I’ve founded startups, I’ve worked at small companies, I’ve worked at huge companies, and I’ve worked at medium-sized companies. Some may even say that I have an interesting background. You’ll get many different answers when you talk to any of these companies’ senior management and ask them to define innovation or where it comes from.
Many point to incremental innovation, small changes, and little bits. Improving their products, making them better. While that’s always good, and nothing wrong with that, incremental innovation will not save your company, nor will it kill your company. Incremental innovation is safe.
Let’s put that aside for a moment because I’d argue that it’s not ” innovation ” since everyone is already incrementally innovative. Everyone. Seriously, who says, “We’re not going to make small improvements to our product to make it better”? No one. Those are table stakes. Incremental innovation doesn’t count since everyone will always want to improve their product to make it better.
Others go back to Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma: Unless you disrupt yourself, someone is going to do it to you. Innovation is disruption, and it always comes from without, unless you let it, help it, encourage it, to come from within.
It will kill your company because a competitor, likely even from some other industry you may have never even thought of, comes along and can service your customers far better than you can at a much better price. Your customers will leave you, and you won’t even be able to respond because it may even be too late. To combat this, you can, and should, disrupt yourself, eventually replacing your current business with something new which may eventually replace your company. How do you disrupt yourself? Where does this innovation come from?
Of course, there’s always plenty of resistance to most disruptive types of innovation. One of my colleagues who I worked with at Yahoo! (who wrote the excellent book – Exponential Organizations) calls it the “internal corporate immune system.” Some companies really do treat innovation as a disease or a virus that tries to infect the company. Innovation starts to infect the company, and the immune system says, “No, we’re going to do any of that. We’re going to shut that thing down because it will disrupt our current business.” Some companies seem less innovative because they are older, bigger, or in specific verticals where innovation lags.
Age, size, vertical. None of it matters. INNOVATION COMES FROM AN OPEN MIND.
One of my pet projects is ageism. You hear about ageism happening all over, but it seems to be the last remaining prejudice that people don’t really care about. You’ll never see people marching in the streets against ageism – racism for sure, sexism definitely. But ageism? Hardly. What is the difference between a younger person and an older person? What specific things do people have issues with when someone gets older? If you ask me, the top reason people believe someone is too old is how of Open Mind they are. Why do some people feel that younger companies and younger people are more open to innovation and new ideas? Their mind is open to new connections, new data, and serendipity. In many people’s minds, aging means not open – not open to new connections, new data, serendipity, and in many cases, risk. In reality, for a person, age has nothing to do with it; there are plenty of younger people with no Open Minds and plenty of older people with Open Minds. Your age has nothing to do with your ability to be of an Open Mind.
This is one reason that small young companies seem to be more innovative and nimble, agile, lean, and fast and disrupt themselves, and they’re happy to do it: they welcome disruptive innovation. Pivoting is no big deal to them; the better and faster they pivot, the more chances to stay alive. They are open to the idea of doing something slightly completely different to serve their customers better. In fact, most of them are based on disruptive innovation. Look at Uber and Airbnb. They have not only embraced disruptive innovation; they are the epitome of disruptive innovation.
When you take a disruptive concept to certain companies, you may hear the following: “That is way too disruptive for us there’s no way we could do that.” This is not an Open Mind. Innovation cannot take root there.
For example, take the AirBnB model (I rent out my spare room to anyone, properly vetted by the crowd) and apply it to a bank (I rent out my spare cash to anyone, properly vetted by the crowd). Probably too disruptive for a bank – but if the bank doesn’t do it, someone else will. Take the same idea, and go to a large technology company instead. You might get the same answer: for some reason. Generally, the larger and older a company gets, the more rules and processes are in place, the more jobs depend on keeping the status quo as it is, the less innovation you will see, and the more closed mind it is. Like a human can be closed-minded, so can a company, its leaders, and its people. As I mentioned above, the more rules, people, and process layers, the more and more the company’s arteries harden, and you eventually end up with atherosclerosis. There is nothing you can do in a bad enough case, and the patient dies. In fact, some of these companies are already dead; they don’t know it yet. There are plenty of companies out there who have basically decided that they are not innovators. They are not of Open Mind. They are going to play it safe. Those are the ones that are eventually going to die out. It’s proven.
Do we want to be innovators or not?
I’m saying:
It’s got nothing to do with the size of the company.
It’s got nothing to do with the vertical that it’s in.
It’s got nothing to do with any of those things.
The key is the senior management’s mindset, the employees’ mindset; it’s the company’s. If you have an innovative mindset, then you will innovate. If you are open to innovation, you will innovate if you are open to new things. If you are happy to see your own business disrupted and destroyed by new things you develop, you will innovate.
If you don’t, then you won’t. It’s as simple as that.
Others will come to you with some magic incantation or formula—five phases of innovation of this or that. You don’t need five phases; you don’t need ten steps; you don’t need seven points. You don’t need any of those things.
You need an Open Mind; you need to create the environment to allow innovation, to foster innovation. Let your employees think out of the box and have a safe place to innovate, discuss, talk, and come up with new ideas.
