Innovation for the Fatigued

How to Build a Culture of Deep Creativity

Alf Rehn

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780749484088
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780749484095
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

How many presentations on innovation have there been recently? Thousands? Millions?

We are experiencing 'innovation fatigue': we feel cheated by the endless rounds of consultants who come into our organizations, deliver conceptual models that don't stick with the realities of business and then leave again. Companies and teams are left feeling more deflated than before, and with not one idea that's impacted the bottom line. Innovation for the Fatigued argues it is worth fighting for the concept and study of innovation in organizations.

Business leaders are always looking over their shoulders for the next Uber moment to overtake them, and they recognize that innovation needs to be a top priority. But how does one innovate? This book is the antidote to the empty promises that pervade the innovation industry. By designing a company culture that nurtures ideas, but also defends against incrementalism and fads, we can rediscover the powerful basics of imagination, empathy, play and courage, which are all instrumental in delivering real impactful innovation. Innovation for the Fatigued will detail where companies have got innovation wrong, whilst celebrating and studying the ones that lead the way. With unique, relatable and varied examples, renowned innovation and creativity professor Alf Rehn provides a practical model for getting innovation back on track, and instilling change at speed with real concern for market demands.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Between the shallows and the deep blue sea

‘As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.’

FRANCIS BACON

Scenes from our innovation crisis

This is a book about innovation cultures and about why some cultures can engage with innovation on a deep level, whilst others get stuck in the shallow and superficial. But it is also a book with a warning. Despite the talk about innovation, despite the professed love for it, there is a lurking crisis at the heart of it all. A crisis that can be intimated from things both big and small. We shall start with the latter.

Scene 1: The year is 2006, and I am a young, fresh-faced professor. I got tenure and a chair a few years previously, and I do have some experience in working with corporations. I have just arrived at the headquarters of a major such, and have been led to a large seminar room in which 100+ people sit and wait. The preamble has been dealt with, and I am introduced. I step up in front of the crowd and say ‘Hello! My name is Alf Rehn, and I am here to help you with your innovation initiative’.

The reaction is as immediate as it is positive. People smile, if sometimes just slightly, and you can notice a fair few people expectantly sitting up a little straighter. Some eyes twinkle, and not just from amusement. In the discussion that follows it becomes evident that people are enthusiastic about the idea of trying out new things, breaking old barriers and the like. This enthusiasm isn’t necessarily evenly shared, but it is there.

Scene 2: The year is 2018, and I am no longer quite as young. I am, however, very experienced when it comes to working on creativity and innovation in corporations. I arrive at the headquarters of a corporation much like the one in scene 1. I am led into a seminar room also very much like the one in the first scene, both when it comes to the look of the room and the look of the people gathered within it. The preamble is noticeably similar, as is my opening line: ‘Hello! My name is Alf Rehn, and I am here to help you with your innovation initiative’.

What follows, though, is markedly different. The smiles are still there, and there are many in the room who are clearly excited about it all. But it is no longer universal. Amongst the smiles are also looks of exhaustion and exasperation. Some in the audience look down-right dejected. In fact, I can hear a person muttering ‘Oh no, not this again’.

I do not offer these scenes as proof that I’ve become markedly duller over the years. In fact, I often achieve better results in corporations now than I did 12 years ago. What I offer in these scenes might best be described as an insight into what has happened with innovation since the late 2000s. As the term went from battle cry to buzzword, and organization after organization started hunting for it in increasingly desperate ways, the manner in which innovation is understood and received underwent a transformation, and not always a happy one at that.

Whereas innovation is universally hailed as a critical business competence, the literal thing that organizations need to survive and succeed, it has also become something of a pain. In the mid-2000s, you might find the occasional larger organization that didn’t run a yearly innovation initiative, or that didn’t have an idea competition or recurring workshops on business model innovation. Today, they’re rarer than unicorns (both the startup and the horses with a horn kind). In the mid-2000s, a new innovation book was an interesting addition to the canon. Today, it’s frequently grist for the mill.

