
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7. Gary Hamel: What matters now
• Challenge: building organisations that can win in
a world of relentless change
• Rethink the fundamental assumptions of
management
• Five paramount issues:
– Values
– Innovation
– Adaptability
– Passion
– ideology
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8. IBM survey
• IBM Survey: 81% of 1500 CEOs surveyed rated
innovation as a ‘crucial capability’ needed for
corporate success
Big new challenges (Isaksen & Tidd):
• Increasing volume and pace of change
• Growing complexity
• Intensifying competition and globalisation
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9. Who killed innovation?
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10. ACT II: THE USUAL SUSPECTS?
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11. If innovation is dead, who is to blame?
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12. Who killed innovation?
• Think about your company: Who usually kills
innovation?
• Introduce yourself to one neighbour; compare
your culprit; decide who is the most guilty
party in your joint experience
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13. Partial list of suspects
• Oppressive systems
• Bureaucracy
• Organisational culture
• Bullying leadership
• Fear of failure
• Fear of taking risks
• Fear of the unknown
• Lack of urgency
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14. Additional profiles…
• Too much to do
• Politics
• Death by business plan
• Death by ‘Prove it’
• No resources
• Patchy plan
• Lack of executive sponsorship
• Groupthink
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15. Hands up if
• You come up with good ideas, but cannot take action
because it would be too risky
• Functional managers control resources and can stop
innovation
• You don’t know how to start a new innovation
• Innovations fails to materialise
• Potential innovations are not prioritised
• Politics can stop new ideas
• Innovation is driven (and prioritised) from above
• ‘That’s not how we do things here’?
• ‘We already have a method for doing that?’
• ‘We tried that 5/10/15 years ago’
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16. Garvin & Roberto (2005)
• ‘What worked in the past is good enough; in
the absence of a dire threat, employees will
keep doing what they have always done. And
when an organization has had a succession of
leaders, resistance to change is even stronger.
A legacy of disappointment and distrust
creates an environment in which employees
automatically condemn the next turnaround
champion to failure.’
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17. ACT III: RETHINKING THE CRIME
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18. Innovation is changing…
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19. The innovation illusion
• According to Erixon & Weigel (2016):
• Western capitalism has lost its propensity for
experimentation and adaptation
• Instead, it has become middle aged, risk
averse and lacking in entrepreneurial spirit
• We are now on the verge of innovation famine
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20. Where are they today?
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21. Strategic drift
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22. Life expectancy of companies
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23. Corporate versus human life span
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24. Corporate life cycle (Adizes)
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25. ACT IV: WISDOM AT LAST?
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26. Need for a new approach?
• We work inside organisations
• Organisations are built to perform; not to change
• Need to be guided by a more dynamic perspective
• Change is ubiquitous, and getting faster =>
• Need greater flexibility and resilience
• But our organisations block that degree of flexibility and our systems
ossify and slow down progress, often killing promising innovation
• Indeed, organisations tend towards bureaucracy
• Cross functional initiatives are hard to run in silos
• Start-up culture offers a lot of insights about responding to opportunities
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27. • “The world is now changing at a rate at which the basic systems,
structures and cultures built over the past century cannot keep up.”
• “Incremental adjustments to how you manage and strategize are not up
to the job.”
• “The solution is not to trash what we know… but instead to re-
introduce, in an organic way a second system—one which would be
familiar to most successful entrepreneurs.”
• “The new system adds needed agility and speed… The two together—a
dual system—are actually very similar to what all mature organizations
had at one point in their life cycles, yet did not sustain (and have since
forgotten).”
PAGE 27
John Kotter: Accelerate!

28. Lost innovative capability
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29. Gary Hamel…
• ‘To build organizations that are adaptable at
their core, we will need to rework every
management process so it enables, rather
than frustrates, breakthrough thinking and
relentless experimentation’
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30. Dual system structure
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31. Eight accelerators for innovation
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32. Acceleration stalled and overcome
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33. Start with the big opportunity
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34. What about more modest innovation?
• If you cannot redesign the entire organisation,
what now?
• Any way of experimenting in the small?
• Many models are linear and plan-driven… so
need a different approach!
• Any suggestions?
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35. Feedback-driven model for change
Lean change management (Little)
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36. • Insights: Before you can plan any change, you need to understand the current
state of the organization. To do that, there are many tools, assessments, and
models you can apply to understand the current state.
• Options: Once you’ve gained enough Insights to start planning, you need
Options. Options have a cost, value and impact. Options usually include one or
more hypotheses and expected benefits. These hypotheses are turned into
Experiments when you are ready to introduce a change.
• Experiments: Once you have learned enough about your current state and
considered multiple Options, it is time to introduce a change and see if it works
out the way you thought it would using the experiment sub-cycle.
SAMPLE FOOTER PAGE 36
The lean change cycle

37. • Prepare: This is the planning stage of your Experiment. The key point
about the Prepare step is that at this point, all you have are your
assumptions about the change. It is during this step that you validate
your approach with the people affected by the change.
• Introduce: This is the stage where you start working with the people
affected by the change. Once a change has reached this step, it’s
considered to be in process. Ideally you will be limiting the number of
changes happening at the same time.
• Review: Here you review the outcomes of the Experiment. Typically
you do this after the period of time you thought would be needed for
the change to stick.
SAMPLE FOOTER PAGE 37
The experiment sub-cycle

38. • With the experiments and the mix of different tools, it becomes possible to
design our own change management method. And amend it based on the
feedback we generate from our experiments, or insights.
• We could plug in different approaches and tools, for example: Lean coffee:
Offers one example of an approach used to generate insights. Lean Coffee is a
structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and
begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda
for the meeting was democratically generated.
SAMPLE FOOTER PAGE 38
Devising our own method…

39. • A key advantage is that the team can explore ideas, go
through meaningful conversations, try out different options
and adjust based on the result.
• It also means that change targets can become part of the
conversation!
• Thereby, creating useful value from ideas = innovation
• Consequently, new knowledge and insights are co-created
and co-constructed following the learning cycles.
SAMPLE FOOTER PAGE 39
From change targets to partners

40. • Respond to more opportunities
• Work cross functionally
– Lead across silos
• External collaboration
• Crowdsourcing
• Democratise innovation – user innovation
• Change business models
• Work in agile fashion
• Experiment
PAGE 40
Other ways to rejuvenate

41. • Innovation as a practice
The don’ts:
• Don’t try to be clever; innovations will have
to be handled by morons
• Don’t diversify, don’t splinter, don’t do too
many things at once
• Don’t try to innovate for the future; innovate
for the present
PAGE 41
Peter Drucker

42. Summary
• Mystery in four acts:
• Act I: Innocence: Doing what we always do
• Act II: Awakening: Asking why
• Act III: Realisation: Looking beyond
• Act IV: Maturity: Thinking bigger; thinking
smaller; experimentation
• IARM model of maturity stages of innovation
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43. Final word…
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