Book Review and Innovation Summary - "Conquering Innovation Fatigue"

by Braden Kelley

About a month ago I received "Conquering Innovation Fatigue - Overcoming the Barriers to Personal and Corporate Success" in the mail, a 284-page piece co-written by Jeff Lindsay, Cheryl Perkins, and Mukund Karanjikar. Now you might be thinking - Everyone is so excited about innovation, how can anyone get innovation fatigue?

Well, while most authors choose to write about the green fields or the blue oceans you can potentially create by pursuing innovation, "Conquering Innovation Fatigue" instead chooses to focus on the things that can wear down the inventor, the manager, and the innovator. The authors classify potential innovation fatigue into three main classes of innovation fatigue:

1. People Fatigue


2. Organization-Level Fatigue (Strategy, Culture, Actions)


3. External Fatigue

And then break down those classes of innovation fatigue into Nine Leading Fatigue Factors:

People Fatigue:

1. Theft of the invention and exploitation of inventors


2. Innovator deficiencies (e.g. unreasonable expectations, impatience, unhealthy pride)


3. The NIH syndrome ("Not Invented Here")

Organization Level Fatigue (Strategy, Culture, Actions):

4. Breaking the will to share (loss of cooperation from the innovation community)


5. Fundamental flaws in decision making and vision


6. Open innovation fatigue (corporate barriers to external innovation and collaboration)

External Fatigue:

7. Patent pain: barriers to intellectual property protection


8. Regulatory pain: challenges in policy, regulation, and law


9. University-industry barriers

Risk is discussed briefly in the book. As many of you may know, most companies end up focusing on small, incremental innovation because the more disruptive ideas are likely to been viewed as too risky. Smart companies don't spend all of their energy trying to de-risk every idea, but instead engage in innovation portfolio management that spreads innovation investment across ideas with different risk profiles and time horizons.

The book makes the point several times that innovation is not always fast, including a story about how it took the British Navy two centuries (200 years) to adopt the cure for scurvy. Along these lines, I'll be writing and publishing an article about slow innovation later this week.

One of the points I particularly liked in the book was the section talking about how there can be lots of logical reasons why an innovation project should not be funded or not proceed after funding. So, don't take it personally if someone wants to kill your innovation idea, instead try to anticipate as many of these logical reasons to kill it and strengthen your idea or have your rebuttals ready. Be your own devil's advocate, and deprive others of the opportunity in the process.

Breaking the Will to Share

As more and more organizations try to establish an innovation-led organization or choose to try and differentiate themselves based on innovation outcomes, nothing is more crucial than maintaining the will to share among employees and any other group that you ask to participate in your innovation efforts. The authors break down the will to share in this way:

Maintaining Trust

1. Fair, Helpful Performance Reviews


2. Rules Consistent, Fair


3. Promises Kept

Sense of Inclusion

1. Access to Insights, Results


2. Inclusion in Decision Making


3. Talents Valued, Used

Effective Incentives

1. Financial Incentives


2. Intrinsic Incentives


3. Likelihood of Impact

Innovating Beyond Innovation

There was a great call-out in the Orion Energy Systems case study about innovative reasons to believe when your innovation idea faces doubt. The point can be summarized in this quote from the book:

"Sometimes a great invention is not enough to deal with the social aspects of innovation. Further creativity is often needed to help customers change their behavior and try something new."

Innovating from the Inside Out

Finally, I'd like to agree with the authors on two important points that we all need to be more aware of as we push for increased innovation in the United States or elsewhere:

1. An incredible number of the great inventions and companies credited to discovery or formation in the United States were created by immigrants. The United States and any other country in the world hoping to start their share of innovation-led organizations, must ensure that immigration policies do not place mis-guided caps on immigration from well-educated and populous countries.


2. When comparing the potential benefit of an innovation idea, we must remember that we should not typically compare the potential benefit against some sort of continuing steady state. The absence of action will generally not lead to maintenance of the current state, but instead inaction will lead to a general decline in financial performance as competitors choose their own path of action.

Conclusion

There are a couple of great case studies in the book, an interesting framework or two, and lots of good information about intellectual property that most books on innovation don't have, making it a worthwhile reference for the layperson.

My interview with co-author Jeff Lindsay can be found here.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.