Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 39 views

    Don't Treat Innovation As A Cure-All

    Uploaded by

    Nicolai Aquino
    Innovation is not a cure-all for organizational decline and can sometimes accelerate decline. While innovation is important, unsuccessful experiments are demoralizing and costly, draining resources and hastening decline. Innovation flexibility, or how easily an innovation can adapt after introduction, plays an important role in determining success - inflexible innovations are more likely to fail or face major setbacks. Successfully innovating out of decline is difficult, as misjudgments about innovations are inevitable and flexibility is often not considered.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Don't Treat Innovation As A Cure-All

    Uploaded by

    Nicolai Aquino
    39 views3 pages
    Innovation is not a cure-all for organizational decline and can sometimes accelerate decline. While innovation is important, unsuccessful experiments are demoralizing and costly, draining resources and hastening decline. Innovation flexibility, or how easily an innovation can adapt after introduction, plays an important role in determining success - inflexible innovations are more likely to fail or face major setbacks. Successfully innovating out of decline is difficult, as misjudgments about innovations are inevitable and flexibility is often not considered.

    Original Description:

    asdas

    Original Title

    Don’t Treat Innovation as a Cure-All

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    Innovation is not a cure-all for organizational decline and can sometimes accelerate decline. While innovation is important, unsuccessful experiments are demoralizing and costly, draining resources and hastening decline. Innovation flexibility, or how easily an innovation can adapt after introduction, plays an important role in determining success - inflexible innovations are more likely to fail or face major setbacks. Successfully innovating out of decline is difficult, as misjudgments about innovations are inevitable and flexibility is often not considered.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    39 views3 pages

    Don't Treat Innovation As A Cure-All

    Uploaded by

    Nicolai Aquino
    Innovation is not a cure-all for organizational decline and can sometimes accelerate decline. While innovation is important, unsuccessful experiments are demoralizing and costly, draining resources and hastening decline. Innovation flexibility, or how easily an innovation can adapt after introduction, plays an important role in determining success - inflexible innovations are more likely to fail or face major setbacks. Successfully innovating out of decline is difficult, as misjudgments about innovations are inevitable and flexibility is often not considered.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    You are on page 1of 3

    Dont Treat Innovation as a Cure-All

    If your organization is declining, dont expect innovation to be a cure-all. Sometimes innovation


    can accelerate a decline.
    No one likes to say that. No one likes to ruin a good pep talk about a companys future by
    pointing out innovations possible negative consequences. But theyre real, so why not talk about
    them?
    In the corporate world the infatuation with innovation runs deep. Just about any idea for a new
    product or process can win managements attention, and companies often follow through on
    inventions in a spirit of experimentation in fact theres a rich literature now on the value of
    taking an experimental, fail-quickly-and-fail-often mind-set.
    But failure isnt to be taken lightly. Unsuccessful experiments are demoralizing and costly,
    draining an organization of critical resources, and they can hasten a companys decline. They set
    up a form of downward spiral, in which failure exacerbates performance weakness, leading to
    greater desperation for innovations, whose failure further worsens the situation.
    And failure really does happen, probably a lot more often than most leaders realize. Products,
    processes, and firms that fail tend to drop off the radar screen, so theres a bias in the literature
    toward experiments and companies that ultimately proved successful. You can read endlessly
    about factors that appear to lead to success, but youll rarely find a book or article on what
    causes failure.

    Dont Treat Innovation as a Cure-All


    One study that did explore this territory shows that a significant percentage of companies
    spiraling toward bankruptcy were characterized by extreme vacillations in strategy, suggesting
    that they were trying to innovate their way out of decline and were being driven toward
    increasingly risky experiments.
    But its still not clear what causes innovations to fail indeed, empirical research to isolate the
    factors that lead to failure is potentially a gargantuan undertaking, given the vast variety in the
    types of companies, products, processes, and failures.
    Insight Center

    Leading Innovation
    Sponsored by Accenture
    Set your organization on a path toward powerful new ideas.

    But the evidence suggests that innovation flexibility plays a powerful role.
    When you put an invention out there or implement a new process, you really dont know what
    the consequences are going to be, and if the consequences are negative, an innovation with builtin flexibility stands a better chance of surviving than one thats inherently rigid.
    Innovation flexibility is basically a measure of two things: how many configurations a product or
    process can take on after its introduced, and how quickly it can be transfigured from one form to
    another. In other words, if it simply is what it is, you better hope its very good. And hope
    generally isnt a superior strategy.
    Video games are examples of flexible innovations. Its impressive how Grand Theft Auto and
    Mortal Kombat make frequent changes to their characters and scripts after the games are on the
    market. Those changes allow the companies to adapt to consumers changing tastes.
    Some of the big software packages for managing corporate supply chains have proved to be good
    examples of inflexible innovation. The software solved a number of companies supply-chain
    problems, but numerous customers found they couldnt adapt the packages to their particular
    needs.
    .

    Dont Treat Innovation as a Cure-All


    Industries that take decades to produce massively expensive things like planes and ships often
    end up with products that are so inflexible they almost seem to invite failure, or at least major
    setbacks. In the 2000s, Airbus tried to stay ahead of competitors by pushing full-throttle on the
    $25 billion production of the A380, its biggest plane to date. Fast-forward to 2014 and the A380
    is plagued by a multitude of design issues. Because post-production modifications are
    prohibitively expensive, Airbus is in the position of having to seek cooperation from airline
    customers and airports to modify gates and widen taxiways.
    Of course, companies arent always able to recognize that inflexibility is the cause of an
    innovations lack of success. Because of cognitive limitations, were all too quick to attribute
    failure to outside forces over which we have no control. If we work in a company with declining
    sales, we cite shifts in global markets. If we work in a university with decreasing enrollment, we
    point to demographic changes. Breaking out of that mind-set requires reminding ourselves that
    often we have a lot more control over situations than we at first assume.
    Organizational decline is depressingly common, and turnarounds are relatively rare. Only about
    30% of declining organizations are able to turn things around. Thats because business is
    inherently uncertain, and all managers make mistakes. Misjudgments about innovations
    consequences are inevitable. Managers pick the wrong inventions to implement or pick the
    wrong markets or operational contexts for them.
    So innovating your way out of decline is a long shot to begin with, and the odds get even longer
    if you fail to ask a simple question about the implementation of an invention: What then? After
    the innovation hits the market or gets implemented in the company, will it have the flexibility to
    survive setbacks, and how quickly can it adapt?

    You might also like