In a contemporary organization, the average employee has heard the term bandied about more times than they can count, seen numerous innovation consultants pass through, developed a slight allergy to multi-coloured Post-it® notes, and feel, on the whole, sick and tired of it all. The audience in my second scene wasn’t sick of me. Instead, they were suffering from innovation fatigue. It is a curious illness, this, being exhausted by that which was supposed to energize. But right now, it is a rapidly spreading malaise, and it’s evolving towards a pandemic – even as we move towards an imagination economy. It is an illness that is brought on by a peculiar and insidious process, one where innovation moved away from being a powerful change agent and instead became something… different. Something… shallow.

This is a book about this challenge. It is a book about how innovation became something shallow and superficial, and what we can do about it. It is a book about the enormous potential society and organizations have to innovate and what needs to be done to capture it. It is a book about how vapid and empty sloganeering took over innovation thinking and about how we can fight back. It is about going deep; about crafting deeper innovation cultures, about rediscovering innovation ambition, about going deep into diversity. But most of all it is about ideas and humans and the need to save both from the shallows that are much of modern innovation thinking.

An age of innovation talk

Have you ever sat in on an innovation workshop and seminar and had the sensation that you’ve heard it all before? The terminology starts to blur, and you can’t even remember if there’s a difference between disruptive and transformative. You also can’t remember when it became acceptable to describe a new way to sell coffee, or empty a rubbish bin, as being radical or revolutionary. You look at the slides, and somehow every example is giving you a massive feeling of déjà vu. That is, until you realize that it isn’t déjà vu, not really, you just literally have heard it all before. You used to like Elon Musk, but now there’s a tiny twitch in your eye when either he or Tesla gets mentioned. Congratulations, you’ve experienced shallow innovation.

This year, like every year for the last few ones, more than 100 books on innovation will be published every month.1 Not all of them will be on innovation management in companies, and some might have a somewhat tangential connection to the theme, but this is what you can gather if you go through publishing data and see how books are categorized on platforms such as Google Books and Amazon – more than 100 books a month. That means that if you read three books on innovation a day, you’re actually falling behind. And this is just the books. To this comes a plethora of other material, an unending tsunami of LinkedIn-content, magazines, Twitter-feeds, blogs and sundry government pamphlets. We may need to have a discussion regarding how innovative our age really is, but one thing is true beyond any doubt:

We live in the golden age of innovation chatter!

But whilst there is lots of talk, we should perhaps pause for a moment and ask what is really being said in this torrent of words and pictures. Is all this talk really making organizations more creative and society more innovative? Or is it all just… talk? I’m a professor of innovation (more to the point, I’m the professor of innovation, design and management at the faculty of engineering at SDU in Denmark), so talk and text about innovation are pretty much what I do all day, every day. Those 100 books? I’m the guy who is supposed to keep up with it all, and although I cannot claim I read three innovation books a day, I read a lot of them. I can thus tell you what would happen to you if you actually tried to read all that is written about innovation. You would go insane, but not for the reasons people might think. You see, reading the innovation literature of today doesn’t put you at risk of having your mind blown. Instead, you’d go crazy from the sheer boredom of it all.

Why? Because for all the talk about revolutions and ‘thinking outside the box’ (a phrase I hate with such a burning passion I would like for it to be outlawed), the most pressing characteristic of contemporary innovation literature is how maddeningly similar and repetitive it is. The advice given is so standardized it cannot be more than a year or so until an AI can write an innovation book, using the same, endlessly repeated advice: look outside your industry for ideas, listen to diverse groups of people, experiment and test with customers, take chances, learn to love failure. See, I just saved you from reading 50 of the best-selling innovation books published since the early 2010s. You’re welcome. If the advice is standardized, that’s still nothing compared to the examples and cases. I used to joke that there seemingly was a law that said each innovation book needed to reference Apple before page 10, or the book would be pulled from circulation. Today, of course, things have changed. Now you have to mention both Apple and Tesla before page 10…

