The innovation blog

Tawnya Starr is the president of an American company called PrinterPresence that makes money by helping printers improve their websites. So when she says too many printers apply to a “do it cheap” mentality online, she is hardly a disinterested party. Unfortunately, she also happens to be absolutely right. Her stats suggest that 76% of print customers look online before spending  – and that’s why she recommends that printing websites enable buyers to design, personalise, proof and place their order without having to make a phone call.

Many bosses say they want innovation, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor observes, but “operate by a set of hidden principles designed to prevent innovations from surfacing or succeeding.” You can find her nine ways to kill innovation using the link below, but three struck me as particularly pertinent.

“If I had an hour to save the world,” Albert Einstein once observed, “I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions.” And yet, as Stephen Shapiro points out in the European Business Review , most businesses, as they strive to be innovative, do the exact opposite – and fail spectacularly. Shapiro cites the example of a UK bank which did the traditional thing that companies do when they want to innovate but don’t know why or how – asked staff for suggestions to improve the business. 

“You must offer all sorts of value beyond the literal merchandise. Being big will not save you.” 

A quick review of the major social media disasters of 2012 (http://mashable.com/2012/11/25/social-media-business-disasters-2012/ ) is enough to terrify any managing director or sales and marketing director. The funniest catastrophe was this eloquent tweet from a disgruntled employee at the US ticket sales company Stub Hub: “Thank f**k it’s Friday! Can’t wait to get out of this stubsucking hell hole.” Astonishingly, many of these disasters have the same root cause: companies not controlling who Tweets from their corporate account. How many employees have to be fired, how many apologies have to be posted and how many companies have to have their reputations damaged before they learn this simple lesson?

What’s the point of having a strategy when everything is changing so rapidly and radically? That is a question many business executives have raised with Roger Martin (http://rogerlmartin.com), the Dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto. While he understands the thinking behind the excuse, he points out: “If we live in an uncertain, turbulent, fast-moving world today, why would it be any different a week, a month, a rear from now?” He argues that that companies that say they don’t ‘do strategy’ actually have one in reality because every day, hour and minute they have to make choices and decisions. If they are taken without any reference to agreed goals, companies risk making daily choices that are incoherent, contradictory and inconsistent.