Innovation as Usual by Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell, HBR Press

This new book, by a professor at the Spanish Business School IESE and the Head of a New York consulting firm, challenges some conventional thinking about innovation, in particular the preference for away days and taking people out of the business to encourage ‘blue sky’ thinking.  Instead the argument is that innovation must not be separated from the job but must instead be part of the everyday activities of all key people, not just a chosen few.  All must be 'innovation architects' which, by no coincidence, happens to be the name of the co-author’s consultancy firm.

This argument is supported by emphasis on six key behaviours or, as they are described, ‘the 5+1 keystone behaviours’.  The extra one is that of persistence, without which the other five will wither.  These five behaviours have a chapter devoted to each of them, a nice simple structure that makes the book easy to navigate.  The five behaviours are:

·        -  Focus

·         - Connect

·         - Tweak

·         - Select

·         - Stealthstorm

All except the last bullet may seem rather obvious but there are important points made in each chapter, not necessarily breakthroughs in thinking but useful reminders of good practice.  The message around Focus is that it is important to provide key people with guidance around the areas where they should be thinking creatively, in particular the company’s strategy should make it clear where that focus should be.  ‘Focus beats freedom’ is their message.  Though this point is well argued, my initial response was that this is too dogmatic; there must be occasions when free thinking is desirable; more about this later.

The need to Connect is about having access to external sources, the key message being that true insight comes from contact with a range of perspectives; thus innovators must seek and be given opportunities to access external domains where the views of customers, competitors, suppliers and other external bodies can be sought.  It is also about maximising internal sharing, providing ‘creative space’ for this to happen.  The example quoted is Steve Jobs’ design of Apple’s headquarters to maximise opportunities for such interactions (it was surprising and perhaps significant that this was the book’s only mention of Apple, see later).

The arguments behind Tweak and Select are that there are usually too many ideas to implement so a process of filtering is essential.  Tweaking is about challenging because many initial ideas are flawed and need rejecting or changing at an early stage, for which there must be rigorous testing processes.  The further and less obvious point is that the normal selection processes contain inbuilt bias which affects judgment; there is a need to have systems which encourage objective, thorough analysis, irrespective of where the idea has come from.  This requires gatekeepers who have been properly trained and what the authors call a ‘engineered decision environment’.  This seems sensible but hardly different from the innovation funnel processes that exist in many top companies already and which are sometimes criticised for slowing down decision making.

Stealthstorm is a less obvious heading and is about the importance of managing ideas through the corporate culture and the political influences which impact decisions.  Rather than trying to remove innovators from the politics, there should be concerted efforts to embrace it, to remove anything which is counter cultural.  The idea is to encourage innovators to ‘play politics’, to use this as a positive factor to guide projects through the system.

At this stage of the book I began to feel frustration because I was looking for a debate about how this argument fitted with the other school of thought, that you must take innovators away from the politics and the culture if they are to be truly creative.  The most well-known example of this was Steve Jobs in his early Apple days, creating secret ‘Skunk-works’ where a team could work in isolation, away from the bureaucracy and culture.  The fact that the book does not quote this example or any others of its kind, suggests that it is only looking at one side of the argument.  I would like to have seen a debate and maybe some guidance on the different stages or types of innovation when the different approaches apply.

So in this sense the book disappoints, though it makes some valid points and provides some useful guidance for those who want to bring greater awareness of innovation into the normal workplace.  On balance however, I feel that its contents probably justify an HBR article rather than a book.  It is padded out with some rather obvious points and theoretical arguments.  It would also have benefitted from more examples from top companies; there were some good stories but too many were disguised or anonymous, thus reducing their impact.

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