How to do innovation when you are not R&D?

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was an organization with the most talented, innovative and courageous R&D. This R&D loved its customers. And its customers loved it back. Year after year, R&D was able to guess what its customers wanted and come up with brilliant products yet again.

The rest of the organization was very very happy.

 Their jobs were now easy. They had to keep doing what they had always been doing year after year. They were hard working and followed directions rather well. 

And there was no worthy competitor in any kingdom near or far. Many had tried but none had been able to come up with similar products that customers loved.

 The organization made tons of money each year, its shareholders were the richest people in the world, and everyone lived happily ever after.

If this is your organization, then the answer is quite clear. It is your job to innovate if you are R&D, if you are not R&D, all you need to do is follow processes well, and all is well.

To be fair, there have been times and places for this fairytale organization.

You may have been an Indian business pre-liberalization. As long as you had the much coveted "License", your customers lapped up everything you made. With limited competition and import restrictions, you had no real need to be innovative.

Or you could be in an industry with very high increasing returns to scale, where the more your product was used, the more likely it was to be used in the future. All this making it hard for a viable competitor to gain a foothold. For instance, you could be Google (the search engine) or Microsoft (Windows or Office).

But this fairytale organization is relatively rare, and what's more it is increasingly short lived.

The rules of business can seemingly change overnight, and the biggest disruptions aren't necessarily coming from new products. Instead they seem to be coming in the form of entirely new solutions to your customers needs. Take for instance, the challenge Air BnB or Uber pose for traditional hotels or taxi services. There is very little an R&D function could do about what is essentially a different set of solutions.

Who then should innovate?

I suppose the answer depends on what your view of innovation is.

Here are two views that might be helpful.

1. Larry Keeley in 10 Types of Innovation

This is one of the most popular frameworks for identifying opportunities for innovation. Keeley maps the organization into 10 different functions that provide good opportunities for innovation.

There are two very useful ideas contained in this framework:

The first is to "think beyond product".

Product in this framework is just one type of innovation. This is so important because product innovation is in fact the most obvious form. It is also relatively over emphasized and easy to copy.

This framework lays out a vast canvas that draws attention to many rather neglected areas of innovation such as business models, networks or even structure.

And the second very important idea is that in order to have a sustainable competitive advantage, it is not enough to be innovative in just one area.

Instead the most successful organizations select 4 or 5 interrelated areas for innovation. These innovation systems are hard to replicate.

So your advantage comes from the way you pick and organize the basic 10 building blocks of an organization for innovation--now that is a powerful thought.

You can watch Keeley talk about this here:

If this makes sense to you, and it certainly does to me, then it is the job of the leadership team to identify the areas of the organization where they want innovation to provide a competitive advantage.

And this potentially includes functions like finance and manufacturing, that are best known for stability and predictability.

So if this is your view of innovation--then potentially any area of the organization can provide you with an opportunity for innovation, and there are important strategic choices to be made here.

You can learn more about this approach here:

10 Types of Innovation

2. Alex Osterwalder and Clayton Christensen examine Innovation

Keeley's framework considers innovation to be "innovation" only if it provides an organization with a competitive advantage.

But what about the many opportunities for innovation that may not provide you with a competitive advantage, but instead make life easier in some other way. Perhaps they increase efficiency, or perhaps they help you manage status quo. After all not everything new and useful is necessarily so life-changing.

So it is a bit of relief when all of this counts as legitimate innovation.

It may not necessarily create a new engine for growth, but if it increases the efficiency of your business or helps sustain it, it counts as innovation.

(You can read more here Innovation is Dead: Blog Post)

What is wonderful about this way of looking at innovation is that there is space for innovation in its many different shapes and sizes. Sometimes you are just thinking of how you can make your meetings more productive, or your website more attractive. There is nothing path-breaking here, but each of these makes something better.

Photo by Fancycrave.com from Pexels

So whose job is innovation anyway? Perhaps it is yours? And perhaps it is mine. After all each one of us can think of so many ways we can make our business or our organization better.

When we wear the hat of a business leader, a CEO, we are concerned with placing our bets carefully and building competitive advantage.

When we are the functional head, we are concerned about how we can be better than our benchmark companies or ourselves yesterday.

And even if our concerns are not quite as lofty as all that, we may want to be concerned with all the ways in which our job can be done better by us-- and by others like us.

In the end it is this striving that is invaluable.

(Dr. Shalini Lal works with clients to embed Innovation as an organisational competence. She has a PhD from UCLA, and an MBA from IIM-A, and has worked in this field for over twenty years. Write to her at [email protected])