Innovation Redefined: Check Out The Top Myths And Ground Realities

Just as the first rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about the Fight Club, the first rule of innovation should be that you don’t talk about it. Instead, to borrow the tagline from one of the real innovators out there, one should ‘Just Do It’ when it comes to innovation. But as this is a topic that attracts scholarly outpourings from some of the finest thinkers and great doers, let us put aside our own opinion and sample top myths and ground realities involving innovation.

Disruptive or bust?
Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School is considered the Peter Drucker of innovation. In other words, he is the high priest of the discipline. With an intriguing background that covers a stint as a missionary, Christensen is fascinated by the idea of disruptive innovation, which is what up-and-coming start-ups are mostly associated with as they create new product categories or reinvent products completely.

Most of us, especially spoilt now by the stellar success of Google, Apple, and Tesla, tend to regard only these types of players as the true innovators. But as per Christensen, there are two other types of innovation that we tend to disregard – sustaining innovation and efficiency innovation.

Sustaining innovation is what companies do when they replace one generation of product with a new generation. Think of colour television that replaced the black-and-white TV set or automatic transmission over manual transmission as two key examples. Now, think of companies like GE and GM. These are also the folks who tend to get disrupted the most as they have sunk huge amounts of money into certain product types, rather than focusing on end-benefits like entertainment or ease of travel.

Efficiency innovations get the least media space but they are probably the most common type of innovation as companies focus on improving processes to derive greater value. The much-heralded ability of Wal-Mart to constantly tweak its supply chain to offer consumers low prices would not be possible without such innovations. Again, India would not have emerged as an IT outsourcing behemoth, had it not been for the American companies who had first figured out the whole outsourcing model.

Christensen also likes to use the term empowering innovation, sometimes interchangeably used with disruptive innovation. According to him, such innovations create thousands of new jobs as the mankind discovers new ways to meet human needs, and makes products affordable and available to the masses.

But there lies the real rub about terming something as an innovation – unlike high fashion, which is frequently ‘innovative.’ Should we bandy around the term if innovation does not make a tangible impact?

What you can expect
Scott Anthony, a one-time associate of Christensen, has a ‘Top 10’ take on innovation myths and realities, which he has expressed in the Harvard Business Review.

One myth that resonates closely with Christensen’s characterisation is that innovation is the monopoly of only genius minds. We frequently mix up the creativity behind disruptive innovation with other more common forms of innovation defined by Christensen.

The other major myth closely associated with innovation is technology. Technology works well only when it is leveraged to support an innovative business model – for example, outsourcing. In fact, great technology usually fails the first time around as it is mostly ahead of its time or too buggy.

Dr Mohammed Yunus created groundbreaking innovation in the world of banking without even a single IT expert from the West’s all conquering financial sector chipping in. How many innovators have won a Nobel Peace Prize as he did in 2006 for his efforts?

Seduced by the visions of commercial space travel and driverless cars, most folks stumble when the size of the challenge and the big bets needed to create such innovations throw up huge roadblocks. However, the reality of innovation is that it can start small and even be cheap. In India they even have a word for it and management literature is now devoted to the concept of jugaad.

Interestingly, Apple spends far less on R&D as a percentage of revenues than competitors like Google, Microsoft and Samsung. Therefore, innovation is about finding your sweet spot and exploiting that to the ‘nth’ degree.

In the innovation game, many realities will be reinvented and new mythologies will be created – that’s par for the course.

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