When we grow older, we admire bold thinking.  Revolution is chic.  Trendsetters are idolized.  It is demeaning to be called unoriginal, conventional or traditional (boring). We thrill at the idea of being the one that breaks the rule, being the one that creates the next big thing.  But many people have a hard time seeing themselves in that role. In the process of growing up, they lost that ability to see themselves as creative.  For some reason, they believe that creativity is some kind of gift from God and that others have it but not them.  It is these mistaken assumptions, half-truths, misplaced generalities and habits that keep them from being able to create truly brilliant innovations.  If they believe they are not creative, they will not try to be creative.

I don’t buy-in to the “gift” thinking.  I’m a firm believer that each and every person is born with the ability to be creative.  I’ve seen it over and over again that once I’ve helped someone unlock their own ability to be creative, they go on to create amazing things.  What is it that holds most people back from breaking out from this “old think”?

1. Never having been taught the basic skill of creativity.  Yes, its a skill that anyone can learn, practice and become proficient at.
2. Worrying about creating a stupid idea.  Instead they develop concepts using old thinking that sounds sensible, sounds safe, that has an outcome that is most likely an incremental improvement or worst, a failure.

Good stuff from HP CTO Phil McKinney. Two points stand out for me here:
1. People are overly focused on the disruptive idea
2. People fear looking stupid for their ideas

Company culture goes a looooong way to resolving these issues. It's just a matter of how serious the company is about innovation excellence.

As “innovation” buzzword gains popularity, various sub-areas start getting attention too. However, many of the sub-disciplines associated with “systematic innovation” are several decades old. One such sub-discipline is “idea management system”. In fact, the book “40 years, 20 million ideas” gives an excellent overview of how an idea management system evolved from 1951 till 1988 in Toyota. The book traces the origins (in 1950s), structures, processes, challenges in adoption and psychology of change and the role senior management played in making Toyota suggestion system work. It was a surprise to me to find out that idea management system came to Toyota from Ford when Toyoda and Saito visited Ford's River Rouge plant in Detroit in 1950-51.

During its first year (1951) there were 789 suggestions and awards totaling $2638. Both the quantity and quality of the suggestions were rather low. One reason apparently was that the employees thought “creative ideas” must be something like “big inventions”. Consequently, Shoichi Saito, father of the creative idea suggestion system, started emphasizing quantity and efforts were made to increase the number of suggestions. In fact, they replaced the formal kanji characters with hiragana alphabet in the logo to soften the stiff tone of the message. It took 20 years for that number to reach 100,000 ideas a year. Idea per person per year increased from 0.1 to 2.2 during the same time.

Interesting that the initial thought of Toyota employees was that they needed "creative ideas", as opposed to smaller block-n-tackle types of innovations. Given Toyota's success, it's obvious a steady diet of smaller incremental ideas can lead to big things.

If we want more entrepreneurs, stop worrying about jumpstarting innovation. Focus on "minnovation."

In reality, the vast majority of real-life entrepreneurs around the world aren't innovators. They're minnovators — mixing small parts of novelty and creativity with huge helpings of flexibility scrappiness and a generous portion of hard-driving execution.

Another argument for making smaller innovations technically, which have market changing potential if applied the right way.

I believe that devoting efforts to create disruptive innovation is a futile effort.  Virtually all the commonly described examples of disruptive innovations turn out to be either a confluence of unforeseeable events or the result of luck.  Further more, most disruptive innovations are only seen as disruptive in retrospect, long after the original invention.  To use Malcolm Gladwell’s terms, disruptive innovations are outliers, not the result of intentional efforts.  Great ideas, excellent execution, brilliant people, capitalizing on a unique set of circumstances and a lot of luck are almost always the key components of disruptive innovations.  Trying to create a disruptive innovation is as unlikely as being hit by lightening.  By chasing disruptive innovation, organizations are wasting their resources and not capitalizing on valuable innovations within their grasp.

I like the underlying philosophy here. Many "disruptive innovations" didn't seem that way at the start. It really takes market acceptance, a retrospective way of saying something was "disruptive".

I do believe there are times you would actually know something was going to alter market dynamics though.

