An innovation map to guide deliberate creativity

Mapping innovation goals by type of strategy and style of creativity can guide selection of innovators, tools, and  processes for deliberate creativity.

	Cost Leadership	Benefit Leadership
Adaptive	Improvements to current production process	Incremental improvements to current product or service to improve benefits
Innovative	Disruptive change to a new production process, delivering far lower costs than previous technology.	Transforming the nature of the product or service to deliver additional benefits the customer is ready to pay for.

In this mapping the two upper quadrants utilize adaptive creativity, as defined by Michael Kirton.  People and organizations of this style seek incremental changes to current methods, while those he characterizes as more to the innovator end of the scale seek ideas that challenge many more of the assumptions about the problem.

Strategy is mapped along original dimensions of Michael Porter, with the left quadrants seeking changes that allow them to offer much lower prices, driving up volume.  The rightmost quadrants focus on making changes that differentiate the product or service from others, allowing increase in profits from the increased prices that customers are willing to pay. Although shown as four "quadrants", each dimension has many, many points from extreme to extreme.

Of course there is a lot more to be said about strategy and creativity than these dimensions, but this simplified map separates the innovations and improvements in a way closely related to how we organize to get new opportunities. Many organizations assign the different quadrants to different parts of the organization, or to different specialized programs.

For example a Six Sigma program can be expected to discover many opportunities in the Adaptive Cost Leadership quadrant, but would be exceptional if it discovered a highly innovative product with features that provided new and highly valued customer benefits.  On the other hand, a Design Thinking focused effort to develop innovative and transformative new products is unlikely to deliver many ideas to incrementally improve the current production process.  The lower left quadrant in which extreme creativity is focused on disruptively better production and delivery processes are very well described by Clayton Christensen in his many works growing out of "Innovators Dilemma".  Actions in the top right quadrant attempt to deliver the intended package of benefits and functions in new ways with more benefits per cost, with techniques such as Value Engineering.

Innovation is a critical investment of organizational resources.  It should be targeted at areas where the greatest return  seems possible, and enough years of benefit to earn back the investment costs of developing and implementing innovative ideas.  While all quadrants should be surveyed constantly, strongly focused efforts on the area with the highest apparent potential for each product or service should return the greatest long term success.

Most importantly, the team composition, data analyzed, and creative methods need to be carefully fit to the intentions.  Even when the same people, data, and creativity techniques are used in the different areas, the way they are used can be quite different.  Managers and consultants organizing and leading product or service focused innovation efforts, need to either understand which kind of innovation they are best prepared to lead, or have the ability to adjust their facilitation to match these differences, as well as organizational, discipline, and cultural backgrounds or innovators and the organizations they serve.


Further reading:

Christensen, Clayton M. , The innovator's dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail, Boston, Massachusetts, USA: Harvard Business School Press,  (1997).
Kirton, M. "Adaptors and innovators: a description and measure", Journal of Applied Psychology (61:5) 1976, pp 622–629
Porter, M.E., "Competitive Strategy: Techniques for analyzing industries and competitors" New York: The Free Press (1980).

Innovation may not be improvement...

Lovers of innovation may not realize that a change for the new and different might be better, but it might not be the best way to succeed.

Some organizations can benefit most from doing a better job of “working to plan”.   Programs such as of quality, motivation, better hires, or better training help everyone improve their compliance to procedures and processes, reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction.

Others might find more benefit in improving those plans and procedures for products and services.   Management science, industrial engineering, work simplification allow workers and experts to discover procedures which enable more production from the given resources.

For others, the greatest benefit lies in redesigning the product or service to better fit customer needs and values.   Approaches such as product improvement, industrial design, and Value Engineering make changes to the actual product design to deliver more customer benefit for lower costs.

Of course, other companies need to shift to a whole new industry or niche as either they are overwhelmed by competitors or the entire market or industry disappears as technology changes.

It makes sense for those investing resources in improvement or innovation to first consider which level gives them the best opportunity, because each of these target levels require different knowledge and different types of thinking.
 

Innovation or strategic leadership consists both of choosing which aspect of which level has the most potential and assembling and leading teams in the optimum kinds of thinking to discover opportunities.

And the ultimate organizational decision is to decide the balance between efficient operations and innovative search in various areas, because the investment and the cultural dynamics are quite different for each type.

As innovators and innovation promoters, we must consider the very real possibility that those resisting our efforts have a better grasp on the strategic potential of each level, and greatest potential for success might be in an area that bores us...

It is not all the same...

Natural creativity is awesome, enjoyable, and often beneficial, which leads  many to deliberately seek creativity with a variety of tools, techniques, and attitudes.  But there are an infinity of things to be more creative about, and some are much more likely to give more useful success.  Since creativity, no matter how enjoyable, is a limited resource, it makes sense to be choiceful about which things to target.  The company focusing its innovation on building a highly efficient and accurate production line for buggy whips really needs to notice the emerging car industry making horse drawn buggies obsolete.

The creativity of constantly improving processes and performance to better fit the plan seems to take a different mindset and a different set of mental tools than trying to invent a whole new thing to plan for.  Michael Kirton addressed this by assessing people's creative tendencies along a scale from adaptive to innovative.  This is practically identical with Michael Porter's writing on strategy where he suggests that companies must choose whether to compete by being the lowest cost producer or the one which succeeds by differentiation, making their product different from others.

It is important to note that these endeavors often require different techniques for making thinking and conversations more creative.  For example, the classic method of brainstorming is excellent for making long lists of short ideas, and has the additional benefit of building fluency and flexibility of thinking in individuals and groups.  But often the thinking necessary for a particular type of opportunity is not an assemblage of small ideas, but thinking in large complex patterns.  We need short lists of long ideas.  More complex approaches such as analogies, visual brainstorming, and even extensive incubation are more likely to come up with ideas like E=MC squared.

As we attempt to become effective advocates, facilitators, and leaders of deliberate creativity and innovation, we need to become adept at a broad set of tools to most efficiently and effectively apply our creativity and knowledge to the right targets.

Or we can wait to get lucky...