Disciplined Innovation In Corporate Development

By M. Isi Eromosele

While innovation can be groundbreaking, it is more often incremental improvement of existing practices underpinned by evolving technologies that transforms the way a company does business.

Innovation is hard. It is one of the business activities that does not benefit from economies of scale. Large businesses are no better at it than small ones and, in fact, are often worse. But the notion that only brilliant individuals create all extraordinary innovations is a myth. Implicit in the myth is the idea that innovation is beyond the reach of an organization’s process improvement and discipline, and is resistant to management influence.

Innovation is highly desired by CEOs in virtually any industry. In the past, they might have focused on growing market share to drive growth. Now, they increasingly are focusing on innovation in new products and services in a highly competitive global market.

Problem solving is crucial to innovation. Problems are what inspire innovators to look for answers. Problems often surface as pressure, such as loss of market share, decline in profitability, dissatisfied customers, and others. Natural innovators are good at defining the problems; they often see problems that others do not.

Almost all innovation involves the application of a known solution to a problem or part of a problem from one domain that also applies to a different domain. A culture of open collaboration, as a source of ideas that address design problems, succeeds because it exposes the challenge to a large number of people from different knowledge domains. This increases the likelihood that someone will intuit what the problem has in common with a solution outside the domain.

The combination of these two themes reveals how enterprises can recast invention challenges into problem-solving tasks. Thinking about the invention challenge as problem solving task and using patterns and principles that already exist greatly simplifies the invention task and transforms it into a process of knowledge search and pattern recognition. In the transformed invention task, process orientation and technology will play a bigger role.

This problem-solving approach typically involves four steps, as follows below

• Understand and specify the precise functional problem that needs to be solved - anything from an operations or market issue to a business model challenge. For example, despite the existence of many search engines, Google’s Larry Page understood and focused specifically on the problem of relevance in search results.
• Abstract the specific problem to a general principle so it can be mapped to a generic version of the problem. Rather than seeing the problem of poor search results as unique to the Web, Larry Page saw it as a general ranking problem, which he then mapped to other domains.
• Identify generic solutions to the generic problem to generate candidate solutions or approaches to the specific problem. This activity often means a creative mix and match of partial solutions to parts of the problem. The domain of academic literature and how it ranks the popularity of research led to the insight that Web links could serve a similar purpose.
• Translate the generic solutions into specific solutions to the specific problem and thereby invent a new approach. In Google’s case, this was the page rank algorithm.

Without a system or discipline, such problem solving will not sustain cohesiveness. If an organization can have a disciplined culture to make it happen more often, with more people, to yield more productive outcomes, then the organization would have higher innovation performance.

If this approach to problem solving, invention, and innovation is so powerful, so well specified, and so developed, where has it been all this time? One challenge is that most enterprises view innovative problem solving as a disjointed activity, limited to the R&D and product development departments.

Clearly, if enterprises start to look at innovation as an end-to-end process, they could improve their innovative performance. This means marketing, product management, sales, customer support, strategy, IT, and even human resources need to incorporate creative problem solving in their daily jobs, supported by a disciplined and technologically advanced infrastructure.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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