Discussion on:

How to kill innovation, in five easy steps

What tips can you share on this topic?

Link to original post:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/how-to-kill-innovation-in-five-easy-steps/8348

That was good. Clean, tight, to the point. Further, sounds like it comes from you and your own direct TR experience, and not some amalgam of a rehash of an MBA latest and greatest way to do things.

Unfortunately, where I work now, it seems your buddy status is more important than what you bring to the table. If you are in, you get away with outrageous breaches of protocol, best practices and plain ole' manners.

I'm quickly finding somewhere else to hang my hat.

If you don't act on the good ideas suggested - people wont bother to suggest any more in future. After all - what's the point?

...to stifle innovation. 3M is successful because it encourages its employees to come up with new ideas and develop them.

I enjoyed it.

The headline says five, there are numbers 1. - 5. but the line below seems to need an editor in a couple of ways.

Here are six things that a lot of leaders and companies do stifle innovation.

maj

All in all a good list.

maj

edmerc

you are not alone nor are you the only one thinking about go to a better place. Where I am, we have some technical cavemen who think they can rule the world just because they have spent 10+ years in the company

Many times, the underlings have some really good ideas; usually created from their hands-on experience with frustrations. Each represents an opportunity to innovate. Failing to listen to these leads to missed opportunities and unhappy employees.

I once worked for a mobile phone company that had recently merged with another company. Even though my original company was the aggressor, the department director came from the other company. I invented a HTML page that allowed us to access our resources much faster, and when others saw me using it, I gave it to them as well. I even contacted a friend I made in the other company's department so that they would have access to it too. (After advising my supervisors and manager first, who I liked a lot.) Lo and behold this director pays us a visit, and sees me using the tool. After a nice fifteen minute browbeating about using this "unauthorized" tool, my supervisors and managers got in trouble because I advised them first. Now, NONE of us are with the company (Including the director, fired for his incompetence!) Having protocol a priority over performance will KILL innovation in any company.

I work with data/dashboards, and I think most organizations discount dashboards when the "gut check" seems different. If a dashboard was created such that it measures what you want it to measure and it is important to the organization, you should use dashboards. The examples you give talk about not getting enough data or that data being inconclusive - if a dashboard is built correctly, you don't have those problems. Sure, you may not be able to say with statistical confidence that you are doing better/worse in an area if the change is small, but at least you know that your goals are or are not being met. Outcome and procedure goals are important, if they are developed with the goals of the organization in mind.

Data doesn't do you any good without common sense and context. You can't quantify everything and poor managers can always lie with data.

Of course the opposite would also be a problem -- all gut feeling and ignoring the data.

How true. I think of Taco Bell years ago, when apparently sales weren't quite up to snuff. They laid blame on their advertising agency and fired them. You remember the chihuahua? Of course you do! That ad agency commandeered an entire breed of dog and associated it with Taco Bell! Perhaps some metric popped up on management radar that pointed to advertising as the culprit. Not food, not service, but the dog. Just sayin'.

EVERYbody liked the dog. Those ads made me go back to try their horrible food again! Now, if they'd quit selling crappy mexican food that gives you diarrhea...

I have worked with statistics for a decade and one certain rule of statistics, they can always be skillfully manipulated to say exactly what you want them to say. Common sense, and an intimate understanding of your business and direction should always take precedent.

I remember spending 6 months on a team that (among several dozen other more important projects) were tasked with coming up with a dashboard that measured what our department did. We did it, but at the end of the day no one ever used it, other than one stick-in-the-mud manager, who never understood what our group was about.

This is the title of a paper that I recently submitted to PRO-VE in Brazil. The key word here is ICONOCLASTIC as you may discover if you read Dr. Gregory Berns' book ICONOCLAST. My interpretation is explained in a two-minute video at http://www.w-w-w-w.org/videos/IconoclastCharacteristics.mp4 explains how 'brain chemistry' kills innovation ....unless you happen to read the book as I did SIX TIMES more than two years ago. The Iconoclast has:
1. Glass half-full (not half empty) perception
2. Absence of fear of failure and ridicule.
3. Social intelligence to steer ideas most think are crazy to fulfillment (that's the hard one!)

....

The answer to #2 isn't inherently fewer managers (although that approach can work as well), but more specifically to push down the level of responsibility. Just because you have Managers to maintain employees' morale and handle their needs, doesn't necessarily mean they also need to, or should, be responsible for projects or whatever.

Excellent!

