Coaching for Innovation

Tools and Techniques for Encouraging New Ideas in the Workplace

Cristina Bianchi, Maureen Steele

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137353252
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137353269
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Making innovation in the workplace highly accessible, Coaching for Innovation presents a step-by-step guide which is full of practical tips, models, exercises and interviews with HR and business professionals. It demonstrates the integral role that coaching plays in idea generation and the innovation process.

Part I

Practical Coaching Tools for Innovation

chapter 1

Making Innovation More Accessible

Chapter Highlights

This chapter is about making innovation more accessible, demystifying some of the myths about innovation and highlighting some of the essentials you need to begin driving innovation. You will discover that:

There are some commonly held assumptions about innovation that make it seem inaccessible and something that sits apart from what most of us do every day.

Adopting the right attitude and behaviours, and developing certain skills that are conducive to being innovative, will support you in your mission to drive innovation.

Coaching has a fundamental role to play in having the kind of conversations that need to take place at every step along the way of the innovation process.

The Innovation Myths

Based on what our clients tell us, on what we observe when we work with them and on what we read, innovation is definitely a big topic for business today and is likely to remain so in the future. The message coming across is very clear; without innovation there is only stagnation. Innovation is definitely not a topic to be taken lightly and it certainly requires time, energy, commitment and even a healthy dose of passion to make it happen. Innovation is also the subject of much research and a great deal has already been said and written about it. There is little doubt in our minds that when you are involved with innovation in any way at all then you would do well to read up on the whole topic and take advantage of the existing knowledge. Becoming more informed about innovation and how it works will certainly prepare you to embrace it more effectively.

Top 30 Innovations of the Last 30 Years

In 2009, NBR, the Nightly Business Report (the Emmy Award-winning PBS business programme), and Knowledge@Wharton (the online business journal of the Wharton School), asked viewers and readers in more than 250 markets to suggest innovations they think have shaped the world in the last three decades. They arrived at a list of the “Top 30 Innovations of the Last 30 Years”. The top ten were: Internet, broadband, www (browser and html), PC / laptop computers, mobile phones, email, DNA testing and sequencing / human genome mapping, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), microprocessors, fibre optics, office software (spreadsheets, word processors), non-invasive laser / robotic surgery (laparoscopy). The panel of judges defined innovation as “something new that creates new opportunities for growth and development” (Forbes, 2009). They did not limit themselves to product design but also used criteria such as problem-solving value – innovations that solved existing challenges. They did not think of innovations purely as ‘inventions’ that then needed to search for a user, application or market. One of the judges, Karl Ulrich, Chair, Operations and Information Management department at Wharton, cited the anti-retroviral treatments for HIV (number 30 on the list) as one such example saying, “We don’t think of that as a product design but we would think of it as an innovation.” (Forbes, 2009).

Be prepared though; while the current literature on innovation is extremely valuable and comprehensive, there is also a risk that it could make innovation appear more challenging and complex than it needs to be. Our own research has led us to believe that there are several assumptions about innovation that make it seem inaccessible and something that sits apart from what most of us do in our everyday lives. Far too many people perceive far too many barriers to being innovative, based on what we have identified as sometimes contradictory myths.

Therefore we would like to tackle some of the myths about innovation that, in our view, make the very concept of innovation daunting to most people.

Myth: Innovation only happens as the result of the work of a lone genius
When asked about innovation, many people imagine a laboratory, or a makeshift workshop where a single, dedicated inventor is inspired to work tirelessly in isolation for years to achieve a breakthrough. Genius of course has had a role to play in many of the major innovations of the past and no doubt it will always play some sort of role. Interestingly though, the evidence now suggests that this sort of innovation scenario is far less common than you think. Increasingly, innovation happens as the result of teamwork. In his book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson comes to the conclusion that from the beginning of the nineteenth century there has been a significant shift from individual breakthroughs to innovation emerging in collaborative environments where people come together and join forces, expertise and knowledge, and exchange views of the world to create something new (Johnson, 2010, p. 228). According to Jim McNerney, CEO at Boeing, ‘Innovation is a team sport, not a solo sport...It takes people working together across different groups, disciplines, and organizational lines to make it happen’ (McNerney, 2007, p. 9). In fact, by coming together and joining forces, the creative potential of each individual is amplified because the whole equals more than the sum of the parts.

What this implies is that you do not need to work alone, nor do you necessarily need to be a genius to come up with something innovative.

Myth: Innovation is only about major discoveries and big breakthroughs
Most people think that innovation has to be radical but in fact innovation can also be incremental. Radical innovation makes news because it is about major discoveries, breakthroughs and inventions that bring about something totally new and is considered a leap forward from what has gone before. Experts talk about this as discontinuous and even disruptive innovation (Christensen, 1997). Incremental innovation on the other hand is about taking what is already there and improving it or making things different in smaller steps. It can happen around products, processes, business models and services to improve customer experience. Economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr call this “tweaking” – refining and perfecting things that already exist or have been developed by others (Meisenzahl et al., 2011). The fact that you are adapting or improving does not make incremental innovation any less significant or any less innovative when the result is still something new and useful.

What this implies is that innovation is not necessarily the same as the invention of something totally new or different. Innovation can be incremental, happen in smaller steps and can be based on what already exists.

Inventors: Innovators or Tweakers?

Ask people to come up with a list of the great inventors of all time and the names will be familiar. From the past it is likely that you would see Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Louis Pasteur, the Wright brothers... From more present times, names such as Steve Jobs, Tim Berners Lee and Mark Zuckerberg would probably feature heavily. A closer examination of many names on the list would demonstrate that whilst many were indeed original thinkers often those we acknowledge as ‘inventors’ actually borrowed heavily from what went before, synthesising earlier inventions en route to being recognised as game changers. Nonetheless they possessed determination and vision and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Key to Symbols
• Mind Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Practical Coaching Tools for Innovation
• Part II: Bigger Thinking for Teams
• Final Words: Challenges and Opportunities
• Appendixes
• Bibliography
• Index