(Picture credit: J.P. Davidson, Evening Iron Shadow. https://flic.kr/p/85ZY3A (CC BY 2.0 DEED))
What if innovation is degenerative? What if most innovation not only fails, burning money and resources in the process, but is degenerative; in other words, it progressively weakens and erodes individuals, teams, organisations, communities, economies and ecologies?
There is a widespread assumption in management practice and management scholarship that innovation is an imperative. Innovation is essential for organisations to continue to create value (mostly in the form of revenues and profits) and to survive. It is widely understood also that innovation is hard, and has a high failure rate. Yet the promise of chasing down and capturing the benefits of innovation is enough to persuade executives to sponsor innovation strategies and to invest in innovation in product, process, platform, service, internally and across their networks and ecosystems.
Sometimes when we look at theories, processes and practices of innovation, it is hard to ignore the sense that these have been formulated by an explorationist, colonialist mindset. One widely studied paradigm carries the fingerprints of this legacy, the ‘SSIC’ process model of innovation (Tidd and Bessant, 2021), where SSIC stands for:
- Search – how can we find opportunities for innovation?
- Select – what are we going to do, and why?
- Implement – how are we going to make it happen?
- Capture – how are we going to get the benefits from it?
This might sound innocuous enough, until we imagine this process being used by fossil-fuel companies, or arms manufacturers, looking for ‘opportunities for innovation’. Innovation strategies (as taught in university business schools) tend to be variations of ‘explore and exploit’ – first explore, then take possession of (though we don’t like to acknowledge this part), and finally exploit. Innovation here is a process of appropriating benefits for the explorers.
Now, you might argue that these metaphors are unimportant, and that ‘real’ innovation these days is incremental, open, collaborative and ‘sustainable’. However, my experience is that innovation is degenerative. Not only is it wasteful of time and money and other resources, but the high rate of failure erodes the quality of the soil. Over time, repeated failure (or even middling success) has a debilitating effect on the health of the organisation, and on the mental and physical health of innovators. Go into any large, established public-sector or commercial organisation and ask to speak to their in-house innovation people, and you will often be introduced to misfortunates made tired, cynical and disengaged by years of failed projects and the collective inability to improve things in any significant way.
Innovation is degenerative. It exploits and erodes the sources of our prosperity and flourishing on the promise that success will repay the losses, a promise that is seldom if ever kept. So, what if our processes for innovation were regenerative, in the sense that they nourish and strengthen individuals, teams, organisations, communities and environment continuously and unconditionally, regardless of the outcome?
What would this regenerative innovation process look like?
This post is accompanied by a colour photo by J.P. Davidson from Flickr entitled Evening Iron Shadow, showing a section of the vertical side of a structure covered in corrugated iron, pictured in the evening light, with the sun setting far to the left of the picture. Within the corrugated iron wall, an opening that might be a door, might be a window, and also covered in corrugated iron, reveals a black dark interior and casts a long shadow across the side of the featureless structure.
Reference
Tidd, J. and Bessant, J. (2021) Managing Innovation: Integrating Technological, Market and Organizational Change (Seventh Edition). Hoboken: Wiley.
Matthew Moran 