The sad thing about people who spend long years in a company is that they are not exposed to other ways of thinking, they easily become "old dogs". The worst part is that they feel threatened by whoever brings fresh ideas, simpler solutions, standard techniques, so they inmediately pack themselves as one in order to kill those new ideas. They start calling you names - newcomer, etc - they start crying you must respect them - is it disrespectful to disagree? They can even tell you that you must earn their respect in order to be heard - probably after you endure there 10+ years like them if your brain doesn't fall in a technical comma before.

I've been thinking about writing an article titled "How to sink a company" regarding these old dogs' practices. Can you Jason write something like that, please?

I was raised in an era where you wnt to work for a company that valued and respected your service, and rewarded you with a pension thereafter.

There is something so very wrong with that (from an employee / employment / economic stability standpoint?)

People who've been in jobs for a while have habits. They think they know the company. You being there with fresh ways of looking at things bring out these comments from them. But that doesn't mean they're committed to the old ways. Ask them for details of what needs to change to implement a new idea. Communicate with them as you get buy-in from mgmt. Usually things are the way they are for reasons, and changing things without dislodging the reasons doesn't work. Instead, start changing things from the way things are. It often works, if you don't get stopped by the comments comments. And sell them on the benefits and the vision of how things'll be with the new ideas implemented. And treat as gold their insights into what might oppose the fresh ideas- it's not them, just the old ways of thinking.

Hey rastr,
thanks for your input... very objective. I do understand that people develop habits even without being in the same place for a long time. What I meant is that as much as people want to make changes to things they know deserve a make-over, it's not easy to do so and actually it's easier to patch what they have than it is to shape something new.
Contrary to what you state, these guys don't think they know the company, they DO know the company precisely because of their staying for so many years dealing with the business issues and crafting the solutions to those issues. But they realized long ago that a change must be implemented, however, they are so trapped in their own old design that they don't see the way out. What I'm already suspecting is that even if they know the way out, they want to be the protagonists of such changes, but since they are so stuck in their own web, they don't allow for someone else, especially a new employee (not a rooky), to be the force driving the changes.

As an "old-timer", I find your remarks (and similar ones from other young IT "professionals") frankly insulting and demeaning, smacking of "age discrimination". If you had that attitude in my IT team, you would last, oh about 12 and a half minutes.

Whether the younger generation likes to admit it or not, there is no substitution for experience. New ideas are good, and on-going education a must. But there are a lot of things that cannot be learned in a classroom or an IT blog.

Frankly, are sign of youth and enthusiasm. Which tells that you have no grasp of perfidy, yet, "old-timer".

My 50+ co-worker with a toilet-paper Masters degree in C.S. can barely keep his workstation running let alone code or design. So far, he has proven he can run reports, perform a few queries, and ask strange questions. Sorry, but if you want to survive in this field, you've gotta stay fresh, live to learn, and figure out how to do a lot of things that aren't your specialty. Otherwise, do the rest of us a favor and find something you love to do.

Reference here, in my understanding, is not about the old timers, but the ones who are not willing to adapt to the changing tech world. There is no substitution for experience and at the same time there is no substitution for innovation also. 'been there, done that' has to make way for 'do it different' in today's competitive world.
I am on the fence of being an old-timer and early members of younger generation. I get irritated when younger ones screw up stuffs because their lack of awareness and same goes when some old timer says "if it aint broke, dont fix it".
So the key in today would be find a correct balance between both like how Apple and Google managed to do in 2000s and Microsoft and Sony did in 90s.

We like to capture brainstorming ideas on a sticky note along with the authors initials. This way ideas can be added together at a later date, and new ideas can easily be traced to original author for later IP generation.

The above list is good and followed at all brainstorming events we have. We will sometimes use brain writing to ensure that everyone vooices their concepts.

I enjoyed this a great deal and it hit nearly every item on my list and a couple I missed.

I think you missed "Establish highly detailed RIGID standards" and "Focus on the task at hand to the exclusion of all else."

If my organization went by its standards, nothing would ever get done. My employer's standards are too numerous. For the most part, they are too detailed, too rigid and too long. We need more "guidelines" (but a relative few of those) and fewer standards.

I would also suggest that encouraging developers to adopt an extremely tight focus on the task/project at hand stifles innovation by not encouraging people to create truly reusable tools and components. The increase in development time required by generalizing a component is usually less than that consumed by developing essentially the same thing a second (or third...) time from scratch. How good would modern tires be if the Goodyear engineers had to reinvent the whole wheel every time they wanted to change the tread design?

