Breaking down the barriers
Andrew Jones, the founder of Geelong’s leading innovation company G2 Innovation, highlights the common barriers he sees to change.
IN our G2 Innovation workshops, we always explore what participants’ barriers to innovation are.
We ask them to think about themselves, their teams and their wider organisations and list all of the barriers they can think of that stop, hinder or stall innovation. We have completed this exercise with hundreds of participants and teams, and I find it very interesting that, regardless of industry, geography or profession, very often the same barriers and challenges occur.
By sharing each other’s barriers to innovation in this way, people learn they are not alone. This helps to develop innovation confidence and create a sense of solidarity amongst participants. It’s a powerful place from which to embark on a journey to overcome these barriers.
From the thousands of innovation barriers we have collected, typically they fit into three categories: 1. Strategy 2. Culture 3. Process. Very often the barriers might spread to two or three of these categories, so we draw them as an interconnecting Venn diagram. For innovation to succeed and thrive, teams and organisations need to ensure that there is a clear Innovation Strategy and Purpose, an active and supportive Innovation Culture and a clear and practised Innovation Process to follow.
I thought I’d share one of the main barriers and discussions that emerged from our most recent Design Thinking workshop in Melbourne.
Perhaps you share this barrier in your organisation too. It is not knowing where to start. It is one of the most common barriers and it’s easy to see why it slows people down. Not knowing where to start derives from not knowing what the purpose or destination is and a lack of a process or map to follow. Often referred to as the “disorientation barrier”, it fits in the segment between Strategy and Process.
During the workshop, we dug a little deeper and discussed the difference between knowing where to start and knowing how to start. We also offered a couple of immediate actions to start fixing it:
(1) Have a clear and agreed definition for innovation — what it is and what it isn’t. The definition of innovation that G2 Innovation use is: “Innovation is the process of turning an IDEA into a REALITY that creates VALUE.”
The type of value to seek is value to your end users. Focusing on end user value first will result in and drive longterm growth and market differentiation. Unfortunately, too many organisations prioritise seeking value for themselves and hence end up with short-term focus, incremental growth and limited market differentiation. This can quickly result in lost market share and user loyalty, plus they become easily disruptive.
(2) The second part of the fix builds on this. You need an innovation process that actively seeks to add more value to your end users by identifying their needs, wants and frustrations. To emphasise this I like to quote Uri Levine, the co-founder of Waze, and say: “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution!”
What this means is that all too often, when people are looking to innovate, they think they must come up with a good idea first. But ideas are cheap and easy and very often don’t go anywhere because they do not solve a user need or frustration.
This is not innovation, this is just invention and a lot of wishful thinking. It is slow and wasteful, and people soon tire of their ideas not working and so stop trying.
However, if you start seeking out problems first, and really get to know them and understand them (i.e. “fall in love with them”), then the solutions become obvious and the value to the end user is clear.
Design Thinking is about constantly seeking to add value to your end users by understanding and empathising with their needs and what’s going on around them. It has an iterative process and set of tools that provide a framework and guide. It is very agile and fluid which makes it extremely responsive to new insights, ideas or outcomes. Moreover, it is quick, which is increasingly important in today’s fast moving world.
Over the course of this workshop, we immersed participants in this way of working — instilling the powerfully creative, user-centric mindset, skill-set and toolset that is Design Thinking, to practice and deliver innovation in their roles and teams every day.
A robust process for innovation is vital. It gives teams structure and comfort. If you think about most things in an organisation there is a process for it — a sales process, a procurement process, a recruitment process and so on.
So if you want innovation to happen consistently and sustainably then you need an innovation process. This will tell you how and where to start. With this barrier overcome, opportunity beckons.