In my initial overview, I stated that I felt that there were 3 items necessary for innovation. The first, the resources, I covered in my first entry. This one is geared towards the second which is the Culture to support innovation.
THE CULTURE
By only supporting the incremental improvements within the organization, we take no risks. This will force teams to think about small next steps and will in turn hamper our organizations ability to drive innovative thinking. This keeps us away from the art of the possible. Here at Intel, we use possibility thinking in order to keep the innovation going. Possibility thinking is starting with a clear definition of where you want to be and then spending time trying to figure out what has to happen to make it true. Not focusing on the next single improvement, but rather the whole picture first. This frees us from the constraints of the current system and processes and allows for a more open field of possible routes to get to a solution. I like to think of it as the difference between a great sprint hurdler and a fair one...A great one focuses on the finish line and the hurdles are where they know them to be; a fair one only focuses on the next hurdle.
This helps set the mindset, but does not always lead to success. In order to drive towards innovative thinking, failure has to be an option. Understanding that the lessons that you learn from failure leads to success is the key to any learning organization. When you are a child, you do lots of things you should not, but through learning the hard way, you find the paths that work. Within companies, we need to do the same. If every project was exactly the same, every issue was exactly the same, all the same people were involved and no human error possible, then maybe we could follow exactly the same method to get to the same result. But in my experience, that is seldom the true. Budgets are different, new people come onto the projects, new businesses are being driven, new capabilities are desired, and these force us into coming up with new capabilities and solutions. Also, in my experience, any successful project or innovation is made up of lots of failure to achieve the results. Support of these failures is critical to their ultimate success. Innovation happens more frequently.
Support of failure does not mean that you need to build out a new reward system that provides monetary compensation for each failure Congratulations Bob that is your third failure this week, here is your bonus!" It means that you recognize it, don't spend time looking for who is at fault and penalize everyone, but focus on what was learned from the failure and how to overcome it. How can you avoid it in the future and strive for better results? This is one reason that small companies or newer companies can innovate faster in many cases. They do not have the time to search for all the guilty parties and punish them in their reviews, they have to continuously evolve and deliver quickly, which forces them to adapt and learn from these mistakes. They are also very focused on the goal and not always married to the path to deliver. This frees them from the constraints and allows for more dynamic approaches.
The third, and hardest part of innovation culture is to simply stop things. When innovations are not panning out, delivering the results expected, or driving to the capability you thought, you need to stop the work and simply move on. This is much harder for people and organizations to do as any innovation begins with a passionate individual or group that truly invests in the direction. Stopping this is a bit like stopping an aircraft carrier in that it takes time and much directed energy to stop. While very difficult, it is a critical step in managing those critical resources you have directed towards innovation.
Here in Intel IT, we build stage gates to manage our ability to stop things. We look at innovation in four steps:
1. Basic Research - Where we are scanning technologies, futurists, research companies and some universities for leading-edge thought on what we might want to work on next. (10% of our time in IT Labs, with no expectation of yield)
2. Proof of technology - Where we bring in capability and test our hypothesis on whether this will work to help us solve problems (30% of our time, with an expectation of about 50% yield)
3. Proof of concepts - This is where we know what we would like to solve based on the capabilities we discovered in the proof of technologies, and we assign goals to the business case and test in live situations (30% of our time, with an expectation of about 60-70% yield)
4. Pilot/transfer - This is where we work with our services delivery groups to do the final proof and production implementation of the capability (30% of our time, with about a 90% yield)
Our process is completely supported by our reward system and our culture to ensure that we focus on our big business problems and deliver solutions to help move us faster. We also are lucky that here at Intel, innovation is in our DNA. We keep in mind some wise words of one of our original founders, Robert Noyce.
Don't be encumbered by the past, go off and do something wonderful! - Robert Noyce
In my next entry, I will discuss the problems and how you need to think in order to guide any innovation process.