Joking aside, the number of companies that are endlessly referenced and re-referenced in the innovation literature makes for a rather depressing list: Apple, Airbnb, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix and Tesla. Rinse and repeat. Once in a while someone sneaks in some lesser known company, but the tendency is clear. The same can also be seen in the often quite tragic lists of ‘The World’s Most Innovative Companies’ that magazines often devote ink and bandwidth to. Gary Lineker, the UK football pundit, famously described football as being ‘a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win’.2 Today, we might say that innovation is an astoundingly complex phenomenon, but when listing the most innovative companies, Apple always wins. In late 2014, two competing consulting companies, Boston Consulting Group and Strategy& (the consulting arm of PwC) published independent reports purporting to make clear once and for all which were the world’s most innovative companies.3 The former listed the top three as Apple, Google and Samsung. The latter’s list was Apple, Google and Amazon. Looking at both lists, the top 10 were 70 per cent identical, if with slightly shuffled positions. Fast forward to 2018, and Fast Company’s list of The 50 Most Innovative Companies in the World,4 and the only thing that has truly changed is that Google has fallen out of favour – but Apple still holds #1 with Amazon at #5. The more things change…

What is going on here? In a word, innovation talk isn’t really about innovation. In fact, a lot of innovation isn’t about innovation. As a result, we need to start to have a serious talk about what innovation is today and about the difference between shallow and deep innovation thinking.

Innovation ain’t what it used to be

Innovation used to be a term used sparingly for a limited number of clearly defined projects. Today, the term is used for nigh on everything, from the most minute improvement of an existing product to truly revolutionary developments – and many things besides. In my work with innovation I’ve often come across uses of the word that might seem humorous, until you understand how problematic they are. The CEO of Kellogg’s famously declared that the introduction of a new flavour (peanut butter!) to Pop-Tarts, a product that has existed for over 50 years, counted as an innovation. This got even the Wall Street Journal, not known for their aversion to business hyperbole, to publish a most sarcastic rebuttal.5 I have seen pencil sharpeners advertised as ‘revolutionary’ innovations in classroom technology6 and the most traditional of people claiming themselves to be innovators or innovation mavens, and you can probably add several other examples of nonsensical uses of the word. In fact, the manner in which innovation has become the go-to description of nigh on everything is today such a universal phenomenon that few of us even react any longer. Innovation, and the various words associated with it – creativity, revolution, disruption and so on – has become the business equivalent of elevator music. We don’t really listen, yet we expect it to be there.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that this also comes at a cost. The aforementioned tsunami of innovation talk, coupled with the contemporary tendency to call everything and thereby nothing innovation, has created an environment in which innovation fatigue is a completely normal reaction.7 It isn’t that people don’t want to innovate; of course they do. But as what they get served is less a discussion about solving meaningful problems and more about recycled and regurgitated clichés, people tire. And with clichéd innovation talk comes other ills. As innovation talk has become more and more superficial, we have started seeing a narrowing of innovation thinking, one where people look more to how they can repeat whatever buzzword is beloved at the moment – be it gamification, open innovation, freemium as a business model, or trying to get in on the AI craze – than what impact they might achieve.

I have taken to calling this ‘shallow innovation’. For most people, it’s just innovation as usual, or the normal way of talking about innovation, but this is because we’ve not talked enough about the alternatives to it and the critique it should be subjected to. Shallow innovation is a way of engaging with innovation that emphasizes style over substance and easily recognizable stories over stories that might actually drive innovation forwards. It cares more about fitting in with today’s narrative than breaking truly new ground, and it dominates not only the literature but also companies.

Sce...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: between the shallows and the deep blue sea
• 2 Of yawns and broken windows: how ideas die in the modern corporation
• 3 Respect, reciprocity, responsibility and reflection: crafting innovation cultures from the ground up
• 4 The imagination premium: pushing beyond fatigue, thinking beyond boundaries
• 5 Innovative by design: diversity and the trouble with monocultures
• 6 Making innovation resilient: meaning, purpose, ambition, courage
• 7 Time, velocity, slack: working at the speed of innovation
• 8 Pulling it all together: from ‘innovation’ to innovation
• Notes
• Index