Creative People Must Be Stopped (2 page)

Too Much of a Good Thing?

The table summarizes the six perspectives on innovation I have described. All six agree that there are interventions that can make innovation more likely to succeed. The only trouble is that each perspective assigns fault for failures in innovation to a different set of causes and therefore recommends a different set of “fixes.”

What emerges from this survey of work on innovation? First, as you look down the rows of the chart, your response to each perspective might well be “Of course!”
Of course
you need good ideas,
of course
you need a supportive group,
of course
you need the right organizational structure, and so on. Beyond intuition, each of these perspectives has been developed through a long history of thoughtful observation, research, and practice by a long list of reputable academics, writers, and managers. Yet each group thinks it has found
the
key to understanding innovation. They can't possibly all be misguided or wrong. Or can they?

A General Framework for Understanding Innovation

Let's agree that each of the perspectives offers an important insight into innovation. What are we to make of all of them, taken together? To answer this question, consider the work of designers and design consultants. In my experience working as a designer on many kinds of projects for many different clients, from laptops to luggage, from ski goggles to wine-in-a-box, I found that all designs had to meet some specific and detailed requirements. But these requirements were entirely different depending on the product, the client, the intended user, and sometimes even the design team itself. My job as designer was to tease out a deep and nuanced understanding of the particular requirements that would govern the problem I had been asked to solve. This is to say that the full set of requirements acted as a set of
constraints
on the solutions that might be possible and meaningful.

Here is an example of what I mean. A design consultancy I know well was hired in the mid-1990s to design a handheld personal digital assistant (PDA) device. Right off the bat there were clear requirements that would have to be met. Obviously, the cost of manufacturing the ultimate product would have to be less than the price customers were willing to pay for it. Success would also require that the design meet certain size requirements. While the PDA had to be large enough to accommodate the applications it was intended for, such as managing to-do lists, calendars, and a digital Rolodex of contact information, it couldn't be too large to fit in an average adult's hand. There were other requirements as well, governing such characteristics as screen size, weight, battery life, durability, and attractiveness. Another way to say this is that a successful solution—one that would be accepted by the client and welcomed by the ultimate users—had to satisfy a particular set of
constraints
if it was to be acceptable to the company that wanted to sell it and attractive to the customers who might buy it.

Using this same reasoning, look back at the chart summarizing the six perspectives on innovation. Each of these views can be seen as describing one of the general constraints that must be satisfied for an innovation effort to be successful. I can illustrate this point using the financial innovation called Keep the Change, a bank debit card program offered by Bank of America. The program works as follows: as an adopter of the innovation (that is, a member of the program), all of your debit card purchases that do not result in a round-dollar total amount are rounded up to the next whole dollar value, and the difference is transferred from your debit card account (usually your checking account) into your savings account. Thus if you purchase a cup of coffee and charge the resulting total of $5.51, the bank will round the amount deducted from your debit card account up to $6.00. Of that $6.00, $5.51 of it will go to the coffee shop, and the $0.49 remainder will be transferred into your savings account. Depending on how many purchases you make on the card, you can end up with a nice little treasure in your savings account at the end of the year.

Relating this innovation to the table, start in the first row, the individual-centric view. The truism of this view is that for successful innovation to take place, there must first of all be an individual with a good idea. Whether individuals act alone or in groups, in effect these authors were saying that innovating successfully requires meeting the
individual innovation constraint
of being able and willing to generate and recognize a new and relevant idea. When we apply that insight to the debit card innovation, it's clear that a person was able to generate this service product idea, probably on the basis of the insight that most people aren't able to (or don't like to) deposit large amounts of money in their savings accounts, but don't mind putting aside some “pocket change” now and again.

The second row of the table reflects the assumptions that innovation always involves the participation and cooperation of other people as contributors, collaborators, or supporters, and that group dynamics can therefore be critical to the fate of the idea. This means that success depends on satisfying some specific
group innovation constraints
. The Keep the Change innovation therefore required a group, most likely the design team, to understand and refine the original idea, probably first at a brainstorm meeting and then much later at an executive-level approval presentation. You can imagine that the project might generate controversy among bankers because it involves taking a
different
amount from the customer's account than he or she signed for at the point of purchase. As you can well imagine, this kind of small technical detail could easily have been a justification for killing the proposal at this stage.

