There’s No Innovation Without A Definition

Although it may sound obvious, it is important to understand what innovation means in the context of your organisation before you start trying to be innovative.

You'd be surprised at the number of innovation groups I've worked with who can't actually articulate what innovation means to them.

They then wonder why they seem to have poor success driving outcomes their stakeholders really care about.

In many organisations, say the word “innovation” and you will most probably find it impossible to get any consensus at all with respect to meaning. People have very personal ideas of what constitutes innovation or not, and it is generally very difficult to change such strongly held beliefs. That's especially true if those concerned feel a prospective innovation effort will stray onto their turf.

I've seen arguments on this topic go over the same ground for so long that sooner or later someone almost always suggests “we don't need a definition, so let's get on with it”. This is a mistake.

The presence of divergent opinions on what's to be achieved in an innovation programme is almost always the first sign that nothing much is going to be achieved, no matter how much effort and money is expended.

The most successful innovation teams usually agree a definition that permits them to examine new things with very broad scope, but which avoids being excessively threatening to existing operations.

In my own programmes, this is a definition that's worked:Innovation is “anything that wouldn't have been achieved through ordinary business-as-usual processes”. Note this doesn't prescribe either the scale or volume of innovation that is undertaken.

Innovators are free to do anything at all that is not already being done. But it does make it clear to everyone that if they already have something working, the innovators won't interfere.

It is a good balance between having flexibility, and ensuring potentially affected stakeholders don't sabotage the innovation programme before it even starts
innovation effort .

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