A management consulting professional in Buenos Aires was advocating the creation of new disciplines within the innovation cycle. He insisted that “People tend to unleash [their] full potential in [a single] discipline.” I thought this reply might be interesting to our Innovation Management Institute community.
[Response starts here]
Don’t you think that strong disciplinary distinctions hamper innovation?
Are you familiar with “design thinking” (Tim Brown of IDEO) and the new Stanford d.school ( http://www.stanford.edu/group/dschool/ )? Basically the idea is you get a bunch of bright people from a variety of disciplines, put them together in a room, add a gifted ideation facilitator, and you’re going to get some novel ideas. Works like a charm. I’ve been doing for years (long before anyone had the decency to give it a snazzy name).
So that’s a good starting point.
Now, please allow me to add a few observations from 15 years in the innovation trenches (with fleeting moments in innovation playgrounds [a concept that the consultant had introduced]):
1. The best innovators are themselves multi-disciplinary. They usually don’t fit into any nice disciplinary “compartments” which tends to be reflected in their rather colorful and esoteric academic histories and career paths.
2. Many of the disciplines in an organization were defined based on operational paradigms or modeled on work divisions that made sense in manufacturing. Why is that problematic? Operational mandates are typically “reliability” and “stability.” Innovation mandates are “change” and “differentiation.” The disciplinary boundaries that make sense for operational roles can be very detrimental to innovation initiatives–projects that require higher levels of collaboration and iterative cross-disciplinary problem-solving. I have seen many mission-critical innovation initiatives seriously threatened or even killed by operationally-modeled discipline boundaries and discipline-to-discipline “hand-offs.”
3. Ideas aren’t really the problem anyway–everybody from Doug Hall to BCG agrees with me on this one. There are many great techniques for coming up with heaping piles of brilliant ideas. The real issues are:
A. How do you sort through those ideas?
B. If you figure out some system for determining which ideas to invest in, then how do you drive successful realization 90+% of the time?
C. If you figure out how to have a high rate of success in turning ideas into innovations, then how do you drive broad and long-term adoption of those innovations?
I’m distilling the answers to those questions into an intensive 1-day workshop. The first one will be in San Francisco on March 3. Here’s the outline: http://www.slideshare.net/jkloren/mission-innovation-success-workshop-presentation
Breaking down traditional disciplinary boundaries is a small but important part of answering the three questions above related to innovation effectiveness (3.A., 3.B., and 3.C.). If you want high rates of success, I have found that multi-disciplinary collaboration is important throughout the entire innovation cycle.
[Response ends here]
What do you think?