Innovation — create a space

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about innovation? Is it space travel, medicine and the Nobel prize? Is it new business models, computer chips and programming languages? You can probably name several disruptive innovations connected to these areas. But do you ever think of a cross functional team delivering software as innovative? Do you call their work innovations? What would change if you did?

I believe there are two types of innovations: **disruptive **and incremental. The disruptive innovations are breaking new ground, having a large impact perhaps opening a whole new market. These are some of the crazy ideas that are realized and become successful, often resulting in a company being able to pivot. Incremental innovation on the other hand is much smaller. These are the small improvements that are often made to products, tools and ways of working. These innovations are created by the people that are closest to the work to improve their world, make life easier for their customers or to overcome a certain obstacle. I believe that iterative and disruptive innovation are connected. You need iterative innovation to be able to come up with and implement disruptive ideas and you need a space of creativity to allow iterative innovation to happen.

Conditions apply

Innovation does not happen on it’s own. Telling people to be innovative or work smarter is just as successful as telling a smoker to quit. Innovation happens under specific conditions. There is a lot we can do to lower the barrier and make it easier for innovation to come out. I like Jurgen Appelo’s description of the five cogs of innovation.

Five kogs of innovation — illustration by Jurgen Appelo

Knowledge —The team doing innovation must have domain knowledge and understand the problems they are trying to solve. They must understand the constraints that drives the innovation.
Creativity — There must be space for creativity, an environment where people are allowed to, and encouraged to, be creative.
Motivation — The team needs to be motivated to innovate. We need to show that ideas are valued and taken seriously.
Diversity — There needs to be a diversity of ideas (quantity over quality) to choose from, and a diversity of thinkers, people that see the problem from different angles
Personality — People must dare to try out new ideas, explore and fail

Create the space

So how can we make this happen? We have to create a space for creativity and innovation and allow people to experiment and fail.

Today, many software companies (but far from all) will let the teams do hackathons. The basic recipe is to take a day out of the calendar and spend time on a project of your choosing. Make sure you have something to show off at the end of the day. This is great, but far from enough. This will give the team some freedom to experiment and fail. There will be some learning, but what about innovation? What happens with the ideas and prototypes once the hackathon is over? Is it left to rotten on an intranet site or in a git repository? what will this do with the teams motivation to innovate in the long run?

I believe every hackathon should start with an understanding of the problem we want to solve and for who. There is usually no shortage of ideas that the team wants to try out. However, ideas are cheap. Generating ideas is usually simple. Knowing why you are trying out an idea, what value the solution might give and defining an experiment is the real challenge. The team will have the freedom to choose the problem to work on. They will spend the hackathon exploring, quickly iterating and learning. But what happens after the dust has settled, the prototype has been demoed and cheers have died out? This, I believe, is where we create innovation. If, after the hackathon we still believe in the idea, it is time to go further. We have to show that we, as a company, are ready to invest in the idea, that we are ready to support the team with making this idea reality. Of course, if the efforts for implementation are really small the team might apply a “just do it” mentality, but in most cases some more runway needs to be created before implementation is started. This is where the rest of the organisation needs to give the team permission to spend time further developing their ideas. We must help them rethink what the idea could be, and challenge them why this is important. I like the approach of the Walt Disney method taking on the roles of Dreamer, Realist and Critic. We should also help the team build a business case around their idea, getting input from real customers and create a clear understanding of why this idea is valuable, or quickly learning that it isn’t. Finally, I believe that the team should pitch the idea to people that can make it happen. It could be to the rest of the team, management, a community or another department. There are probably many ways to realize the idea, and we should explore those options. Imagine if Silicon Valley only had one single venture capital firm that decided which ideas got funded and which did not. This would be a sure way of killing of many of the good ideas. In the same way that we need diversity of ideas, we need diversity of people that can invest and make the idea a reality, therefore it is valuable to pitch the idea to a lot of stakeholders both inside and outside the organisation.

Summary

In summary, we have to create a space where creativity and innovation can happen. Teams need slack to be able to spend time on their ideas that are outside of the normal product development cycle. But absolute freedom is not enough to create innovation. There needs to be constraints, the right knowledge and motivation to create innovations.

There are many ways to actually achieve this environment, and I hope to share some ideas going forward, but I would also love to hear what you are doing to create a space for creativity and innovation.