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Praveen Gupta

Commentary by Praveen Gupta

Email and RSSSubscribe via Email or RSS   |   Praveen Gupta's Biography Biography
June 6, 2008
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Seven Killers of Innovation

Corporate leadership understands innovation is important for success, employees understand how to innovate, and innovation occurs in every business. However, the extent and rate of innovation have been insufficient. I believe that following seven killers innovation suppress our innovation instincts:

1. Harmful Vocabulary – Words such as ‘used to, ‘hate it, ‘shut up,’ and ‘why’ have been used since childhood to discourage innovative thinking. The ‘used to’ implies resistance to change, ‘hate it’ is to demoralize a person, ‘shut up’ is a personal attack on the innovator, and ‘why’ is to discourage from trying something new..

2. Standardizes Tests – SAT and ACT like standard tests promote rote test taking skills, and do not test for or encourage true learning. Individuals conforming to the norms succeed and have no reason to be innovative.

3. College Education and Grading System – Many college courses are taught in a crowd with a little interaction, require standard assignments, and promote regurgitation of the outdated material. Then these students are graded according to their test taking skills. Grading may make teaching easy, but limits learning. Teaching without grading generates in learning, a prerequisite for innovation..

4. Group Thinking – Studies have shown that conventional group thinking methods are not suitable for innovation. Experience shows in a typical brainstorming session, only about 20-30% of attendees participate actively, while others remain passive. Instead of group thinking and fragmented execution, innovation requires grouped-individual innovative thinking, and networked execution.

5. Subject Expertise – Mastery of a subject poses a dilemma. On the one hand domain expertise is a necessary requirement for innovation, on the other hand expertise has an adversarial impact due to associated baggage – I know!

6. Focused – Similar to expertise, too much focus on one thing can limit free or diverse thinking and experience, inhibiting innovative thinking.

7. Too Busy – Most companies hire the best and brightest, and give them a little time to think. The highly qualified employees are kept busy fighting fires generated by rushed management decisions such as launch of new products, or shipment of products in an unrealistic time.

The above list can be expanded by you. If you have experienced an innovation killer, share it here.


Comments [13] | Permalink
Categories: Methodology

COMMENTARY COMMENT
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posted by  Ellen Domb  [ http://www.trizpqrgroup.com ] June 6, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Thanks, Praveen! My favorite/worst is "It will cost too much." It is a real killer, because the commenter assumes that he (she?) knows what "it" will cost AND that amount is "too much" -- leaving no room for discussion. Is it too much if we sell a million of them? Is it too much if we sell 10 of them?

One rule in my TRIZ workshops is that nothing is rejected for costing too much. If we can find a way to achieve the objective, we can ALWAYS find a way to make it less costly. In 13 years I have never had this rule fail because of the method, but I have had it fail because someone who is resisiting the change is unwilling to try.

I hope this starts a broad discussion on overcoming the negatives.
 


posted by  Praveen Gupta  [ http://accelper.com ] June 6, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Ellen,

I agree with you that cost is a major excuse used by people to suppress innovation. In my opinion, that excuse is another reason for more innovation. Whenever we experience constraints, that is an opportunity for innovation.

Thanks for your comments,
Praveen
 


posted by  Navneet Bhushan  [ http://innovationcrafting.blogspot.com ] June 7, 2008 at 2:08 pm
I think the biggest Killer is "Yes, but ..." This in my experience has been used in so many brain storming sessions and general discussions to KILL very nicely and divert the attention to totally different dimension.

I BAN this phrase to be used in my brainstorming sessions. As soon as some uses it others are instructed to cut-short the person!
 


posted by  Robby  [ http://www.jamesrick.com ] June 8, 2008 at 5:48 am
Wow! well said. Those things are really killers and should be blamed for not coming up with different ideas.

I was stunted by the 4th one : Group Thinking. I didn't know that could be a hindrance for us. Maybe brainstorming is actually good IF everyone participates and stops acting like a parasite.
 


posted by  Prakash June 9, 2008 at 5:41 am
One thing I have experienced is the way people look at as "others have done it already". This completely blocks their thinking beyond anything, and move away from the entire topic. My recent experiment here is the tool like IFR, but the comparing mindset is still a big issue.

Best,
Prakash
 


posted by  Saeed Khan  [ http://onproductmanagement.wordpress.com ] June 10, 2008 at 0:03 am
There's certainly a language needed to facilitate these kinds of discussions. Stating reasons why something won't work is easy and costs the speaker very little.

