Systematic Innovation Breakfast Seminar - Feb 2012

On the 3rd of February, Western Power hosted a breakfast seminar attended by Western Power and Hargraves invited guests. Darrell Mann took them through a presentation titled 'Innovation 2.0 – The Science of Innovation' in which he covered three topics.

• The right insight – 95% of projects focus on the wrong question
• The right solution – someone, somewhere has already solved your problem (the underlying foundation of Systematic Innovation – TRIZ)
• The right execution – innovation can be the cruellest game in town as failure to execute any one step in the innovation process from ideation to commercialisation can undo the total project

To achieve WOW innovation you need to engage at all levels inside the organisation. Garry Hamel outlined 4 levels of innovation within an organisation:

• Process innovation – make it better
• Technology / offering innovation – make it different
• Strategy / management innovation – sell it differently i.e. have a different business model
• Leadership innovation – work differently

You can’t innovate at the Process and Technology level without innovating at the strategy / management / leadership level if you want to stand out from your competitors.

Darrell Mann is in the process of testing an Innovation Capability Maturity Model (more will be revealed at the Hargraves Conference) which addresses the often asked question of “what is the best way to innovate” and while he used to answer with a classic consultant’s reply of “ it depends....”, he now knows what is depends on and that is the level that your organisation is at along the innovation journey.

His team has found that there are five levels along this journey: L1 Seeding, L2 Championing, L3 Managing , L4 Strategising and L5 Venturing.  You need to decide what level you want your organisation to operate at (not everyone wants to be a 5) and then you will find that the usefulness of the Systematic Innovation tools will depend on what level you are at.

Questions revolved around the cultural / human aspects of the Innovation Journey and queries about why was Apple so successful and what happened at Kodak.