This bank's opinion is that optimisation is not the same as innovation. And, they added, you can optimise yourself out of the ability to be innovative at all.

Initially, I disagreed with this. Doing small, incremental optimisation sounds rather like doing small, incremental innovation. But then I thought about the question of incremental vs. optimisation in the context of our own definition of innovation: innovation is anything except what we would have done as business as usual.

Optimisation, clearly, is business as usual. Innovation isn’t.

Optimization is an exercise in extending the linear value curve of current practices. Still think that many of those ideas will represent innovation.

The main reason “disruptive” causes confusion is that it sounds like “major upset,” which suggests that the technological cause should be major as well. This leads us to falsely conflate disruptive innovation with technically radical innovation. So we end up confusing disruptive with radical and sustaining with incremental. The two are orthogonal axes.

In fact, in most documented cases of disruption, the disruptive innovation was a minor/incremental change and well within the technical capabilities of the incumbent (and was often taken to market by a renegade spin off from the original company).

What's interesting here is the the perspective that the *market* decides what's disruptive. It doesn't have to be out-of-the-blue types of heavy duty technological innovations.

Small changes technically can be disruptive if they change market behaviors.

The negative consequences of too much attention to incremental innovation have been recognized by many business scholars. James Utterback and Clayton Christensen, among others, have noted how firms that dominate one generation of technology often fail to maintain leadership in the next. 7 Either through hubris or a lack of inspiration or capability, industry leaders continue investing in the technologies that made them successful, even when more effective technologies—"disruptive technologies," as Christensen calls them—appear on the horizon. The big steel producers in the United States learned this painful lesson when Nucor operationalized continuous casting of rolled steel, a radical innovation that Big Steel had known about but had failed to take seriously. Kodak, which has dominated film-based photography since its creation by founder George Eastman, now finds itself in a race with many contenders for the next generation of picture taking, one that has eliminated film in favor of digital imaging. In each of these cases, and hundreds like them, products based on one technology were undermined by radically new ones—and incremental improvement to the old technology has done little more than delay the eventual rout.

The examples of companies being upended by new innovations are good ones, and it seems all companies will face these types of challenges/opportunities.

The corporate death-inducing nature of these changes make great studies and consulting advice. But they don't happen *that* often. In the meantime, pursuit of incremental innovations can lead to real benefits.

Lesson: mix a portfolio of disruptive and incremental innovations.

When I talk about the incredible value in getting lean, of course I'm channeling Amory Lovins (and many other efficiency proponents). The big idea here is that there are not only low-hanging fruit, but fruit on the ground. Many companies that have aggressively pursued efficiency have found vast amounts of money waiting to be picked up, even if the large-scale savings result from adding up many small changes. For example, Wal-Mart improved the fuel efficiency of its entire fleet by over 25% in just a few years with a range of efforts — from new tires to aerodynamic improvements such as side 'wind skirts' to a larger investment in new auxiliary power systems that eliminate idling. (Note that all the improvements paid back in at most two years, the company's internal hurdle rate for investments.)

So does an incremental approach really conflict with a systematic one? Not if it's done right. An incremental improvement in packaging design, for example, will reduce costs and impacts throughout the value chain, from production to shipping to inventory and storage. One part of the business can make a moderate change that can create outsized effects. As much as we want to think holistically, companies are still organized around functions; the person designing packaging is not responsible for shipping and procurement. But coordinating between these functions and making sure people understand the larger picture will help inspire them to move beyond the incremental changes and drive toward larger, systematic improvements.

Moreover, you can't always get to systematic without going through incremental. At another event I spoke at, during a talk by an exec from Frito-Lay about the SunChips brand, some attendees were on Twitter criticizing the company for saying it was solar powered when only one of seven manufacturing plants was converted yet. But what business is going to invest in seven retrofits at once? That's just not the way companies operate. I quite often come back to one core, evocative image from Jim Collins' Good to Great. Picture that heavy "flywheel" that everyone pushes a little bit until it really gets moving. A mass of coordinated, thoughtful incremental changes can create larger change than you think.

Incremental changes can pave the path to disruptive changes. And incremental changes in aggregate, like Walmart's, can have dramatic impact.