I did a Podcast this month on how to use technology to increase innovation. Now I'm not a fan of innovation for himself. If you have something that works, innovation can be a bad thing because it can break what works. But if it does not work, or if it works badly, and you have examined the practices passed by you and others, then innovation plays a role in terms of resolution of a single problem which seems insoluble or sub-optimal.
Innovation is difficult, I have been disputed with a CEO of Ford who will soon be Let Go on innovation and I told him that the path he was on was likely to have fun being an ex-CEO, I did this in my career, and more sadly, I was generally right. My worst was with Steve Ballmer to Microsoft who really annoyed by me before he was released.
But there are three solid steps that can be used to improve innovation in a business.
First step: innovation is not a final goal
Innovation is a way to solve a problem, but it is often not the best way. It's like watching surgical sorting and thinking it would be great as a normal practice when it is only great when you don't have the resources to help everyone and would be a disaster in most other cases. You do not measure people on innovation, you measure them on achieving objectives, and if they have innovated to achieve these objectives, and the result works, you do not penalize them either. Too often, people are punished for doing something in a new way, but does not damage the business simply simply because it was not how it has always been done.
Thus, innovation is a tool, and to ensure that this tool is not abused, you must put it in context with the result. If someone has innovated and messed up something because he did not bother to learn the right way, he should be penalized, however, if someone confronted an insoluble problem is innovated and has always failed, he should not be punished because, even thanks to their failure, they used innovation correctly.
Skunk Works
One of the most successful ways to stimulate innovation is to create Skunk Works Project teams. These are teams of highly qualified people who deeply understand the problem but tend to be rebels. What you do is send them to a distant location of the company, give them a decent budget, provide them with basic resources, then delete unnecessary channels that companies put employees.
I have seen this work several times where we have trouble creating a product that met a single market or a customer need and that we needed to go outside the box to get there. Some of IBM's most innovative products have been created in this way. Having worked at IBM, within the company, I noticed that there was too often almost an amplitude more people who would block an innovative approach than to implement it. This was due to a number of problems, such as the fear of being overshadowed, the fear of appearing stupid in the face of a better solution, the fear of losing status to a better solution and the fear of change. A skunk effort works, well done, can bypass all of this and lead to a much faster and better solution than what could have been accomplished in the company.
Be tolerant of failure
Innovation is accompanied by a strong potential for failure which is in accordance with its strong potential for surprising success. But if people are afraid to fail, they will be afraid to try something new and will therefore not be able to innovate in the problem in which they are. It was one of the “discussions” that I had with this old Ford CEO, he agreed that you had to be tolerant of errors, but that if someone made a mistake with the F-150 pick-up that they would be killed metaphorically. This meant that he was not tolerant of the mistakes and that the F-150 was in danger.
You need a carrot and stick approach, but if someone takes the risk of innovating and succeeding, it should be rewarded publicly and part of the reward dialog should be on the errors they made which ultimately led to the success which transmits this failure, as long as it is on the way to success, that's fine. The stick is intended for people who innovate when innovation is not necessary, which leads to avoidable failure. Innovative people because they do not want to do their homework should be penalized because they harm their business.
Envelopment: what AI brings to the table
Thus, you can make innovation part of the creation process, you can create a skunk to focus on innovation around a difficult problem, and you can reward good innovation practices and punish bad ones, so what does AI bring to the process?
The AI can create concept variants at machine speeds, and offers such as the Nvidia omaverse can allow results simulations in virtual environments so that the cost of these errors is minimized. With AI tools, you can quickly fail at an alarming rate that could destroy companies if this failure is in the real world and affect real people. But with strong simulators, you can test the offer in the metavese so that no real person is damaged and that the knowledge of the effort remains contained in the company.
Thus, AI can play two roles, one that it allows the really rapid creation of concepts of multiple solutions, and it provides, in the metavese, a way to test the group's most convincing group in an extremely safe and private manner considerably increasing the probability of a positive result.
In short, even if I was not a fan of rapid failure, largely due to the damage to the company and its reputation if this failure is made public, with AI, you can make a rapid failure more quickly and much more safely, which also makes it a much more viable path to success.