The perspective described in the third row of the table emphasizes that an organization pursuing innovation must have the strategy, structure, and resources needed to carry an idea from conception all the way through implementation. In other words, to innovate successfully, we must satisfy some set of
organizational innovation constraints
. This means that Bank of America must possess the will, skills, and resources needed to implement the concept. The bank would need the resources for actually building and debugging the service, the ability to create awareness of it, and the ability to implement it using resources in its control.

Next are the
industry innovation constraints
inherent in the perspective that sees success as possible only when an innovation, be it product, process, or service, delivers a higher level of performance to customers at a cost that is as good as or better than current offerings. There is no requirement that cost be measured in dollars or performance in any particular units. For example, for some the cost of time may be significant, while performance might be measured in the pride that ownership brings. As a constraint this requires the bank to find a market of people for whom this is a valuable service. Given that Bank of America is among the largest in the country, finding potential adopters may not have been the hard part. It would also need to ensure that rival banks didn't steal or copy the idea and offer it at a lower price. It's probably also obvious that it needs to get more returns from the program than the costs it incurs, while still remaining price competitive in the personal bank account market.

Assuming that we've met all the requirements so far, society will test our proposed innovations against its moral, ethical, and legal standards. In effect, the fifth perspective is telling us that we'll also need to meet a set of
societal innovation constraints
. In order to protect vulnerable consumers, society will require that this banking innovation meet the spirit and the letter of the banking laws, both at the state and federal levels. For their part, participants in the program need to value the “savings” aspect of the program, while also not feeling that any downside to the program was unfair, as might occur if, for example, your account was overdrawn because more was transferred than you realized.

Finally, our sixth perspective makes the credible, if obvious, claim that to be successful, an innovation must actually exist in the world and that it must function in an intended and desirable way. In other words, a fundamental requirement of innovation is that we satisfy a particular set of
technological innovation constraints
. Here the bank must, for instance, be able to unequivocally identify members and nonmembers of the program in order to determine relevant fund transfer amounts. It must also be able to execute the funds transfers without errors and not, for example, transfer funds from an overdrawn account.

The Venn diagram in
Figure 1.2
is a visual depiction of the overlapping requirements of the six constraints. Each constraint is represented by an oval with the area inside the oval representing when the condition is being met. Areas of overlap between any two or more ovals represent the conditions under which multiple constraints are met. My proposition here is that
any
real, proposed, or even hypothetical innovation will have to satisfy all of the constraints presented by the context of that innovation. A quick trip to the Bank of America Web site proves that it was successful in meeting all six of the constraints.

Figure 1.2

Diagnosing Innovation Failures

By making the conditions of success clearer and more specific, the framework of six types of constraints can also illuminate the reasons why a particular innovation has failed. To see how, let's return to three of the brief examples I presented at the beginning of this chapter. In the case of the consumer products company with the breakthrough product that failed to move into production,
industry constraints
were apparent in the form of this organization's role within its industry as a “fast-follower” organization that waits for others to prove a market first; this made the company uncomfortable with competing on the basis of product innovation versus relying on its customary advantage of efficiency. The mention of “financial pressures” suggests that
organizational constraints
took the form of insufficient resources to fund the new project. Organizational innovation constraints are also apparent in the company's structure; it maintained its ability to manufacture its derivative products efficiently by sacrificing that part of the organization that focused on new products that were still in development and that were not currently producing revenue.

In the case of the part-time inventor, although he was able to come up with a promising idea, thus overcoming the
individual
constraints, he succumbed to
group
constraints in the form of a potential collaborator who ridiculed and dismissed his ideas. Rather than face the possibility of being embarrassed again, he decided to drop the project. It is also possible that the expert would have been vindicated if in fact the state of electronics at the time meant that
technological
constraints would have prevented the inventor from turning his idea into a viable product.