Can You Buy Innovation?
Last week, I read with some interest an article in BusinessWeek Sony Chases Apple’s Magic which was mostly about Sony’s poaching of Apple-ite Tim Schraff three years ago and how that’s worked out. (Mostly the article seems to suggest it hasn’t, although there have been some accomplishments.) Leaving aside the questionable decision to bring in an engineer to change an engineering culture, this lead me to wonder whether a company can just buy innovation.
My first impulse was to say, well, of course not, but then I remembered, wait, I’m a consultant. Companies come to us for innovation all the time. But here’s the difference: they come to us for new or improved products, not necessarily organizational change (although it sometimes causes that to happen). Bringing innovation to an organization is a different, arguably harder, task.
My old professor Dick Buchanan theorized there are four ways to change an organization as a designer:
- Through Products. Designers can create new products that change the way a company thinks about itself or how it goes about its work. The iPod did this for Apple.
- Design Attitude. This is what many people call “design thinking.” This is demonstrating and teaching a way of working that is more like designers do: rapid exploration of multiple ideas.
- Interactions. This is about the service design of organizations: how people inside the organization work together. These workflows can be designed.
- Values. Change the deeply held, often unspoken, values of the organization.
Interactions and, even moreso, values are very hard to change, and that’s the challenge Sony (and many, many other companies) has before it. It is much easier to buy innovative products (or buy the company that makes them) than it is to affect the underlying nature and operations of the company itself. Very few people get excited about a reorganization. Which is why I’m a firm believer in the tangible, in change via products. Certainly, products can be shallow as well, and can have little long-term impact on a company. But a product is something that companies can rally around, point to, and rap on a desk if necessary. There is something powerful and substantial, especially in tough economic times like these, in saying, We Make That. Because “that” (or the next “that”) could be something amazing.
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2 Comments
I believe that at the core of innovation is the passion of experts for a given field, be it products, management, attitude, etc.
Companies are looking for innovation, but my core belief is that they are paying for passionate expertise.
So this buzzword ‘innovation’ came along this year and every company that I worked with told us that was what they were looking for. It was mind numbing until I realized that as long as I was passionate about the products, and surrounded myself in the world of them, my expertise would show to the clients and innovations became a given through the iterative design we all practice.
The pessimist in me would suggest that ‘companies’ have become so lazy that they don’t realize that they’ve had to create special word and category that ultimately just means “do your job”, but I’m more positive than that. I see innovation as an opportunity for passionate people in this economic slump.
So to answer your question, “Can you buy innovation?” Yes, you can hire experts who love their jobs, though not always cheap, innovation will come of it.
This is a great point! I wrote about a similar idea a while back
http://unweary.com/2008/04/by-example.html
but didn’t apply it to actually changing the organization! I think that it is very true that a tangible symbol of what you are all about is a powerful change agent. Products do that. I think that’s why Jobs calls Apple a Product company.