I think it helps to separate brainstorming from the process of organizing, harvesting, and culling so that you have two separate processes, and then put those two distinct processes into a loop. That is, brainstorm, then process, then brainstorm, and then process and get to a place where you have a good, solid model of what you are trying to build. What's cool about it is that when you have the right stakeholders involved, you not only end up with a great design, but shared vision among those who will execute on the plan, those who will control it, who will do the risk management and quality management and make assessments for any acquisitions that may be required.
Keeping the project on track against the baseline and avoiding scope creep may seem frustrating and stifling to creativity, but it's possible, and wise to have good, fast, responsive, and healthy change control processes so that you can leave room for creativity at the lower level tasks in a project and so you can, say, have that overlapping of phases where you are executing and controlling one phase while planning the next phase. It sort of blurs the lines between project and operational or help-desk work in a way, but rather than seeing everything as being the victim of one specific tool, it's better to have a full set of tools for support, project management, development, and have policies and procedures and your business structure optimized to make use of the best tools applying them where appropriate and keeping them away from where they are in appropriate. Use structures to support creativity and scalability. Get a glimpse at how companies like Google do it. Look at monster companies that act like a bunch of little start-ups energized, doing fantastic new things that haven't been done before sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding wildly. Break up the monotony. Give the people who cannot tolerate change their routine environments where they function best and cut the creative types loose and watch them go wild, and harvest the benefits of both. Some creative types will get tired and need a break where they can cruise on auto-pilot running routine operations for a bit, and that can give the folks who do routine operations a chance to be creative for a bit and take a break from the routine operations. This makes sure that you can easily cover when someone has to be absent or leaves to take on another job.

But, the main thing I wanted to suggest is to do the normal separation of brainstorming and culling and then make a loop out of those two processes early on in the planning of a project, creating a work breakdown structure, breaking down the work items into tasks if they don't readily map straight across, and then continue to use this two phase initial planning for planning communications, scope, risk, quality, change, procurements, and all so you have good plans through and through.

I have worked in more than one business where the people who generated the ideas and implemented innovations were stomped on because their changes, though immensely helpful to the bottom line, altered the balance of percieved managerial power.

another organization where I worked was penalizing staff for speaking to staff from other departments within the same organization because it "disrespected the chain of command." When management took the position that saying "hi" to a coworker in the stairwell (without engaging in a conversation) disrespected the chain of command, morale plummetted as did the desire to verbalize, design, or implement innovation.

Don't expand on any ideas created elsewhere. If it wasn't invented here, we don't need it.

(AKA: Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Who needs cell phones?)

Good article, but unfortunately it opens up one of the favorite topics on TR: Management Bashing. Coming from the other side of the fence and playing a little devil's advocate, managers have to guard against innovation that doesn't provide any value. It comes down to a decision based on the value, savings, speed, profits, or whatever the ROI is based on. If the ROI isn't there, then a manager would be a fool to move forward with it. Of course this means the person or persons who want the change will hit the company grapevine with all sorts of derogatory misinformation. It is worth noting that had the roles been reversed, these people would likely have made the same decision. (An exercise which I have personally tried before.)
Excessive changes can result in something I call "Change Thrashing". This happens when organizations are so hell bent on changing that their primary activity becomes changing. Their real output drops to essentially zero. It's just a matter of time before they change themselves out of existence.
I could write a book about this sort of stuff, but I need to get some real work done so I'll sum it up like this. Innovation is a form of change. We all know not all change is good. Managers are responsible for providing a sanity check to prevent over-exuberant workers from implementing innovative ways to destroy the business.

Exactly what happened to Sun Microsystems, in a nutshell.

