Innovation Meet Mr. Reality

A lot of the talk about Innovation is out of context. Most of what is out there is about thinking “different”, pushing the frontier, treading where others are not inspired enough to go. While this pretext has a kernel of truth it is useless without the context of execution. Talking about innovation without talking about execution is like talking about a bicycle race with no bikes; it’s irrelevant.

For example, I’m currently working on project that will solve some of our consumer’s problems in a way that nothing else can. The problem is that we ran into some execution delays, and due to the nature of the market, will not be able to introduce the product as anticipated. We have a great idea, but it means nothing – no revenue, no profit, no good – until someone can buy the darn thing.

Finding the right “blue ocean” is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of Innovation. In addition to knowing “what value you need to bring to what target market”, you need to be able to translate that value, through systems engineering, into a set of actionable specifications. You then need a world-class project management component to drive those specifications to reality.

There are a couple of reasons, I think, that project management is not the focus of much of the latest Innovation literature. First, it has been around since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock (a fallacy it turns out according to the book Mayflower) so there is not much new news in the subject. Second, very few people actually want to read about project management because at most companies project management is a thankless front line job that most people try and get “out of” rather than “in to”.

Regardless, if you are serious about being a successful Innovation player you need to couple the latest Innovation ideas with a bias towards execution because the cool product prototype that is sitting on my desk is just a giant paper weigh until we can get it commercialized.