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Hello,
Welcome to Connecting Dots, the monthly newsletter on Innovation Leadership by Brett Macfarlane.
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The Eight Schools of Innovation
One of the things I love about innovation is its generative energy. Unlike many other topics—say budgeting, risk management or seasonal sales promotion—innovation gets people excited. It signals hope and promises for the future.
Though I often meet many skilled professionals who see innovation as exclusive or not for them. They are intimidated or can't relate to the topic as innovation can seem very abstract, theoretical or merely buzz words.
In practice, innovation typically isn't exclusive or elitist. Not everyone makes a great innovator but a great innovator can come from anywhere. As well, innovation is a byproduct of collaboration and any professional can play a role. It’s not necessary to think of yourself as an innovator.
Within highly innovative cultures, you’ll find innovation all over. Not just the R&D department or an exciting new lab. Innovation happens in units of the team and different teams can serve different roles to the organization.
A helpful demystifying exercise is to approach innovation by what role innovation serves for a team or the wider organization. Whether in a finance department, research group, HR or the production line—your innovation work “doing things in a new way”—will serve different ends.
That’s the beauty of the modern organization, and the 50-year trend of decreasing hierarchy and increasing autonomy. Individual teams and programs innovate their work such that the sum is greater than the parts.
To help understand possible roles of innovation within a firm I use an exercise called Schools of Innovation. I call them schools because each has its own philosophy, processes, activities and outcomes. Many companies will have all of them happening at once.
Each of the eights schools is based on a role as described in the headline and mechanics described in brackets. Yes, as you start to think about your work, a single initiative or a team may move through schools as progress happens or integrate multiple at once.
Sometimes people are confounded by the reality innovation serves multiple ends in a single company. One of my best experiences of diffuse innovation is a surprise to many. The 300-year-old bank Barclays.
As a senior leader, I was running five product teams and multiple other initiatives concurrently. Each with a different role within the firm. For example, a day might look like:
9:00 Check-in with the core mobile banking teams and its mature siblings running Innovation as Process of continuous improvement.
10:30 Head upstairs to check in on another team in stealth reimagining core mobile banking in 3 years with Innovation as Exploration.
13:00 Attend a resource planning session for a new product scoping initiative where Innovation as Experimentation scientifically determined what feature set we should launch with.
15:00 Taxi down to an offsite facility where the Barclays Techstars Accelerator was giving executives Innovation as Learning where they would learn modern startup and entrepreneurship capabilities in exchange for their mentorship.
17:00 Start writing a business case for a provocation on “banking as a service” based on speculative design research to use Innovation as Vision for the purpose and logic of a bank in the future.
As I transitioned between very different innovation contexts these schools helped me understand what’s the job of innovation as a role within the business and the logic for how it is done.
The language of schools and the clarity of their role is very welcoming to people new to or anxious about innovation. This "why" we are doing it is more clear at the early stages before the "what" of findings, concepts or prototypes become real. Using the Schools of Innovation as a way to explain the why can be a helpful way to engage those whose help you'll need.
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About
This edition of Connecting Dots starts an experiment in writing for a broader audience. For experienced innovation leaders, it should remain interesting and insightful. Hopefully, it's also helpful to share with your non-innovator colleagues to build their confidence that they too can change the world.
I hope you’ll share your thoughts on my shift to a mass audience away from exclusively innovation leaders. It has been a growing shift in me. After getting a lot of expert validation last year I’ve started to see the biggest impact of my work comes from non-innovator audiences. People who didn’t realize they have the potential to see and solve unmet needs in their work.
While the expert one-to-one Innovation Leadership Map coaching program and executive group facilitation remain core to my work, the growth area for me is the non-innovator. It’s an optimistic and great use of my experience and capabilities. It’s rewarding seeing people see and apply potential and capabilities they didn’t realise they had.
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