There is no “ROI” on Innovation – it is an end in itself

This post is a sequel to the the previous post titled “Innovation is not about ideas, but about execution!“, here are a few other thoughts, insights and learnings about Innovation.

1. The “central innovation team” myth: Innovation in an organization cannot be the responsibility of just a central team. Every group and every individual needs to do everyday things in an innovative manner. Every leader should take responsibility and ownership for innovation, and not just delegate to the central team. Every leader should ask himself / herself on looking back in time: Did I do enough to influence a culture of innovation?

2. The “Return on Investment” myth: It’s very interesting how many people have the expectation that there should be a “Return on Investment” (ROI) for what you spend on innovation. This is like expecting an ROI for excellence, or quality – rather absurd. Excellence and quality of deliverables are hygiene and non-negotiable factors. Similarly, innovation needs to be regarded as the end in itself. Innovation is its own reward. Organizations who seek to have a target “ROI” on innovation initiatives will never succeed.

3. Collaborative Innovation Trends:The days of going solo are fast receding. Whether individuals or organizations, innovation flourishes with partnerships, alliances, and a collaborative effort. In my opinion, this trend towards collaborative innovation rather than solo innovation is being fuelled by the increasingly connected society, as well as the larger scale problems that innovation needs to address today.

4. Intersection Points: Steve Jobs once said that his focus throughout was on the intersection of technology and the humanities. One of the triggers and among the most fertile grounds for innovation are the intersection points across disciplines. One example I can think of is healthcare and IT. With mobile applications, wearable devices, EMR analytics, and several other application areas, I feel the next decade will be about a lot of innovation in healthcare due to intersection with IT.

5. Anticipate Disruptions, avoid a short term focus: Innovation initiatives necessarily need to be looked at with a longer horizon, for example a 3 year window. A short term focus, for example quarter on quarter based on market trends and expectations, will not work. For example, disruptive innovations often are contrary to what the “market trends” appear to indicate as customer requirements. Therefore large companies find it difficult to adapt to disruptive innovations. This is a paradox, since those disruptions can then overturn the entire industry. Here are some examples of disruptions happening across industries. For simplicity, I am using the “>” character to denote “disrupted by”

1. Electric Bulbs > Tube lights > CFL > LED
2. Floppy Disks > Hard Disks > Solid State Drives
3. Mainframe > Workstations > Servers > Desktops > Laptops > Tablets/Smartphones
4. Postal Mail > E-mail > Unified Messaging
5. Nokia Symbian and RIM blackberry > iOS and Android (touch)
6. Keyboard, mouse (Traditional I/O devices) > touch screens > Gesture interfaces?
7. Print books, newspapers, magazines > digital versions
8. Traditional (Fuel) vehicles > Electric vehicles

As the incumbents on the left of the “>” get disrupted by the innovations on the right of the “>” character, it is interesting how the short term focus and immediate business compulsions results in the disruptions being ignored, till they wipe out the incumbents.

To be continued …..

Thanks for reading. The views expressed are my own. I’d welcome your comments, feedback and suggestions below. You can also send me a mail at shantanu.paknikar@gmail.com or connect on Twitter: @spaknikar

Innovation is not about ideas, it is about execution!

Innovation is a boring topic. Did that get your attention? My actual opinion is exactly the opposite – I cannot think of a more fascinating topic. Over the last few years, I’ve collected some random thoughts, insights, observations and learnings on Innovation into little notes scattered around my notebooks. This is an attempt to compile those into one place. You will be familiar with some of these; hopefully some others might be worth the read. This is the first post of a set, split up for quicker reading.

1. Contrarian Approach: For innovation to happen, you often need to depart from ‘established’ ways of thinking. The contrarian approach involves going against the tide, against popular opinion, and trusting your own judgement. You will be ridiculed, your opinions considered foolish. No problem. If you have the faith, you will find the way. One of my favorite examples of contrarian thinking is this: The optimum shape for a wheel need not be round. Or, we can have a square wheel. It just depends on the type of the road. [Still not clear? Please write to me]

2. Market Trends: Should innovation follow market trends, or should it create them? It’s interesting how “market research” determines what type of innovation initiatives should be taken up. However, what if there is no market to research? For example, the ‘Smartphone Market’ was really created by the iPhone (okay, some credit to Blackberry as well). However, if the product development of the iPhone depended on market research, it might have never got built. Jobs’ famous line: “Customers sometimes don’t know what they really want”.

3. Be different: Innovation is about doing things differently, not about doing different things. For example, in the IT industry, a focus on next generation and disruptive technologies is an example of doing something different. But that is not sufficient for innovation. What sort of solutions you build for customer problems using disruptive technologies has the potential for innovation.

4. Innovation is not about Ideas: Ideas are commodities today. In an increasingly networked world, it is arrogance to think that an idea itself can be completely unique. When you come up with an idea, accept that there are other equally smart people elsewhere in the world thinking on similar lines. What really matters is impact. Impact comes from the execution of an idea and going into production. No impact, no innovation.

To be continued …..

Thanks for reading. The views expressed are my own. I’d welcome your comments, feedback and suggestions. You can send me a mail at shantanu.paknikar@gmail.com or connect on Twitter: @spaknikar

The best answer to a question: What do you think?

