Innovation Sucks (and why you should do it anyway)

Here is the dirty little secret about innovation that nobody wants to talk about. It sucks.

Yep, sure, it’s a great buzzword in the AV industry at the moment, and execs love it. Books are being written, blog articles published, large AV companies are creating internal “think tanks” dedicated to the next big idea, small AV start-ups are sprouting up all over the place whose mantra as to continually “out-innovate” their much bigger competitors.

There are more AV innovations being released right now than there ever has been in history, but how useful is the innovation if people never use it? How valuable is the innovation if it doesn’t turn a dollar or save a dollar or have a meaningful impact on a large group of people? Put another way:

“If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

1.      Innovation is only successful if people adopt it.

2.      Adoption is hard because it requires people to change.

3.      Getting people to change sucks.

Think about it. Any innovation that you come up with requires your target audience to change what they do today. And guess what? They don’t want to change. They are quite happy doing what they are doing thank-you-very-much. Bottom line, selling your innovation (both internally and externally) is Change Management 101.

People often look at change management as a logical set of steps that need to be followed to get people to adopt an innovation. You might get executive buy in, create some corporate comms, conduct training sessions, and then everyone will see how great the innovation is, parades are thrown and your statue is unveiled in the city square about generations to come will tell stories about how you saved the company. Ask anyone who has tried to do that, and 99% will give you a similar response:

“People say they want innovation and change, but don’t want to take the journey to get there.”

Changing behaviour is messy, complex, ambiguous and its deeply personal.

The reality is that your innovation might look great on paper and it might even look great to the CEO that you’re pitching it to. But it might not look so good to Beryl in accounts who would need to spend hours adjusting her workflow to accommodate for your innovation, so she creates a strong opposition to your idea.

Your innovation might reduce your commissioning time onsite by 65% but Larry, your commissioner knows that as well. He even tells you how much better and more efficient it is. What he doesn’t tell you is that he’s worried about what this means for his job security. His behavior shows that he is actively working against you and your idea. This is the same for all the Larry’s you encounter.

Perhaps you are selling your new innovation externally to your customers. Perhaps your new innovation will mean a reduction in their overall spend, or time saved troubleshooting their AV systems. Perhaps your client loved the idea but they know how hard its going to be to get her or his users to change habits. So, they decide to stick with the status quo. Sound familiar?

Perhaps you’ve even responded this way yourself?

The point is this. The innovation graveyard is littered with great ideas that never got off the ground because they failed to influence, facilitate aka manage change. Let me try to illustrate this: 

We know that the innovation will have a positive impact or help avoid the negative impact for your target “buyer”. But in many cases, the innovator has failed to address the “Effort/Pain to Change Delta” that introducing the innovation will cause. Here is the main message:

Your job, as the innovator, is to minimise the change management pain to as many stakeholders as possible, or create an innovation so compelling, that the pain is worth it for the outcome.  

However the chances that you don’t have that unicorn product and/or you don’t know how to address the “Effort/Pain to Change Delta” for all of your stakeholders.

This is why innovation sucks. Innovation is about grinding it out.

Its about thinking that you’ve addressed your stakeholder pain only to realise there are 3 new stakeholders that you need to understand, empathise with and ultimately minimise their pain. Its about realising that your innovation isn’t good enough to outweigh the change management pain and redesigning it so it is more compelling to more people. Its about morphing, asking questions, being rebuffed and being doubted by your colleagues, peers and customers.

So why do it?

We need people to have vision and who are prepared to innovate and sit in discomfort because that’s what propels us forward. Looking at our big cousin (IT), and innovation is rife. Without it we wouldn’t have Salesforce, Atlassian, Zoom, Canva, Hubspot etc. An excerpt from Salesforce when they entered the market:

“You cannot threaten that many livelihoods without generating a backlash, and a backlash there was indeed. The enterprise ecosystem exclaimed that such a system was inherently insecure, that only a fool would put enterprise data “in the cloud.” The PC ecosystem exclaimed that such an application was inherently dependent on the network, meaning unreliable response times and additional complexity above a packaged PC application running on an on-premise PC server. Sceptical analysts agreed that the idea was ahead of its time and dismissed it as yet another dot-com notion that was bound to flame out. Most doubted Salesforce would even get to the chasm, much less cross it. And yet, as it turned out, Salesforce has become the fastest-growing software company in history, approaching $4 billion in sales as of this writing, with growth rates note of 25 percent even at that size”

Moore, G. (2014). Crossing the Chasm. Harper Business 

Its an exciting time for our AV industry. We are seeing more and more innovators who are willing to climb the mountain. From early entrants such as Utelogy (https://www.utelogy.com/) & ACA/PlaceOS (https://place.technology/overview), and more recently companies like Vivi (https://www.vivi.io/), HRT SRL (now acquired by Biamp) (https://www.hrt.website/) and teem (now acquired by WeWork) (https://www.teem.com/). What that means is that we have trial blazers in our community to seek advice from and ask questions and this will only proliferate in the years to come.

Whether you are seeking to innovate within your own organisation or looking to take your innovation to customers, be prepared that your idea alone is not enough. It takes time, effort and pain. Did I say pain, let me emphasis that. Pain. To get to a point of overcoming the effort/pain to change delta, you will receive more resistance than you ever anticipated. Innovation does suck but we know that it can also work and in our own industry and it needs to be more prevalent than ever. The rewards are immense.

Shameless Plug: We're trying to innovate, so we know how much it sucks. Feel free to check out what we've been thinking about here

Sub-note:

There are tried and tested methods for getting tech adoption. In fact there is a great book called “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore that illustrates how to obtain mainstream adoption for high tech products. The graph below is a representation of that:

For anyone in the AV industry looking to innovate, this is a must-read. It’s a great book for helping to identify who to target first when you’re looking to get your innovation adopted. Good reading.