“Aha” moments: Innovation of the Past

The Unproductive Beliefs of Innovation

"Think outside the box. Let’s make world-class products and services for our customers. We’re going to disrupt the fill in the blank industry!” If this makes you cringe to read as much as it did for me to write, it’s likely you're familiar with the symptoms of innovation-culture dysfunction today: resentment towards lost time, growing skepticism of an organization’s ability to deliver something new, and lack of momentum towards doing something different from the way it’s always been done.

These symptoms indicate that innovation as a practice within an organization is misrepresented as instant discoveries and “aha” moments, and implies the expectation that newness is an event of thoughtless chance rather than intentional discovery and creation.

Counter to the elusive “aha” moment, increasingly complex problems facing our world today require a more predictable, sustainable approach to innovation. Problems need a diversity of thought to serve people unlike yourself and impact more than one population at a time. An innovation strategy encourages different ways of working that adopt a multidisciplinary point-of-view.

What is Innovation Strategy?

Innovation strategy takes into account the future of an organization from its products and services to its overall employee and customer experience from a multidisciplinary point-of-view, rather than in a traditional manner in which each discipline view strategic implications through their individual lenses. Innovation strategy is an intentional approach for evolving culture, organization structure, and behavioral habits with the purpose of creating mutually beneficial dynamics to support different ways of working required to launch something new. The impact of an innovation strategy is cultural, organizational, and behavioral change over time rather than in a single moment.

New innovations often include products, services, and customer experiences, but they should first and foremost include the experience of employees. While this may seem counterintuitive to the “customer first” mantra many companies rally their employees around, former Southwest Airlines CEO, Herb Kelleher characterized the resulting value of prioritizing employees above all else.

“Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.”

Innovating successfully means bringing together more than one discipline with the shared purpose of creating employee and customer experiences that drive far more business and emotional value that could be achieved by any one discipline alone.

Innovation strategy draws on the current state in order to iteratively define the future of an organization’s customers and prospects, employees, and its position in a market over time. It is an organization’s ability to overcome the unproductive beliefs of the past where “aha” moments reigned and instead move towards sustainable, repeatable innovation.

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This article is adapted from a longer piece originally published by the School of Design and Creative Technologies in the College of Fine Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. For more context and stories, read the full article on their site.