Michael Schrage, speaking at the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance conference (10th anniversary – happy birthday!) in Portland Thursday night (I’ll be giving the luncheon keynote Friday), offered this important reminder:
Innovation isn’t what innovators do.
It’s what clients or customer adopt.
There’s no lack of good ideas.
There’s massive frustration in implementation.
What follows ‘We can’t do that because…’
is your organizations innovation culture.
Truth.
We’ve been thinking a lot about implementation lately, in part because we see so much of it not happening, so much money left on the table, or on the factory floor. Showing companies the money — the business case, the healthy ROIs — turns out to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for change.
What are the barriers? and the sufficient conditions for change? Like I said, I’ve been thinking about that a lot, and will have some thoughts to offer soon. (And some new offers to our clients as well.)