Innovation and Legacy Operational Systems
"Ok, so now you have been "managing" the future via innovation imperatives for a bit," my friend blurted out over dinner a few years back.
So, "invent the killer product of the future," he continued. "You know what the trends are and now you know how to build products and develop new business models." "What is holding you back?"
This conversation happened over a couple of pints and while working for a Fortune 60 company trying to reinvent itself in the face of massive disruption.
The answer was simply this: While there may be strong desires, passions and intentions to invent the next internet, what matters is the operational capacities to make it happen. Most companies still act with analog operational tools and mindsets.
Many companies still have old product development tools based on gating systems and six sigma mandates that will kill product innovation. Like someone once said: "Six Sigma is for exploitation. Design Thinking (my favorite innovation methodology) is for exploration." Innovation is about exploration with a focused targeted outcome and there are operational tools now in place to facilitate and measure the impact of these explorations. By adopting a risk reduction approach from the beginning of the product development process, the process of risk management, aided by these new tools starts from zero. Case in point is design thinking, which is a process designed to do exactly that.
Innovation management, at least my version of it, is a super fast flow continuum with ideation at one end and product pilot testing at the other. All totally driven by our beautiful creative minds converging and diverging into one big whole at the end of the process. The idea is to try new ideas and concepts and “fail them fast," so as not to waste inordinate amounts of resources on products and services that may not bear fruit and meet the pre-prescribed financial measurements. New digital technologies certainly lend themselves to this type of product road map, and for sure agile, start-up partners can support in this process.
Yeah, I am sure most have heard this before. It is about the "culture being wrong, stupid."
I say not. Cultures can change and do. Salesforce was one operational system that forced change. Successfully. They are others. Concur is another. Quick Book is another. Slack is another. SAP is yet another. Cultures will change when new operational systems are put in place. Many will go to them kicking and screaming. Change is hard, after all. But they will go. Changing the old saying a bit: "Bring them in and they will have to to come."
Legacy operating systems have to evolve to keep pace in order to advance truly revolutionary (most often hyper-evolutionary) products and services. No one is advocating the elimination of these legacy systems (well, eventually yes) but merely creating hybrid knowledge systems that accommodate innovation theories and speed to market imperatives.
We are living in a time where companies rise and fall in three years; the same time that some product development philosophies allow for the development of new products.
So, the good news is that things are changing and companies are reacting because they have to. The bad news is that there is no sense of urgency and the adaptation is taking too long.
Battling 24 hour working schedules in China and India, and competing with new hyper-driven entrepreneurs with something to prove will not be easy. Much less so with product development cycles, mindsets and theories rooted in the old analog World. This has to change and change now.
So, "invent the killer product of the future," he continued. "You know what the trends are and now you know how to build products and develop new business models." "What is holding you back?"
This conversation happened over a couple of pints and while working for a Fortune 60 company trying to reinvent itself in the face of massive disruption.
The answer was simply this: While there may be strong desires, passions and intentions to invent the next internet, what matters is the operational capacities to make it happen. Most companies still act with analog operational tools and mindsets.
Many companies still have old product development tools based on gating systems and six sigma mandates that will kill product innovation. Like someone once said: "Six Sigma is for exploitation. Design Thinking (my favorite innovation methodology) is for exploration." Innovation is about exploration with a focused targeted outcome and there are operational tools now in place to facilitate and measure the impact of these explorations. By adopting a risk reduction approach from the beginning of the product development process, the process of risk management, aided by these new tools starts from zero. Case in point is design thinking, which is a process designed to do exactly that.
Innovation management, at least my version of it, is a super fast flow continuum with ideation at one end and product pilot testing at the other. All totally driven by our beautiful creative minds converging and diverging into one big whole at the end of the process. The idea is to try new ideas and concepts and “fail them fast," so as not to waste inordinate amounts of resources on products and services that may not bear fruit and meet the pre-prescribed financial measurements. New digital technologies certainly lend themselves to this type of product road map, and for sure agile, start-up partners can support in this process.
Yeah, I am sure most have heard this before. It is about the "culture being wrong, stupid."
I say not. Cultures can change and do. Salesforce was one operational system that forced change. Successfully. They are others. Concur is another. Quick Book is another. Slack is another. SAP is yet another. Cultures will change when new operational systems are put in place. Many will go to them kicking and screaming. Change is hard, after all. But they will go. Changing the old saying a bit: "Bring them in and they will have to to come."
Legacy operating systems have to evolve to keep pace in order to advance truly revolutionary (most often hyper-evolutionary) products and services. No one is advocating the elimination of these legacy systems (well, eventually yes) but merely creating hybrid knowledge systems that accommodate innovation theories and speed to market imperatives.
We are living in a time where companies rise and fall in three years; the same time that some product development philosophies allow for the development of new products.
So, the good news is that things are changing and companies are reacting because they have to. The bad news is that there is no sense of urgency and the adaptation is taking too long.
Battling 24 hour working schedules in China and India, and competing with new hyper-driven entrepreneurs with something to prove will not be easy. Much less so with product development cycles, mindsets and theories rooted in the old analog World. This has to change and change now.
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