Welcome to June 2023 edition of the XIth volume of Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs.
The theme for the XIth volume of our Carnival of Quality Management Articles and Blogs is The Defining Trends of Quality Management – An Analytical Survey.
Presently, we take up the concept of Full Innovation Lifecycle ….
The Innovation Life Cycle outlines the typical stages an innovation goes through – from the initial idea generation to development, implementation, evaluation, and adoption.[1]
The typical Innovation Lifecycle is succinctly captured herein as:
However, more frequently the bell-curve usually ends up in a S-curve:[2]
In his book Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore proposes a variation of the original lifecycle. He suggests that for discontinuous innovations, which may result in a Foster disruption based on an s-curve, there is a gap or chasm between the first two adopter groups (innovators/early adopters), and the vertical markets.[3]
The following is a typical example of how typewriting has moved in these S-lifecycles:
The theory of disruptive innovation has proved to be a powerful way of thinking about innovation-driven growth. “Disruption” describes a process whereby a smaller company with fewer resources can successfully challenge established incumbent businesses.[4]
Created by McKinsey & Company, the Three horizons of growth is quite a popular model for helping organizations structure their initiatives and find an appropriate balance between short-term and long-term projects in their portfolio.[5]
On a similar thinking process, the then Google CEO Eric Schmidt, was first to introduce the 70-20-10 rule is a simple rule for allocating resources between “the core”, “the adjacent” and “the innovative stuff”, often referred to as “the transformational”.[6]
How large companies can stay innovative and entrepreneurial has been the Holy Grail for authors of business books, business schools, consulting firms, etc. There’s some great work from lots of authors in this area.
Harvard Business Review Articles:
– Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change, Clayton Christensen/Michael Overdorf: March/April 2000
– The Quest for Resilience, Gary Hamel/Liisa Valikangas: Sept 2003
– The Ambidextrous Organization, Charles O’Reilly/Michael Tushman: April 2004
– Darwin and the Demon: Innovating Within Established Enterprises, Geoffrey Moore: July/August 2004
– Meeting the Challenge of Corporate Entrepreneurship, David Garvin/Lynne Levesque: Oct 2006
– The Innovators DNA, Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton Christensen: Dec 2009
And of course,
However, a note of caution towards all the good that innovation can bring would be in order.
Innovations too fail. Here are five typical reasons:[7]
1 Misaligned incentive – Too heady success of an innovative strategy can lead the organization not to remember that all other rules that make a business a success are still very much applicable.
2 Lack of Preparation – Creating a culture of innovation is essential if you want to really change your business and maintain momentum in creative product development. And it’s not something you can do overnight.
3 Misunderstanding Your Market – Riding on the wave of a brilliant innovative idea can lead to go astray on simple assumptions. One such failure is to read the market correctly for the product. A right product in wrong market is sure formula for failure. And a failure can sometimes be too costly, in terms of efforts and time lost.
4 Prioritizing Technology over Solutions – Technology has come to play so big role in the way business is run that it can be taken as end rather than a means, even if a very vital one.
5 Bureaucracy – In large organization the bureaucracy can turn out a be silent killer of many innovative ideas in their cradle stage only.
The Bottom Line
Successful innovation isn’t a strategic business decision — it’s an ongoing state of mind that the leadership and stakeholder teams must have if the organization wants to build a culture of innovation and succeed in the short as well long term.
We plan to take up a detailed look at the Structured Innovation Approach in our next episode.
We will now turn to our regular section -.
We now watch ASQ TV episode on –
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- Developing Idea Generation Skills: TRIZ – Sunil Kumar V. Kaushik, Business Program Manager at Microsoft, discusses TRIZ[8], and how this theory of inventive problem solving can be used to innovate, think creatively, and solve issues quickly and effectively.
Next, we take up the article, Building Blocks to Improve Organizational Culture– Lay out a road map to achieve organizational excellence and build a culture around it. by Hung Le Ph.D., Grace L Duffy MBA, LSSMBB. When processes and people are not aligned with the strategic direction of the organization, a culture of excellence cannot be sustained. Without a strong foundation of alignment to long-term goals, people soon revert to how they did things in the past. Alignment goes hand in hand with having the right people on the team. As discussed in Jim Collins’s book “From Good to Great,” it is essential to have disciplined people with disciplined thoughts who can carry out disciplined actions. The Building Blocks of Organizational Culture are a combination of process and people.
I look forward to your views / comments / inputs to further enrich the theme of The Defining Trends of Quality Management – An Analytical Survey.
Note: The images or video clips depicted here above are through courtesy of respective websites who have the copyrights for the respective images /videos.
[2] Innovation Lifecycles -Soren Kaplan
[3] Technology adoption life cycle
[4] What Is Disruptive Innovation? – Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, and Rory McDonald
[5] Enduring Ideas: The three horizons of growth
[6] Innovation Management – The Ultimate Guide – Jesse Nieminen
[7] Five Reasons Why Innovation Fails – Scott Arpajian
The world is too small? or Is it? 