What does it take to be an innovator?

What does it take to be an innovator?

Our monthly blogger Phil Rumbol, former marketing director of Cadbury’s and now founding partner of 101 – a free range creative company, discusses innovation.

This wasn’t a question asked by a frustrated CEO or Marketing Director, but a question from my 12-year-old son. Ever curious about what I do, he overheard me talking about an innovation workshop that we were running, and asked this simple question. It’s an interesting question on a number of levels.

Firstly, I was struck by how he referred to people who ‘do’ innovation not as Innovation Managers, but Innovators. Which made me reflect on how incongruous those two words – innovation and manage – actually are. Innovation isn’t something to be ‘managed’. It’s something to be carefully nurtured and stimulated. It’s less of a process and more of a state of mind. It should be more about exploration, invention and experimentation than management of a process.

Yet, this is what most big organisations do. They put Innovation Managers and process in place, yet invariably become frustrated that their innovation pipeline isn’t as strong as they’d like it to be. Or that innovation takes to long to get to market. Or that most of their innovation simply cannibalises existing sales.

What this belies more than anything is that most large companies are set up for business administration rather than business invention. Running a business profitably to exploit an existing proposition requires fundamentally different skills to those required to invent a new one. That’s why big companies buy small start-ups and most – but not all – founders are generally incapable of taking their business through to maturity. (There’s a great book called ‘The Design of Business’ by Roger Martin that expands on the distinction between business administration and business invention.)

All of which got me thinking. What if  the people tasked with delivering innovation were called Innovators? And you put the people in these roles that over-index on curiosity, instinct and drive. And what if this title was reviewed annually? In other words, if you don’t actually deliver some innovation within 12 months, then you can no longer be called an Innovator. It could create an interesting, and more entrepreneurial dynamic often lacking in bigger organisations.

In the same chat with my son (I get all my best ideas from him!) there were two other gems. “So, when you do these ‘Innovation Workshops’, do you have benches and vices and all that?” “You call yourselves a ‘Think Tank.’ Is that ‘tank’ as in ‘boom, boom’, or ‘tank’ as in something that holds water?”

So in these three questions lie the signposts towards a more effective innovation agenda. Innovators instead of Innovation Managers. Innovation Workshops without the usual vices (‘we can’t do that’, ‘that will take 2 years’ etc.) Fuelled by a Think Tank of the ‘boom boom’ variety, rather than one that passively collects and holds knowledge like water.
 

Read more from Phil Rumbol in our Clubhouse.

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