The recent Innovation Week events gave me a chance to meet a lot of people and hear almost as many view points about innovation. Some of the conversations made me wonder, do we sometimes put innovation in a special box?
For instance, what do the following statements relate to?
- ‘It’s about the culture of an organisation’
- ‘It’s everyone’s job’
- ‘It’s about leadership’
- ‘I’m not given enough time to do it’
- ‘It’s no good trying to do that at my organisation’
- ‘I’m a policy officer, it’s not seen as part of my role’
- ‘I’m too busy dealing with the needs of our clients/stakeholders’
- ‘I’m not given the skills, training, support or guidance’
I’ve heard all of these said about innovation. Equally though, on other occasions, I’ve heard them said about:
- Human resources/management – ‘It’s about the culture of an organisation’
- Legal processes – ‘It’s everyone’s job’
- Strategy – ‘It’s about leadership’
- Information management – ‘I’m not given enough time to do it’
- ICT/computer systems – ‘It’s no good trying to do that at my organisation’
- Communications – ‘I’m a policy officer, it’s not seen as part of my role’
- Finance/administration procedures – ‘I’m too busy dealing with the needs of our clients/stakeholders’
- Any function that has not been effectively integrated with the agency’s processes – ‘I’m not given the skills, training, support or guidance’
These functions are all things that:
- you can receive training in and instruction on even though it may not be the main responsibility in your job
- some people seem to have a gift for them or are more inclined and interested towards them
- organisations often provide support for them through a dedicated area or part of a team
- even though somewhere else in the organisation supports/facilitates/coordinates it, other people in the organisation may do it as part their job (even if it is only occasionally)
- can be jobs (‘I’m a project manager/legal counsel’) or skills (‘I have project management/law experience’)
- an organisation does not generally want going wrong.
Is innovation different to these other common functions and processes? Does it have characteristics that set it apart from those other functions that mean that it should not be organised in a similar fashion?
The Innovation Matrix
I think a useful starting point for looking at this question is Tim Kastelle’s ‘Innovation Matrix.’
The matrix is based on a premise that organisations can only become good at innovation if they are both committed to it and increase their competence at it 1. This is pretty logical – no organisation can expect to get better at something if they do not support it and actively try to get better at it.
If we accept this framework, there are no ‘unicorns’ – organisations that are very competent at innovation but with low commitment towards it. You cannot be very good at innovation if you are not committed. You can be very committed to innovation but unless you also focus on competence, on the practice of innovation, the organisation is likely to just be ‘bewildered’ (though perhaps with the occasional insightful moments).
The ability to be consistently good at innovation (in fact to be consistently good at any activity) requires both commitment and focus on competence – e.g. it requires integration into the organisation’s structure, planning, processes, practices and culture.
In the public sector this explicit commitment and focus on competence is likely to be even more important than in the private sector. The default position for public sector agencies, which includes an understandable bias towards risk aversion, is unlikely to naturally favour innovation. Innovation therefore needs to be integrated into how an agency operates if it wants to ensure that a focus on compliance and avoiding irreversible mistakes is balanced by experimentation, learning and improvement.
Making innovation routine
In stretched financial times resourcing an additional function can be a hard ask. But what if we turn the question around? In a time of significant change, where new demands and constraints are being placed on agencies, can an agency afford not to do things differently? Is it sufficient to be:
- Not innovating very much
- Thinking about innovation
- Bewildered, or
- Accidental innovators?
Not every agency will want or need to be a ‘world class innovator’. But it is hard to think of an agency that will be comfortable with an approach to innovation that is, in Tim Kastelle’s terms,‘not very much’ or ‘bewildered’.
Now ‘bureaucratising’ innovation may seem counter-intuitive – innovation is about creativity, exploration, play, experimentation and doing things differently. But it is also a process and one that is about operating within constraints, risk management (not avoidance), while achieving desired outcomes. Agencies will need to innovate to achieve some of their desired outcomes, and must organise for innovation accordingly.
