Capturing New Business Ideas: How to Avoid the Dangers of the Dark Mind
Everyone seems to agree that innovation is important. Consider the following:
• Studies show that innovation increases profits and returns for investors.
• Being innovative can help you make better business decisions.
• Focused innovation can also increase productivity and reduce employee turnover.
• The search for ‘innovation’ in Amazon within the business books returns 5,757 entries.
Even allowing duplicates, this indicates a lot of interest in the topic!
So why aren’t more companies innovating more frequently? Can innovation really work within a corporate structure?
Are you Darkminding?
“Darkminding” is a term I use to explain two of the natural ways we think of:
• Stick with the known: We don’t like things to change, so even if we could be more creative, we are reluctant to develop new ideas because they create risks. We “worry about the dark” by holding it and trying not to let in any light (ie, new ideas). This is another way of saying that we like the status quo.
• Avoid trying to develop new ideas – it’s too much work! Why think of new things when the old way still works? We keep our minds dark and avoid the effort to create light.
Darkminding can be quite useful for a few things. If you had to rethink every step in every process you go through, you would never do anything. Routine can be efficient and helps us achieve the things we do on a regular basis.
But sadly, the world changes and often the process we have developed does not. However, these changes occur very gradually, making it difficult to tell when the normal routine becomes less helpful. If things start to go wrong, some adjustments to what we are doing and we may be back where we were. But if the fundamentals have changed, these small differences suddenly turn into very big problems.
All of this is compounded by a corporate structure that often rewards, in subtle and more obvious ways, maintaining how things are done and protecting its own area of business. Change in a company often poses a threat to status and control, making idea creation dangerous.
How a company can create a solution
If our brains naturally work that way, you might be wondering “Can innovation fit within my company?” Fortunately, our brains also function in more creative ways that you can nurture, based on facilitating our initial reaction to ‘Darkmind’ at the first glimmer of a new idea. It can be hard work, but recognizing our limitations and implementing some of the changes below can create an atmosphere of innovation in any company.
1. Why should I care?
The first step is to understand why innovation is important. There are several ways to achieve this, but the most important are those that provide information about your specific company. You can produce multiple studies and statistics that show the value of innovation, but without relating it to your business it will not have the same impact.
what are your competitors doing? You need to understand how they innovate and if you live up to their standards. Comparing to others outside of your industry can also give you a benchmark to aim for. An analysis like this will give you details on where you are falling behind and will fall prey to more creative competitors.
You also need to know how big the gap is between where you want to be, say, three years, and how long it will take you to get there. If you want to increase your turnover by 20% in that time, and assuming that some of your products and offerings will become obsolete or obsolete, how are you going to make up the difference? If revenue from new products is to provide part of that turnover, how many new innovations are required? If your analysis indicates that two to three new products will be needed, it can often mean that you should have a minimum portfolio of 6 or more viable ideas. The gap may be larger than you think, but you won’t know until you check.
2. make ‘business as usual’ unusual
Let me be deliberately provocative for a moment. People need the motivation to come up with ideas and embrace a culture of innovation. A radical but effective way to do this, suggested by Peter Drucker in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, is to review each area of your business at least every three years and make it clear that they will be tested for life. Poor performance areas should be rigorously checked and cut if necessary. This approach focuses minds on new developments and ideas and prevents people from stagnating and going with the flow. If you know that you will have to explain how you will be profitable in the future, you will need to be able to explain the gap and how to close it. Innovation is the best way to defend your case. If this sounds scary, the pressure the market will eventually put on an underperforming area is usually worse. Globalization only amplifies this pressure.
3. make it part of the system
No matter what systems you have, make innovation part of what you do every day. If you review monthly versus actual budgets, add a section on the current development status of the product. If you have regular staff meetings, add a five minute space for people to discuss recent innovations they have developed. Make innovation seem important and it soon becomes part of the culture. Don’t forget that you should also take some time to get away from your regular work and go through some techniques to generate new ideas that can lead to new products, market approaches, or cost savings. Put some time in your journal! Remember, if you make it a habit, it will be easier to keep doing it.
You also need a system to track the innovations that are being developed, including who is doing the most work in this area. Then you can make sure you have a new and growing list of new ideas waiting to be developed. You can also reward people who are continually innovating. Someone should be accountable to the CEO for this list and for increasing the number of ideas produced. Without a system, you won’t be able to monitor where innovation is needed or know how to use all the skills of your most innovative employees.
4. Create connections
Creativity is connection, so the highest priority is fostering people’s ability to do new things and meet new people. Innovation is killed by people working in silos, moving product from one area to another. Your company can no longer survive with the following mindset:
• “Here’s the engineering. We have designed it, now you build it.”
• “Here’s the marketing. We created it, now you let people know.”
• “Here is the sales department. We have announced it, now you sell it.”
Everyone should work together, up front, on ideas or services to make sure they fit the client’s needs perfectly. The added benefit is that the more diverse you work as a team, the greater the number of unexpected innovations. Try mixing people up and seeing what happens.
Another way to get people to think differently is by moving them. Facilitate secondments, both for internal and external moves. And when they’re off, make people aware that some of their time should be spent thinking about how their experience can improve what the company does in other areas.
The need for leadership
Some of the above ideas can be easily implemented – in fact, they can be done without people realizing that you are fostering innovation. Behind it all, however, is our human inclination to prefer the way things are, so it takes hard work to implement a fully functioning process. Which leads to the need for leadership. Innovation always brings out uncertainty and senior managers and directors of the company must define a vision so that everything seems less scary. Can you help people see, feel and know that this is the most important problem facing the organization? Can you make the vision so vivid and so compelling that people naturally want to go to that future? That’s often the hardest part of driving innovation.