It would be right to provide originator of idea with all support that person need to develop idea, not give it to formally more qualified person like an engineer who would more likely find reasons why it cannot work then make it better. Trying to change an idea from start to make it better is another mistake, since one who has idea surely know how it should be properly executed, else it is not other than hazy supposition.
I have invented new Wind turbines that can be very effective in conversion of kinetic energy of wind, because it is different from all other turbines invented so far.
But Engineers and Ph.D. of Physic first start persuading me that such turbine cannot exist, or at least that it surely has to be less than 59% effective since even ideal turbine cannot extract more energy from the Wind.
Since I know at least one example of turbine with 95% efficiency, which everyone ignore as ugly extemption to the rule which prove that "Law" they take as absolute is not applicable to all kind of turbines, I keep explaining that each Law or Rule is valid only for set of conditions as stated or assumed, and if such conditions are missing or are changed, or new are introduced, then Law or Rule become unapplicable.
So, support should be given to idea originator in first place, that would enable implementation of idea as envisioned by inventor, just to see if it would possibly work.
Even if original idea would not work, if invention of such kind would potentially be of great value, still team should be formed to try to make it work. If idea work by itself, then there would be time to make it still better later.
There is actually another mistake that can kill innovation, rquest that it must be theoretically proven first, before someone would make the prototype :-((
If I could prove that my turbine produce much more electricity by simply building such turbine and exchanging one standard turbine with it using same generator, then it should be at once comparable with standard model of turbine, specially if it is of same diameter as one replaced. That is all that should count, results!
I would let esteemed Proffesors to establish the theory of its functioning and also the formulas for calculations that would acurately predict how much electricity at which speed of wind it can produce, but I would start production of such turbines at once because World need cheap electricity from renewable sources of energy........
But, to get money for investment, I would be required to submit theoretical explanations and detailed calculations and formulas, as there are iron clad rules about getting investment approwed. It of course has also be attested, and for this also I need to submit the formulas, right? Such inflexible rules are also invention killers.
Innovation is just making something allready in use better or cheaper, more productive, etc. so all rules and formulas are known, therefore it is not problem in this case.
Next thing that can kill Invention are Patent Laws.
If something is really new and do not have even the name, how to explain it to Patent Engineers? I explained it best I can, and they told me it is not detailed enough. When I explained it more detailed as requested, I was told that I "overstep the Frame" whatever that can mean, and that I should not in second version give the name to it either :-((
In short, it is not just companies that can kill innovations and Inventions, it is also established science dogmas, Laws and rules and regulations for financing that ask for "Proof of Concept" even when there is need to finance the prototype........
Next if I make someone interested to work with me on turbine prototype, that person more likely or not start changing my turbine by adding "improvements" or subtracting parts they do not think are necesary, and without which turbine would not be as effective as it can be.

M polack this is direct to you

Agree with you right to the end of your statement. I think it is funny you disagree with patten laws when you closed your statement righting the same way lawyers talk and dictate laws.

Patten laws are design to protect the economy more than the inventor her or himself. the invetor is the father of innovation and the economy is the koas of capitalism. Tho the strong will stand the week will succeed with the daily grind of working hard. The backbone of our country relies on the fundamental Value of helping the small business and prevent monopolization of large corporate greed.

I ask you to follow me and be the innovator the USA has continuously bread over centuries. The invention of a light build ( i ask to be corrected if I'm wrong) took over hundred time to rule out what wouldn't work. Basically the inventor made sure that others will not waist there time finding a filament replacement.

The truth is I have engineered a virtual hypothesis of true energy Production. I am not the first one with my concept. Other have stumble upon my design on their own. The laws of capitalism has shut them down many times. I as a true innovator, inventor, and leader will be the first one to help u with your concept. One can not do it all. Your design is interesting tho needing the finical backing of creating a prototype, we stand at the same intersection of grid locks at different location miles away, from this distance there needs no collaboration crossing Einstein relativity of time travel. Einstein believed in time traveling by folding time, if he was around I would slap the old man in the head while the echoes of consoling collaboration, I would explain "boss the ten percent of your mind u use would be useless staring into a apple iPad, probably HTML will punk u out the same military intelligence did, tho unix would have had u conspiring to teach laws of hacking. The bottom line mr Einstein seeing the future is technology u ponder with in your sleep while the Internet was created to see the future for war and the world wide web."

Respectfully I would close to descried there is something faster than the speed of light, and e=mcsquare is for people who don't know how to think out side the box.

Regardless I will help u fund your prototype, find me an a those interested in joining athttp://vehicleswithoutfuelorcharging.blogspot.com/

Understand this if all else fails, my hypothesis on replaceable energy could fail, tho the marketing strategic sales plan would be able to sale your invention, other invention, and new proven technology. I test all to prove weather I can fail, when I know there is definitely 100 other ways to create energy, tho I am stuck on proving my hypothesis and sailing yours or other innovators to our liquid capitalist bulls waiting to swing, while finding another source of energy is what America deserves for ever.

Today's market there is much public excuse to slow down allowing the traditional lazy American to achieve nothing. The productivity of staying with the fast pace inviroment is really the ultimate way to help move production. The important step is to pull away at the right time.

I continuously echo the strategic ideas presented, tho I explain it as gambling. Rullet tables are notorious for draining many people's hard earn green. I always say, walk away during your winning streak. People tend to push to much and obviously leave empty handed. I never would set some one up for failure and will help them when they return to the negotiation table. The circle of having great ideas in hand, is to present it flaulisly the first time. The situation is to give the team a chance to further devolpe the concepts with out cutting each other off. Tho be careful at the speed of inspiration. Dancing during brainstorming is always a great way to continue to lead valuable production with strategic chess moves.