Just as different agencies and different sized agencies will organise and undertake other routine functions differently, and focus on different aspects, so too will it be with innovation. Empowering Change: Fostering Innovation in the Australian Public Service and the APS Innovation Action Plan both recognise that. They provide the framework, but it is up to agencies to decide the appropriate levels of commitment and competence that is right for their situation. And I think we are seeing that in agencies – but like any new function, it will take time to work out how it best fits with all of the other functions, processes and traditions that make up an organisation.
It should be noted that just because an organisation does attempt to make innovation routine, it is not guaranteed that they will become good at or excel at it (just like any other function). Rather, it is difficult to see how they will become consistently good at innovation if they do not intergrate it into their ongoing processes.
Why now?
Of course, public sector agencies have been innovating for much of their history (just like private sector firms). If organisations have managed before without it making it routine, why now? I think the reasons include that:
- we are beginning to learn a lot more about how the innovation process works, particularly in the public sector. If you want a good result out of service design there is growing agreement over the practices that you should follow. If you want to use competitions and challenges to drive new outcomes then there are certain parameters that you should operate within to get a good result. The same is the case for many other approaches (which is why we have been developing the Innovation Toolkit)
- as we become more experienced with various innovation processes and methodologies the associated skill-sets to do them well will expand
- much of the ‘low hanging fruit’ has been reached – many of the easier gains from business process improvement and innovation have been made. To achieve greater gains will require a more sophisticated approach to innovation.
Your thoughts
What do you think? Is innovation different? Or will it too have to be made a routine function of organisations?
- Tim Kastelle identifies that competence requires such things as the successful execution and diffusion of ideas, the practice of different forms of innovation (e.g. service, organisational or conceptual), undertaking both big and small innovations, being good at all the stage along the ideas management process, building a culture of systematic experimentation. Innovation commitment involves innovation as a core value, providing supporting systems such as ideas management systems, dedicated resources, innovation metrics, management support and innovation integrated into strategy. For a detailed explanation see http://timkastelle.org/blog/2012/04/the-innovation-matrix-explained-innovation-competence/ and http://timkastelle.org/blog/2012/04/the-innovation-matrix-explained-innovation-commitment/. ↩
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I agree that organisational/domain boundaries are usually an obstacle to innovation, both horazontally and vertically, within and between entities. Lead roles are often interpreted as “owning” a subject area”, with all the predictable property-related behaviours resulting.
Much of the public sector operates that way currently, as that is how the funding and delegated authority, and the accountability structures for each, are arranged. Ministers’ offices are unlikely to thank someone for generating a massive “win” for another portfolio or, worse, a win that cannot be claimed by any portfolio and may thus constitute an unattributed and uncontrollable addition to “the commons”.
To me, at the heart of the issue is the tension between specialist interest and general interest – generalists – individuals, professions or entities – can be conduits to bring new thinking into speciality areas, albeit that this importation of knowledge may be implacably resisted by specialist entities who may ...
... perceive the purity of their endeavour diminished by the introduction.
A rambling post. On-message summary would be “Innovation can be routine, just as sustainability, inclusivity, transparency and fairness can be routine, but the proof is in the new habit replacing the old.”
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Bill – I think your point there about accountability structures is really important. In a democratic system, there’s always going to be a tension about the appropriate level of innovation, and ensuring that an innovation is, in fact, ‘authorised’. Given the public sector’s responsibilities, a question would have to be asked about whether it was appropriate for someone to generate a ‘win’ for another portfolio, unless there has been bureaucratic and political agreement, and the relevant level of supported collaboration leading up to that.
I agree that there can be a tension between specialist and generalist interests and this could be exacerbated by an organisation introducing innovation as a core function. However, I think that just as with those other functions I mention, such a tension is something that organisations have to manage if they want to be successful at them. If an organisation wants to or needs to achieve significant ...
