Preface
I’ve had the opportunity to work for organization ranging from start-ups, to multinationals and government organizations. Some of them with a history that exceeded human life span and some that died in their infancy. In all of them the question of innovation was relevant to some degree. In startups it was a matter of survival, you either rubbed your MVP with the market till success, or you had to change paradigm. In larger organizations the challenges are different, since the ratio between the circumference of the organization that is in touch with the market and the volume of the organization are grater – Just like in chemistry, the ratio of SA/V is controlling the speed of the reaction.
How to speed-up innovation
Besides resizing and restructuring to multiplies of Dunbar’s Number the real issue is increasing the reaction speed. In organizations, just like in organisms, there there are mechanisms for sensing the environment. The dominant ones are financial and sales based – Sales is responsible for the foraging strategy while finance is the metabolic digestion in the organizational animal, however in large organizations they are working at a yearly/quarterly beat, which is all too slow.
In smaller scale organizations this is less of a problem because those formal mechanisms are the side-effects of not so formal activity. and you have by nature a quicker organizational innovation metabolism.
what is innovation
David J. Hughes at all describes innovation as follows: “Workplace creativity concerns the cognitive and behavioral processes applied when attempting to generate novel ideas. Workplace innovation concerns the processes applied when attempting to implement new ideas. Specifically, innovation involves some combination of problem/opportunity identification, the introduction, adoption or modification of new ideas germane to organizational needs, the promotion of these ideas, and the practical implementation of these ideas”.
This means that you have to have three components in innovation:
- Problem/opportunity identification.
- Introduction of new ideas to solve that process.
- Promotion and implementation of the right idea.
So how to speedup innovation?
- Problem/opportunity identification is automatic when it’s personal.
- Ideation process is generally more productive when done in groups, so there has to be some process of collection entities with the same interests and allocation of time for collecting ideas and prioritizing it.
- Promotion and implementation requires recruiting stakeholders and allocation of budget which are usually outside of the domain space (i.e. you have to get the money from outside the group).
Grouping
If we look at organizations as networked entities where the nodes are employees, we can see that in network terms we have a community or a cluster.
The nodes in the cluster are interconnected by communication links that can be mapped via APIs like Microsoft graph for business interactions and Facebook graph for leisure connections or Google knowledge graph for more general entities.
Problems / Needs
For knowledge workers and digital organizations, one can deduce from the network topology and content both the communication connectivity between notes as well as the content subjects (knowledge entities). Those are not necessarily coinciding within a well defined organizational business unit.
If you have a lot of communication on a specific subject matter that is not contained within an organizational unit, you have potential for problem/need exploration. The basic assumption is that if all works well, you keep quite and automated… just like in a long lasting marriage.
Ideation
Drop the bomb – Proactively message the group that share the interest with a report of the knowledge subjects that were mostly communicated and ask then to verify what can be done to reduce that overhead. The key here is tuning the anomaly detection report so it will fit the organization.
Once you agreement on issues and suggestions for solutions is concluded within the selected group, sponsor and implement.
Implementation
Ideas come cheap, execution is expensive – This is the hardest part, as in order to get budget you have to show value and not all have the talent to sell their ideas. The question is if we can fit a universal KPI for an idea and calculate the future effect of implementation and thus ROI?
I believe this can be done automatically for the digital organization if you simulate the effect of the innovation on the network topology. Common KPIs like shortest route or minimal spanning three can calculated and a cost function fitted. With this as a tool the budget can be allocated as long as it’s smaller then the value attained by the implementation.
If you implement the above, you’ll prove E. Deming quote in the title, was wrong.