Instead, people who object need to be required to define the problem that needs to be solved or the obstacle that needs to be overcome to move forward, and then propose a solution that can be discussed.

Words like "disagree" are danger words. If asked "why", the person who disagrees can simply respond with an unsubstantiated claim to support their position.

Before discussing potential for success of an idea, things like success requirements and key success factors (those are different things), should be listed and those are the things that are discussed.

e.g. if someone wants to build a hydrogen car to address the very high cost of gas, then looking at the space around the car -- not just the technology -- but the things needed to make that successful should be listed and discussed.

Some ideas are easier to shoot down than others, but the root problem they are trying to address may still be relevent. If the hydrogen car isn't viable, the problem it is trying to address still is (high cost of gas) and alternate solutions can be investigated.

Saeed
 


posted by  Sergiu Ignat June 10, 2008 at 4:35 pm
If Group Thinking is not moderated by a specialist it might be a big idea killer. An expert or a manager can easily drive the discussion in their own old way and ignore or ridicule a newcomer with a different perspective and new ideas. An expert can always find a way to show that the newcomer is ignorant about something. This is why it might be better to use an online forum, located inside the company, to discuss ideas using arguments, not personal influence. It gives time to anyone to carefully analyze the arguments and questions, to look for solutions and to post a reply even after few weeks of research. It is also easier to drive conclusions if all the comments are written down on a web page.
 


posted by  Joe Marotta June 12, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Right on! "Too busy" is a major one-if you spend your time dealing with short-term problems, you can become completely absorbed with them. This limits your time to think about the larger issues, and you miss opportunities for some quality time to think innovatively.
 


posted by  Prashant Joglekar June 14, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Dear Praveen,

Thanks for your thought provoking commentary. I liked points 4,5,6,7 and are closed to my heart. Building organizational innovation capability will require patience of first time mango farmer and organisations need to awake to this fact. The organization’s innovation capability, in addition to other efforts, needs to be built with the help of dedicated innovation facilitator/s who is a connector, maven, a good Salesman and a pollinator. His role is to arrange / rearrange the blocks of knowledge & appropriately cement them together to create a new value.

It is said that organisations can think of something long term if they survive in short term, I think the same holds true for individuals who are facilitating Innovation. Generally the value of such efforts is intangible to start with. Senior Leadership needs to be ambidextrous to manage the paradox between tangible & intangible and should equally encourage intangibles. Then only it can craft a vision of having an Organizational Innovation DNA to be inherited by future generations.

Other factor that is killing Innovation is well established and marketed methods like SIX SIGMA. I am not saying Six Sigma is bad but it is over hyped. People know that nothing of this sort really works to achieve significant improvements, but they don’t want to appear backward so they keep on driving such initiatives ignoring their heart count’s inner innovation voice.


Best Regards,
Prashant
 


posted by  Mike June 17, 2008 at 4:21 am
Thank you for the 'innovative' link from the newsletter which prompted me to say something.

I would add motivation as one of the primary killers. Do turkeys vote for Christmas / Thanksgiving? It is absolutely essential that corporate leadership and legal frameworks reward innovation. It's not just a about products, the way we work together counts for a great deal. Check out the power structure in your organisations and understand what really drives innovation. Harness (or change) those levers of power and the culture will change to stimulate better ideas and ideas which are implemented quickly and profitably

 


posted by  K.S.Ramachandra June 19, 2008 at 8:28 am
Dear Praveen Gupta ,
I would like to add some more to your list
There are some more phrases / statements which appear subtle but very effective killers of ideas which may lead to innovation. Some of these are (i) " how about stating your idea like this...? (ii) Let's restrict to this ...(iii) repeatedly telling "think differently....(iv) how/what about the other way of what you said...? (v) think deeply before you say ...

.Any participant who repeatedly hears any or all of such phrases will get demoralised and stops coming out with his/her version on the subject.

Best regards,
K.S.Ramachandra
 


posted by  fiona  [ http://mp3aim.com ] June 23, 2008 at 10:31 am
Negative thinking too is a killer of innovation so always be positive.
 


posted by  Anoop M Kurup June 28, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I think the bigger killer for innovative thinking is "not listening to juniors". As a professional gains experience the tendency is to ignore the ideas coming from less experienced colleagues. This is perhaps the biggest innovation killer in any industry.
 

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