Forget Innovation! Start EXNOVATING to boost your business!
Alexander Krause
ENGAGEMENT CATALYST beyond agile: alignment across all levels, setting environments for change, mobile work and gig-economy pioneer, democracy-enthusiast, antifascist
Invest 2 minutes to read. You will get some basic knowledge to change your way of thinking and boost the performance of your value creation.
You might have heard:
?I know about our workload, but… can we add some capacity to... we need more innovation to… let’s buy this startup… we will do ?agile“ to…“
There is this wish for salvation through innovation, a hope that some future idea will fix all the problems. No need to worry because the next innovation will … NO - IT WILL NOT!
This is what kills innovation:
- Managers think innovation can be managed!
- Learning is not the top-priority!
The conclusion is: In most common systems we need something else to pave the way to innovation:
Exnovation
Exnovation can be seen as an opposite of innovation.
In short, innovation means: Renewal, Replacement, Regeneration - or to establish a new idea successfully at the market.
Exnovation means: Taking back established technology, processes and practices from the market!
Some examples to understand, exnovation is to:
- Stop using analogue telephones
- Stop using music- and video-tape
- Stop using interfaces like VGA or FireWire
- Stop using classic lightbulbs
- Stop using leaded gasoline
- Stop using coal power plants or nuclear power plants
- Stop using classic management in complex environment
This will create free space, capacity or a gap that then can be used in a different way.
Organizational Change with Exnovation
At the moment all Organizations from the industrial age (or built on the thinking of the industrial age) struggle as they are optimized for stability and delivering complicated tasks only. But the world turned and liveliness returned to our work.
Wherever there is life there is complexity
At this point it is obvious that there can be exnotavated a lot to boost your business. You might like to think about exnovating some of the following in your system:
- Shareholder fokus
- Processes
- Rules
- Reporting
- individual performance measurement
- Pushing tasks and methods on people
- Individual incentives and bonuses
- Cost fokus
- Mistrust
- Information monopolies
- Centralized authority
This will create new spaces to be filled with innovative ideas and practices. This will avoid loading more on already overloaded colleagues. This will take some ballast and pressure from the system.
You might like to fill that space with:
- Value creation
- User fokus
- Iterations
- Principles
- Reflexion
- Self-organization
- Automation
- Invitations
- Learning
- …
But be aware: This is not innovation, this is just state of the art in some innovative companies ;-)
Please: Start with exnovation before innovation. It will be very lucrative!
80 % Marketing, 25 % Witz.
3 年Very nice, thx! I have a question: ?Stop using classic lightbulbs“ seems to be a regulation set by governments aka states. ?Stop using music- and video-tape“ seems to be a force of the market driven by competition. How do you apply exnovating within your own company without being ?forced“ by someone else. If you decided to stop using ?x“ or ?y“ for whatever reason, doesn‘t become exnovation a simple prequel to innovation?
Business Development | Sales | Trade Marketing | Route to Market | Sales Management | Distributors Management | Key Accounts Management | Category Management | Business Analytics | Digitalization
4 年Great post Alexander!
Innovations-Diplomat ?Die Zukunft ist offen.“
4 年I like your scratch list.
I like this simple and apparently difficult approach. Where is the link between exnovation and creative destruction - and what is the difference?
Passionate Trainer & Coach for Scrum, CST? (Certified Scrum Trainer?)
5 年Love it! Just re-shared, as this creates the most attention.