One of the most fulfilling aspects of leadership is the impact that you can make on people. In my opinion, the maximum impact happens when you can trigger and influence the thought process itself. It is the power of thinking that makes us unique as humans, and in my opinion the role of a leader is to nurture, encourage and amplify that latent power in every person within that leader’s sphere of influence.

This is primarily the reason why my favorite answer to a question from a team member is invariably, “What do you think?”. The reactions are interesting. Usually, there is some surprise, possibly with the thought “If I knew the answer, why would I ask you?”. However, the question almost always nudges the person to start thinking, and possibly discover the answer along with some help from my side.

Sometimes of course there is total silence, or the person might say “I just don’t know”. There might now be a temptation to answer the question directly. My recommendation: Don’t provide the answer yet. One thing that I’ve noticed that works at this stage, in place of an answer, is another question starting with something like “What if …” or “How about ..”. You need to ask the right question, and guide the person opposite to the answer, which should equip the person to then discover the answer to the original question.

This technique of leadership and coaching is well known as the “Non-directive” approach. The focus is on empowerment, offering guidance, pointing out possible directions, asking a lot of questions and avoiding direct answers, and eventually enabling the other person to answer their own questions. To be avoided are direct answers (spoonfeeding), solving the other person’s problem, telling the other person what do do, and giving advice. One important leadership quality needed here is patience. It will take time for your team member to discover the answers and often it’s tempting to just tell them what to do. You might also not be able to use the technique in scenarios where the consequences of mistakes are high or there is no time available. In general though, over the longer term, as you apply the technique as often as you can, you will be able to build a team where you make yourself redundant. And, isn’t redundancy one of the objectives of leadership?

While this technique is typically employed for ‘senior’ personnel, I have had interesting results applying it to colleagues fresh out of college as well as the senior and mid-senior colleagues (If some of you are reading this, please accept this as a confession – my only intention was to ensure you did not need me to discover answers to your questions).

I am currently trying out the technique with my 9 year old daughter. It’s not going too well.

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I’d welcome any comments and feedback. You can leave a reply below or send me a message on Twitter @spaknikar

Seven Time Management Best Practices

There is a lot of literature on Time Management available, and the importance of managing time well is fairly well known. Even then, I see so many people (including myself) struggling to make time for the people and things that really matter. “I wish I had more time” is becoming an increasingly common wish. Every one of us appears to be really busy, and really short of time. However, here I am making time to write this, and you making time to read. Hopefully it will be time well spent – looking at a few practices to help manage time better.

1. Be aware of what your time is worth. To begin with, do you know how much one unit (say an hour) of your time is worth? A simple way to calculate would be to think of your weekly / monthly work hours and the corresponding work wages. From that, calculating an hour’s worth of your time is fairly simple. Even then, quite a lot of us don’t have this number easily available. Once you do know, then it can act as a fairly powerful motivator not to waste time any more. This is especially true as you move from your teenage years into adulthood, into middle age, and beyond. With age comes the realization that the clock is ticking relentlessly, we arent going to be around forever, and need to make the most of the time that we have.

2. Be clear about the benefits of managing time. While nobody disagrees that managing time is a good thing, how many people can quickly list out clear, tangible benefits? My favorites are: Work-Life balance, Work prioritization, Controlling stress, Improving productivity, and accomplishing the goals that are really important to us. The realization of benefits is another powerful motivator for us to get more organized and manage our time well.

3. Have a Time Management plan. Failing to plan is planning to fail. It is important to plan for each day, week, month, and year. A Time Management plan is a set of objectives with a schedule that works well for you. Creating a time management plan includes things such as setting your goals, prioritizing them, and setting timelines for each of them. A well-known practice is a “To-Do” list. In my opinion, more interesting is a “Not-To-Do” list. This helps you say “no” to whatever is not in your plan. Spending time doing things outside the plan is what results in the lack of time for what really matters.

4. Ensure that your task list is connected with your values. Your values are your belief system, the reason WHY you do something. They are the basis for your Goals, which provide the overall target you want to achieve. To achieve your goals, you create objectives, the intermediate steps to achieve your goals. Finally, to achieve your objectives, you put together your “To-Do” task list. The sequence goes, Values > Goals > Objectives > Tasks.

5. Prioritization is key. Another practice that helps is dividing your task list into four categories: Must Do, Should Do, Nice to Do and Do not Do. One way to understand these categories is using an “Urgent – Important” combination. Must Do are typically important and urgent things, Should do are the important but no so urgent things, Nice to Do are the not so important but urgent things and Do not Do are the unimportant things that are not urgent as well.

6. Watch out for Time Black Holes. A black hole in the universe sucks in everything, including light. A time black hole sucks in time. Interruptions, breaks, delayed meetings, unimportant and transactional emails are all time black holes. Try to avoid them as much as possible.

7. Avoid procrastinating. The most important and most urgent things are typically the most difficult. Human tendency is to procrastinate them and say, I’ll do this some time from now and rationalize by saying “I’m not in the best frame of mind to do this right now”. As the Must-Do items pile up, you find less and less time available for getting them out of the way, affecting all the future Must-Do items that will inevitably come up. The net result? “I just don’t have time!”

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