Disputable ideas: Innovation is local

This is the third in a series of (disputable!) ideas on innovation gleaned from leading change and researching teams who have done the same. Earlier essays are located here.

In a world of online sales and visions of success with a product everyone wants, it’s easy to be everywhere and make an impact nowhere.?

An idea can sound great because we assume there’s clearly a group of people out there somewhere who would want it. We just need to find them and scale!

But we’re building in a vacuum.

By starting locally (in a place or with a specific group), we build and test programs with immediate feedback. Those that take off can be scaled to other locations.

What makes innovation “local”?

When it’s:

• Built with and for a specific group. This could be place-based or domain based. Not “a class for leaders,” but “an online, 3-session course that helps first-time leaders know the three biggest roadblocks and top four accelerators to building a great team based on conversations I've had with new leaders about their biggest questions.”
• Pushed to the people as close to the group as possible. Power is distributed, and people who breathe and experience the context have input and ownership.

Rather than innovate from a position of isolation, how do we localize knowledge and action?

As relevant as this tension feels today, this idea isn’t new. Management guru Peter Drucker was thinking about this same tension almost 70 years ago. In Landmarks of tomorrow: A report on the new post-modern world, he writes:

“Because of the risk of innovation, our choice is not between centralized plan and no plan but between centralized plan and localized plan. But the risk of failure in innovation converts us into a choice between local plan (which alone can work) and no plan, into which central planning degenerates.”

The risk of failure and innovation makes centralized planning impossible, indeed converts it into chaos and tyranny, and makes its certain outcome collapse. The odds are simply too heavy against the success of any one plan. We have to commit present resources to highly uncertain future results, stake ourselves on our ability to perceive the as yet unknown and to do the as yet impossible. Therefore, we have to plan. But to expect any one such plan to come out right is folly, and so is the expectation that any one group of planners will come out right no matter how many alternative plans they develop. Elementary mathematics shows that the outcome of such a sample must be worse than to have no plan at all and to play random chance.” (p.53)

Rather than create one central source of ideas and innovation, our question becomes how we can empower high-context, high-capacity, highly collaborative owners to work with local partners and identify, pilot, and scale up solutions based on real needs.?

Instead of trusting in distant, generalized ideas that emerge from abstracted data and strategy, localized groups should be empowered to plan and adapt to meet needs. From there, ideas can be tested and scaled where opportunities emerge.