Think outside the box to innovate

Innovation is boundless. Incorporating innovation into a complex, structured business organization is a risky business, and it is the source of all corporate innovation paradoxes or dilemmas. In the process of thinking and implementing innovation activities, if enterprises can jump out of the box of enterprise organization, return to the original trajectory of innovation, and enter the "space of discussion" of innovation, it is possible to open up new worlds. This prompted us to recommend three books on innovation to everyone here at the same time: "7 Lessons on Enterprise Innovation", "The Solution of Innovators", and "Sustainable Innovation". They seek to explore and resolve three key innovation paradoxes:

1. Return to the source of innovation, so that commercial success does not have to come at the expense of art or innovation.

2. Large companies that have matured due to successful innovation cannot resist the attack of small companies that innovate by applying low-cost disruptive technologies. The pursuit of a century-old store has become a "moon in the water". The response is for these large companies to proactively use disruptive technologies to make changes.

3. Discover, gather and apply different innovation capabilities within the organizational framework of the enterprise, making innovation a sustainable rather than a fleeting process.

Returning to the Origin of Innovation

"7 Lessons of Enterprise Innovation" was originally called New Ideas About New Ideas, and the literal translation is "Creativity About Creativity", which means looking out of the box to see innovation. The publisher of the Chinese version translated the book into its current name, perhaps to highlight the relationship between innovation and enterprises, but it also inadvertently concealed the origin of innovation, that is, innovation does not originate from enterprises, but rather is an idea that promotes technological breakthroughs. Even the artistic, aesthetic, cultural, psychological and scientific factors that give rise to creativity. This is perhaps what Shira P. White, an artist and entrepreneur, has discovered and shown. "I could never convince myself of the fact that business success must come at the expense of art or innovation," she noted in her foreword. "So I tried to take the plunge and find some way to combine creativity and business." To a considerable extent, this book is a product of that idea: it's a book about innovation written in the language of art and sometimes philosophy.

The main content of the book consists of seven parts: in "Light of Creativity", you will discover the source of innovation; in "Flickering Bubble", you will learn about new ways to develop ideas; Future Bargaining" discusses how to evaluate the value of different ideas; "realization" talks about turning ideas into reality; the innovation mechanism of enterprises is no different from "integrated circuits"; and enterprises design organizational structures for the purpose of innovation, not simply to put work Putting the plans together, they are doing "rocket design", "designing hard to inspire and support the creativity of their own employees, partners and customers". "This applies to the culture they create, the quality of their creative leadership arts, and their perspectives on art in the workplace - natural art or environmental art as well as artistic perspectives on the workplace", which ultimately aims to be "like a rocket" , to push the innovation capabilities of their own institutions to an unprecedented new height.” In the final section, "Creating Perfection," the innovative philosophies of these arts extend beyond the boundaries of the enterprise, to "all aspects of local and global communities," emanating from the boundless source of innovation.

These seven sections almost all contain three types of innovation cases and their experience summaries: non-enterprise innovation, from non-enterprise innovation to enterprise innovation, and pure enterprise innovation. This is also the result of the author's deliberate interviews with hundreds of the world's most innovative artists, scientists, educators, entrepreneurs and senior managers. She discovered that they were successful because they were "hot, trendy, and explosive," and she called them the 3Hs for short. Their whole world "seems like... a bowl of sparkling soup—a liquid of data synthesis in a clear soup of innovation, with a constant swirl of sparkling innovations.... They dip into it, and all the ingredients are Interaction. They are constantly trying to change the cooking method. This is the 3H people, hot, fashionable, and explosive. They pile up different factors in order to collide with new sparks. In this way, new sparks become the soup New ingredients. As things go, things change and so do tastes. Ingredients are combined in new ways and new sparks are created. For 3Hs, it's a way of life."

Disruptive Innovation

3H people rely on innovative lifestyles to achieve their careers. Among them, entrepreneurs and managers have established a firm position for their companies, and their scales have gradually grown. However, these companies are most likely to encounter what innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen has revealed as a "growth dilemma."

This dilemma comes from Christensen's 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma (a companion to The Innovator's Solution): Successful Companies Focused on High-Value Customers and Profit Growth , because of ignoring low-cost, non-mainstream technological changes, and being devastated by the so-called saboteurs who take advantage of these disruptive technological innovations and start from low-value customers, they are on the verge of collapse and cannot achieve their expectations at all. profit growth target. In other words, the reason for success is itself the source of failure. Managers of well-managed, established companies are truly taken aback by the book's aggressiveness of disruptors. They are eagerly waiting for Christensen to come up with a solution to their predicament. Thus, The Innovator's Solution was published.

