The modern malaise of innovation: overwhelm, complexity, and herding cats

This blog is the personal view of Lucy Mason and does not represent Capgemini Invent.

The modern malaise of innovation: overwhelm, complexity, and herding cats

I enjoy talking to interesting people about interesting ideas and making them happen.?I’m passionate about innovation – ideas through to impact. But the modern world is too complicated to innovate alone. Coming up with the idea is the easy bit: developing and implementing it inevitably involves navigating complex and choppy waters: multiple people, funding routes, personal agendas, legal complexity, and strategic fuzziness. All too often, great ideas fail to become reality not because the idea wouldn’t work, but because everything in the ecosystem seems (accidentally) designed to prevent it from working.

Given that innovation is a key Government priority, and so many organisations and people are dedicated to make it happen (such as Innovate UK), this lack of success seems odd. The problem does not lie with the R&D base: despite relative underinvestment by the UK Government the UK punches well above its weight in world-leading R&D. Being an entrepreneur is of course, hard work, high risk and prone to failure even for the most dedicated individuals. But are there particular features which inhibit how innovation is developed, scaled, implemented, and adopted in the UK? I would argue there are three key factors at play: overwhelm (too much), complexity (too vague), and ‘herding cats’ (too hard).

1.????Too much

A classic problem of the modern world is too much information, process, guidance, strategy, and ideas: it’s simply impossible for any person to have a full grasp of everything which might be relevant. An innovative idea may have had years invested developing in the wrong direction for lack of a key piece of information or fail to find the right market for lack of awareness of the potential. Even spotting which idea is a good one is difficult. Trying to find the important information out of the onslaught is a huge challenge for innovators, with no single place to go for guidance and advice. And the more entities created by Government, and others, for slightly different but overlapping purposes, the more confusing it all becomes. It is easily a full-time – or more – job simply to engage with all the parts of the ecosystem while not getting any innovating done at all. Every new report, engagement, competition, initiative, contract, and process has an opportunity cost to be weighed up against everything else that’s going on. Organisations are swamped by too many innovation projects. No wonder so much gets ignored.

Equally, if you are in the business of trying to improve innovation, it is frustrating for your initiative or competition to get lost in the melee of competing initiatives. So much good work is drowned in the noise, indistinguishable at face value from what everyone else is doing. And so, gossip and misconception reign about what organisations are doing, what they are interested in or not, and what really goes on behind the scenes. Everyone is too thinly stretched, doing the easy bit at the ‘front end’ of innovation where a scattergun approach is ok, and dodging the hard, dedicated, focused bit where difficult choices get made and good ideas are turned into a reality.

2.????Too vague

The innovation ecosystem is full of highly intelligent, dynamic people trying to make things happen. I might divide them into two main groups: the people who are passionate about a particular idea, take ownership and try to make that thing happen (entrepreneurs); and the ‘enablers’ who are trying to curate the ecosystem and create the system to allow others to be innovative – whether policymakers, engagement leads, competition leads, commercial officers, funders, or multiple businesses trying to sell innovation services. I suspect enablers outnumber entrepreneurs by quite some way. But as far as I know, nobody is actually setting out to quash innovation. People are trying to do their best with the part of the puzzle that they hold.

And yet, this innovation community is not very efficient at supporting and championing great ideas to the point where they make a difference for their intended users. We don’t put the jigsaw puzzle together. Everyone starts as if nobody had ever innovated before, from scratch, inventing their own process, scouting for new ideas, developing new contacts and networks, launching new initiatives, duplicating what exists already - while success is more of a matter of luck than design. And so, it all grows ever more complex and unnavigable. There is no clear process to follow, or know-how. We are not being very scientific in our approach, managing our shared body of knowledge and learning from it to do better in future. We’re not even very good at communicating what we are doing, let alone analysing it and creating models of best practice. What works in one instance, and not in others, and why? There’s any amount of advice out there (see point 1) but too little evidence.

3.????Too hard

Innovation is a team sport: but everyone needs to be on the same team. Getting an idea to go anywhere likely requires buy-in from any number of people, but all those people have their own incentives, perspectives, and priorities. What’s important to you, the innovator, may not be important to others. Like herding cats, the challenge is to persuade people to do something they may not want to do or don’t prioritise (so doesn’t get done). Getting them onside requires people-skills, communication, psychology, and a massive investment of time – a burden added to people who are already stretched (see point 1) and not necessarily the most collaborative (see point 2). And so innovators face two choices: barge ahead anyway through sheer force of will, or slow down and do the consultation and relationship-building needed. Most entrepreneurs might tend to the former; while innovation enablers to the latter (leading to something of a culture clash and a lot of frustration).

Even when everyone thinks the idea is great, innovation can fail to go anywhere for lack of ownership, accountability, and resource. People may support the idea but not put time into making it work, or want to do things in their own way and timeframe. There may be poor leadership, or no timeline set for action and review, and so things drift to the point of irrelevance through meeting after meeting; or a great idea just doesn’t have the people and skills the team needs to take it forward. Innovation benefits from momentum, and can be killed by just ‘not being the right time’: cynicism over ‘we tried that before’ or ‘we’ve thought of that already’ – even when well-meaning – can drain even the most enthusiastic innovator.

None of these factors are intentional; but the effect is stifling innovation. While it’s hard to suggest one-size-fits-all solutions (while avoiding yet another initiative!) we must be able to do better. Having a one-stop-shop for innovation seems like a good idea, which could be Innovate UK but this would require transformation both of Innovate UK as an organisation from purpose to people to process and extending much more into commercialisation, diffusion and adoption activities, and (controversially) a thinning out of the wider landscape to work at least under a single umbrella with a shared set of rules. Any innovation should be purpose-led, supported by people who understand how to do end-to-end innovation. While bureaucracy and innovation don’t mix well, a bit of governance around decision-making, priorities, resources, and tracking would help co-ordinate activities, prevent duplication, and drive impact. And innovation needs senior-level support and probably exemptions, even ring-fencing, to allow coalitions of the willing to take risks and get on with delivering innovation at pace.

Innovation is key for the UK’s future prosperity and to peoples’ lives: but only when good ideas are taken through to having impact. We cannot allow so many good ideas to fail.

I’d love to hear your ideas on how, as a nation, we can do better?