I’m just back from a
terrific conference produced by Idean, a leading global design agency
that creates world-class User Experience.
They passionately believe, as I do, that “life is too short for crappy
UX!” This year’s conference, attended by business leaders and senior managers from diverse industries, was
focused on Customer Experience (CX). It was a day full of thought-provoking
conversation among attendees and speakers. I gave a keynote talk on innovation, entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship. This post and the three posts that
will follow it are a condensed version of my talk.
I started with the
observation that we’re living in a world where technology has not only become part of how we live our lives but
has infiltrated the very pores of virtually
every business, with the result that everyone has to be at least a lay
technologist. And since, as we all
know, technologies don’t stand still, neither can we.
Take marketing as an
example. Marketing is no longer just
changing the words in a campaign the way it was when there wasn’t much technology
involved and the number of outlets was very limited.
Today, a marketing
campaign is like a mini product – or even a mini business. Technology has infused it with new and
different aspects that require new and different skills. Things like UI, search optimization, data
collection and analysis, Pinterest, Twitter.
Not to mention design and finance and the other traditional skills that
themselves have been transformed by technology. And all the different people with these
different skill sets need to talk to each other if the work they’re doing is to
deliver results.
You can tell the same
story about business models, customer service, product design. And on and on
A fundamental result of this
changed world is that the perceived need for innovation has radically expanded. But the ability to consistently produce
innovation hasn’t kept pace. In fact, from
what I’ve seen over the last five years or so in the trenches of innovation,
it’s not going so well out there.
Here’s what I hear all the
time –
Leaders of companies are upset because they’re not
getting “innovation”
Employees are frustrated because they’re not allowed
to be entrepreneurial
This paralyzing state of
affairs is only made worse by how easy it’s become to see “innovation” as a
joke word – an ultimately meaningless business buzzword like so many others
that have come and gone. But it’s not,
not really. And innovation paralysis can
be overcome.
To see how, we need to
begin by looking at what we mean by “innovation”.
As I see it, an idea alone
isn’t an innovation. And an innovation
doesn’t have to be a completely new idea – after all, a genuine innovation for
one company may be a snooze for others. What
matters is that in a particular company or context the idea leads someone to creating
new value. In fact, by my
definition, unless an idea produces a commercial result, it isn’t an innovation
at all.
To put it simply – an innovation is a
new way to create value.
It follows from this that
if you want innovation, you want people who are good at creating value from new
ideas. And what kind of people are
those?
It’s often said that an
entrepreneur is someone who builds businesses.
But we could also say: A
successful entrepreneur is someone who takes an idea and creates value from it.
So when company leaders say, “I want more
innovation,” what that really means is, “I need my people to act more like entrepreneurs.” Or, since they’re inside the company – “more
like intrapreneurs.”
This is the first of four posts on innovation, entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship from Idean's 2013 UX Summit.