... innovation in its operations then it needs to treat innovation as a systemic process. I’d be interested to hear of any systemic processes that have been successfully introduced where there is not a degree of organisational ‘custodianship’. E.g. inclusivity is usually facilitated by HR areas, transparency by legal or comms areas. As I note in the post, just because it is done this way is no guarantee that it will be successful – rather it’s a question of how it can be done if it is not done this way.
I’d also clarify that I’m not arguing that innovation should be a discrete function, rather it needs to be an explicit function – e.g. it needs to be identified and for it to be integrated into structures and responsibilities.
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I think I will enjoy reading about achieving innovation more if we replace the term “innovation” with other words that describe what innovation was describing in each instance. I am weary of innovation being discussed as a discrete organisational function or aspect of organisational culture and activity. In fact, it is an outcome of a whole range of characteristics and circumstances that may be more effectively identified and dealt with if treated in their own right, rather than constituents of a wider but nebulous concept.. Just sayin’….
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Thanks for the comment Bill. I would ask though – could the same thing not be said about human resource management? Or procurement?
I think for any large organisation there need to be systems in place. Without such systems, those individual characteristics and circumstances that you point to are going to be a lot harder. I think innovation does need to be supported and facilitated as an explicit activity (one that will likely be done across much of the organisation) otherwise it will always struggle to compete with the more pressing ‘business-as-usual’ activities. Innovation may be a nebulous concept, but aren’t a lot of the things that organisations do just bundled together under broader headings, even though the exact elements of success for each of them will of course be dependent on the specific context and situation?
If we don’t use the term innovation, then I think we lose the ability to ...
... draw out and consider the various characteristics – and the necessary pre-conditions – that are common for successfully introducing new activity and ways of thinking. This has been important for many other fields of activitiy common to large organisations and bureaucracies, so why not for innovation?
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I have to agree with the Bill about the misuse of the word.
If you want a theorecical framework to work to, then you have to have an understanding of any word. It’s often thought that innovation comes from the Latin “innovare” = new star, whereas the original greek seems to mean “adapt”. So as a description of “a discrete organisational function”, it’s impossible. What we are watching, on the web, in all publicly funded orgs, is old institutions of “service delivery” trying to mash up in order to increase efficiencies. That’s stillborn, as we try and have agency employees ‘deliver’ independently without adapting their processes to “the users”‘ many of whom, these days can often self-service better than most government employees in a silo.
It’s the same in the edu sector, where we have ongoing attempts at “quality education” & “cross disciplines”, as if it were something ...
... that money could solve. Perhaps a place to begin is from is in an understanding of how institutions (as opposed to orgs) are built and, over time, adapt to one another. (where institutions have Hayek’s meaning http://www.libertarianismo.org/livros/fahtfc.pdf )
The problem we do have, due to the habits of old media, is always building the “get together points” at some institutional domain. You can imagine,e.g. old habits require all researchers to stick their papers in an (open)org’s repository, after which their librarians complain that they have to pay a publisher for aggregating organisational papers and then selling them back to individual orgs’ libraries. That’s one perfect illustration of a complete lack of innovation, which always starts with a imaginative idea, and more practically, collaboration between peers ‘inside’ institutions.
That’s why just watching the EU orgs fracture is quite a good lesson in innovation. As you say Alex, “a lot of the things that organisations do (are) just bundled together (i.e. duplicated) under broader headings. The systemisation of innovation won’t occur until orgs agree on the what these headings are and give each of them their own inter-org domains.(as edu institutions are to do with their “learning spaces”.)
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Nice post.
Innovation, requiring as it does engagement and commitment from employees, implies a markedly different attitude to staff, employment, and the world of work in general, than that which prevails in the majority of organisations today. In the Marshall Model I call this the Synergistic mindset (conducive to systematic innovation) and the Analytic mindset (inimical to systematic innovation).
