Innovation Frustration

"Go Innovate!" comes the cry from the top.  They just know that if the team can come up with the right something that marketshare, valuation, and all good things will fall from the sky.  They've read Christensen's books, been chastised by various VC's and in general seen other companies take their cookies away.  The problem is that there is NO realization of the reality that that creates.  What happens is that each team member searches around for some part of the problem that speaks to them.  They feel the emotional connection to something that they personally wish was better and they go off and build something great to solve that slice.  That emotional connection is a powerful motivator, and in fact is the key to all great development. With great pride, they come to management with either their idea or even better, a built thing, ready to do the gather and cast routine and get their due kudos.  At which point, management looks at the results of their request, realizes it doesn't quite match the internal requirements that were sitting unspoken in their collective heads.  They tell the innovators "nice, job, but not quite what we're looking for.  Go off and try again!"

The dangerous part of this has to do with team moral.  Repeat this a couple of times and the best motivated employee becomes convinced that management is a bunch of short-sighted, time wasting idiots and they go back to not working from their hearts, but punching the clock, needing exact specs so they can do just what they are paid to do without risking more rejection and knowing that their instincts are not trusted.  Ive seen this happen way to many times and it is a silent killer of motivation, because the innovator in question is embarrassed by their failure and therefore likely won't vent any of that frustration directly.  The solutions are twofold.

• Management be much more honest and specific about the constraints of the problem
• Identify what the real customer opportunity areas and focus on those.

For the management side, if people are really honest with themselves, there are usually specific business goals that hide behind the request for innovation.  It's not that they want a better photo upload experience, what they really want is an increase in the viewer signups so the viral spread increases.  But in WAY too many cases, they don't want to expose those business needs to the team because they feel like it shows weakness in their current model, or they can't express it in a way that bridges the gap between doing good business which may come across as heartless and doing the "right thing" for the users. Expressing the innovation requirement as the intersection between those to points is trickly, but ultimatly clever people need to know the rules of the game before they can figure out how to win it.

The customer opportunity is something we've talked about before.   This is that process of paying careful attention to how the customer does the job in your are and which parts of doing that job are annoying them now.

Do this wrong and no one is happy with the results, and you kill your golden goose.  In this case, they only keep laying if you like the eggs. :-)

Source: Strategyn.com