processofinnovation.com

Mike and I were talking recently about the impetus behind innovation. What exactly lies behind a team’s will to create something new, to do things diffferently?

We often produce business-like phrases about ‘value’, written into carefully crafted vision statements. These are important, but we suspect the real spark for innovation is more basic and more human. Tom Cotton discusses this when he talks about scratching the itch.

Tom drew a nice graphic that captures “itching” as the centre of the cyclic process of innovation. As Tom puts it, we “itch”, then brain-storm, then create something, then show it, then reflect on our progress towards the vision. And repeat:

Itchcycle by Tom Cotton, used with permission

When people are motivated to innovate, something is acting as an irritant - just like a pebble in the shoe. That irritant is felt by the team and it says either, “we can do this better”, or, “we could do this a new way”.

There are two important points here. Firstly, ideas for “doing something new” can arise in any part of the organisation, because anyone can itch. But those ideas will only develop into something of substance if they can be shared with a few others who have all been given permission to scratch. Second, we must have an ‘innovation process’ that helps people scratch - meaning, we need a quick, lightweight and flexible process that allows teams of people to try new ideas out.

(Typically, those teams start small and have limited resources, these being helpful rather than hindering attributes. A topic for another time.)

So, the next time you’re staring at some obviously burdensome workflow in your business, and it’s making you sore, we recommend scratching that itch. Nurture the thoughts and feelings that say, “this really could be done better if we …”

This entry was posted Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 3:20 am and is filed under itch, tomcotton, vision. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.