What I Read – McKinsey Quarterly, April 2015 Issue.

Tags

essentials of innovation, innovation, McKinsey Quarterly, organization, technology

Here is what I noted from the article “The eight essentials of innovation” by Marc de Jong, Nathan Marston, and Eric Roth:

The first four are strategic and creative in nature, help set and prioritize the terms and conditions under which innovation is more likely to thrive. The next four essentials deal with how to deliver and organize for innovation repeatedly over time and with enough value to contribute meaningfully to overall performance.

1. Aspire – a far-reaching vision can be a compelling catalyst, provided it’s realistic enough to stimulate action today.
2. Choose – many companies run into difficulty less from a scarcity of new ideas than from the struggle to determine which ideas to support and scale.
3. Discover – look for insights by methodically scrutinizing three areas: a valuable problem to solve, a technology that enables a solution, and a business model that generates money from it. You could argue that nearly every successful innovation occurs at the intersection of these three elements.
4. Evolve – most big companies are reluctant to risk tampering with their core business model until it’s visibly under threat. At that point, they can only hope it’s not too late.
5. Accelerate – cautious governance processes make it easy for stifling bureaucracies in marketing, legal, IT, and other functions to find reasons to halt or slow approvals. Too often, companies get in the way of their own attempts to innovate.
6. Scale – explicitly considering the appropriate magnitude and reach of a given idea is important to ensuring that the right resources and risks are involved in pursuing it.
7. Extend – companies in nearly every sector have conceded that innovation requires external collaborators. Flows of talent and knowledge increasingly transcend company and geographic boundaries.
8. Mobilize – the best companies find ways to embed innovation into the fibres of their culture, from the core to the periphery.

And how this is applicable? I personally have enough of all kinds of lists and consider them not helpful at all. Practice of innovation thrown at that model would mean (in my opinion) that you should be doing points 1, 3 and 4 at once – evolution of your existing business model is part of discovery, aspiration helps you evolve or jump somewhere, and if you are lucky you will have something to choose from. After you have chosen, you move to the other four essentials – cut the red tape, and see it work. All easier said that done.