Thus, to systematise innovation, an organisation will have to successfully transition its collective mindset 180 degrees. No mean feat. NB This is similar to the challenge of adopting a company-wide Lean or Agile approach.
- Bob
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Thanks Bob – I agree, making innovation routine or core is a lot easier said than done. I suspect you are right and that this would be similar in some ways to adopting a lean approach. I wonder to what degree the transitions would be compatible?
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I’ll certainly agree that the “Innovation process” is about synergy, so analysis of “what’s there” is a barren tree.
But I think we’ll find, eventually, that so long as we get past the institutional mindset, and think in terms of disciplinary-centric groups (who are trying to figure out the best ways, and agree on the “right” tools to colloborate) the “ah-ha” moment is not too far away.
That 180 degees is a longitudinal link across the vertical silos. The problem here, and I’m biased/limited towards considering this transition as a movement from MEDIA domains (like govspace.gov.au or http://daa.ec.europa.eu/ ) to hubs of inter-institutional groups who have their own ” virtual room”, is that our institutions are yet to agree on a directory to the domains, and the tools/services, which will be used, by “their” groups to coordinate their activities.
It’s a bit of a Catch 22 at the ...
... moment. We could agree on the directory, which would appear on every institutional website to point to an inter-institutional group’s shared (social) space. That’s not so hard. It’s just a matter of involving the archivists in its design. And to be clear here, just consider these two approaches.
http://www.naa.gov.au/records-management/digital-transition-policy/index.aspx
http://www.naa.gov.au/records-management/agency/digital/socialmedia/index.aspx
One, like govdex, is for groups of ‘institutional insiders’. One, like govspace, ignores the institutional divisions/domains between inside and outside citizens.
As for the services, that’s just a matter of making sure the cost is zero or close to it, and the network engineers at aarnet, and it’s global peers, are trying to get their research on a innovative public emplyees radar.
The real drivers of Innovation? People/ community managers/moderators like Alex who ask questions like “how do YOU do it?” Video conferencing as one case of “product centic” discussions. It’s just unfortunate that the audience is limited to the gov(.au) domain. In the development of these (inster-institutional) learning spaces, the edu sector is where the question needs to be asked.
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A Frenchman’s approach to Innovation. http://www.cairn.info/article.php?ID_ARTICLE=JIE_009_0003
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It’s funny,
Innovation doesn’t seem to have at all the same meaning in English as the original Latin, and the way it gets treated in Europe. Innovation, by definition is considered “social adaption”, so trying to consider it from the organisational perspective is quite meaningless. Innovation may be considered the antithesis of, or foil to, management. The flexibility for social adaption, so far as publically funded sectors and agencies are concerned, is a quality of strengthening the ties between peers who do similar things, ‘inside’ different agencies (to a degree) and sectors (to a much greater degree).
The most basic sectoral “interchange”, so far as the French, Italians and other Nations who include Philosophy as the basis of a good education, is that between the habits of educational institutions and governmental institutions. Their habits, structure and values must align. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the one predominant difference is that, due ...
... to the old habits of a welfare state “delivering” services, a citizen (inside or outside a gov agency) simply has no means to contribute their knowledge for the greater good. Agencies are funded, individually, to deliver ONE service to ALL citizens efficiently and woe and betide anyone who attempts to disrupt their (overly) well defined completion.
So, on the inside of public institutions we see complaints about bullying http://apsozloop.ning.com/profiles/blogs/submission-to-bullying-inquiry-the-totalitarian-practices-of-corp while on the outside, citizens are considered apathetic and bureaucrats are considered unresponsive or “stone wallers”.
(even Wikipedia has bureaucrats).
So far as “systemizing innovation”, in government/education it seems to come down to one thing = utility. If one can define the easiest and simplest way to get something done, and influence others about how, with a slight change in technique and a few additional skills, they can do it to, we’re half way along to implementing a new (what in time will be called) Institution (of education and government).
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