This book was co-authored by Christensen and Deloitte Consulting LLP senior expert Michael E. Raynor. Based on years of research on companies in different industries, they have found that innovation can become a predictable process that leads to sustained profit growth. They propose a way out of the dilemma from the other side of the "growth dilemma": companies should seize disruptive technologies, proactively engage in disruptive innovations, and become disruptors, not disruptors. To that end, they explored some big questions, including:

How do we know if an idea has the potential for disruptive innovation?
·Which competitive conditions favor companies in a blocking position and which favors less advanced companies?
·What is the company's primary target customer for a new product or service?
·Which activities should we outsource? Which should be kept?
·How should we structure and finance innovation projects?
·How do we choose the right manager to lead the project?
·How can we position ourselves to ensure profit in the future?

They also analyzed nine operating decisions that drive profit growth, including product development, organizational structure, finance, key customer base, and more.

Nonetheless, the author has to admit that "no company has been able to build [this] disruptive growth engine and keep it going".

Sustainable Innovation

Perhaps Stephen Shapiro would not agree that corporate innovation cannot continue. A senior expert at Accenture Consulting, he wrote the book "Sustainable Innovation" after 15 years of service, which led to the creation of the "Sustainable Innovation Group", a management education and research company focused on innovation and breakthrough thinking. His research shows that innovation can take place in perpetuity, as long as companies shift their focus from managing the boxes in the organizational chart to managing the connections between the boxes, that is, managing interdependencies in the company, and nurturing and Use the "ability" consisting of five elements.

The five elements are: strategy and customers, evaluation and performance, process, people, and technology.

In fact, in the process of solving different innovation dilemmas, companies will touch on some common important problems. Such as processes and assessments. Therefore, "Innovator's Solution" and "Sustainable Innovation" both emphasize the importance of process as a driving force for innovation, and propose specific and operational practices. Christensen and Rayner recommend that companies take two steps: First, managers should explore early on whether any possible innovations would threaten their core business if they were preemptively implemented by competitors. Clearly, talking about threats is more helpful for companies to mobilize resources quickly. Then, once the disruptive innovation project has been implemented, it must be quickly unbundled into a self-contained unit to avoid being tied to the firm's established way of doing things for incremental innovation.

Shapiro, on the other hand, suggested that companies use a framework called "7-Rs" (7 Re: Rethink, Regroup, Reorder, Reposition, Requantify, Reassign, Reequip). "Designers and front-line staff in the company often ask these seven questions, including 'why', 'what', 'when', 'where', 'how long', The 'who' and the 'how', looking for new answers at the same time, will naturally find yourself constantly finding new ways for old processes and coming up with entirely new ones from time to time."

In the evaluation of innovation, White suggested in "7 Lessons of Corporate Innovation" that companies should consider innovation factors, experience factors, relationship factors, brand factors, aesthetic factors, flexibility factors, "global citizenship" factors, and model factors. Evaluate the value of creativity. And Shapiro proposes three main ways to evaluate the promotion of innovation: focus on results, pursue ambitious performance, and evaluate the right projects. In order to evaluate the correct project, the company should select and determine the evaluation indicators according to the five aspects of a so-called "performance prism", that is, the satisfaction of stakeholders, strategy, process, capability, contribution of stakeholders, etc. Innovation can bring value to stakeholders.

In innovation management books, the ideas and practices of innovation management stand the test of time better than the company examples in them. The innovative companies mentioned in the book can get bogged down in development, and it is not easy for an onlooker to discover the root cause. For example, if Enron's collapse was not seen as a result of corporate governance and moral hazard, the company's innovation was to blame. In fact, the company "through extraordinary creative thinking, developing new business models, new markets, new products, ..., its innovative features are still very meaningful and important, and we can learn from its innovation strategy and advantages. Many things. . . and its great legacy remains: the company has fostered a new and thriving commodity market and competition mechanism, where other companies can continue to compete.” ("7 Lessons of Corporate Innovation" P57)

Therefore, it is actually a risk to pay close attention to the company as a case rather than the ideas and internal connections behind the case. This is also true in many management books. The reason for being criticized. This is the first, and I think, last piece of advice given to readers by the authors of these three innovative books.