The Secret to Innovation is Not in the Process

I wrote an article last year focused on what a company needs to have in place to be innovative. It revolved around three necessary ingredients for innovation: the process, the policies and the people. It got some people talking and arguing about what the most important of the three factors was with different people making great arguments for each factor.

There are an abundance of books, articles and conferences dedicated to telling people how to be innovative. Type in “innovation” into the Amazon.com book search and you’ll get over 38,000 items. There are some unique processes out there, but most of them have a similar approach. The bottom line is that there needs to be a PROCESS of some sort in place for understanding consumer needs, defining the problems to be solved, coming up with the ideas, and evaluating what comes out. The POLICY and culture of the organization is an important factor in determining whether or not innovation can happen and if it will be allowed to grow and develop. The third necessary ingredient is having the right PEOPLE who are involved in the innovation process. I don’t want to minimize the importance of the process and the policy because without some level of both of these, innovation likely won’t happen. However, it’s clear to me that it is the people factor that makes the biggest determinant. And not just any people, but the right people.

A lot of companies struggle with trying to be innovative and the main reason for this is they lack the right people to be innovative. I’m more than happy to defend my belief that not everyone can be innovative no matter how much process or policy they have in place. The key to being innovative is having a team of people who are able to innovate. At Insight, we’re big proponents of including “innovation activities” as part of a job interview. We might create an innovation session where the applicant has to roll up their sleeves and brainstorm ideas for solving problems with us. Our engineering team does this all the time providing the candidate a problem to solve and finding out how they approach solving the problem. I once asked a potential hire to come up with five decidedly different approaches to conducting a research study to investigate how they could collect requirements from a consumer. This isn’t an unheard of interviewing activity by the way. It’s just more important when you’re hiring people who you want to be innovative and I’ve found that the people who “pass the test” are able to be productive members of our innovation efforts.

Innovation does require a rigorous process and adequate environment within which to thrive, but without the right people coming up with the ideas, innovation can be difficult to achieve. Having innovative people from multiple disciplines and points of view, working together is the best way to achieve true innovation.