Book Review - "Innovation to the Core"

by Braden Kelley

A few weeks ago I received "Innovation to the Core" by Rowan Gibson and Peter Skarzynski (with an introuction by Gary Hamel) in the mail. "Innovation to the Core" weighs in at 295 pages, but it is an easy, and pleasant read. The book is full of a lot of great material, and the influence of Gary Hamel is evident in several of the chapters.

Rowan Gibson travels the world giving speeches and conducting innovation workshops, and Peter Skarzynski is the CEO of innovation strategy consultancy - Strategos (which is now owned by UTEK).

The book starts with a premise that I agree with, which is that too many companies view innovation as a specialized activity to be handled by specialists - in much the same way that people viewed the quality movement in its early days. Now of course companies endeavor to embed quality throughout the entire organization and seek to make it a core competency. The same thing now needs to happen with innovation in organizations that want to be able to both sustain themselves and win in the long term:


"Despite the gargantuan nature of the challenge, building a deep, systemic capability for innovation is now the inescapable imperative for every company - as important to an organization's success and survival as the quality movement was in its day."


To create the preconditions for systemic innovation you have to:

1. Create time and space for reflection, ideation, and experimentation


2. Maximize the diversity of thinking


3. Foster connection and conversation ("combinational chemistry")

Before reading this book, I've been trying to convince people that insights are more important than ideas and that the quality of a company's insights and execution are what will differentiate the winners from the losers in today's marketplace. This insights conversation has always been difficult because people always want to jump to the ideas - thinking that the idea is king.

It was refreshing to see that the authors of "Innovation to the Core" also feel that successful and sustainable innovation starts with the insight, and so Chapter 3 is all about building a foundation of novel strategic insights predicated on "Four Lenses of Innovation":

1. Challenging Orthodoxies


2. Harnessing Discontinuities


3. Leveraging Competencies and Strategic Assets


4. Understanding Unarticulated Needs

There are additional ways to generate insights to build sustainable innovation on, but these are a good starting point, and Chapter 3 by itself makes a purchase of this book worthwhile.

Once you identify the insights you are going to build on, then you can get on with producing a torrent of new product or service ideas and even attempt to innovate across the business model. One other key distinction that the book makes is that innovation doesn't have to be risky, and that when you look at your innovation portfolio, you should have a balance of ideas with differing levels of potential impact on the industry.

Timing is incredibly important to successful innovation too - both in terms of determining when to ask the right questions but also when to ramp up the level of investment in an idea. Ramp up the financial investment too soon and you may doom the project to failure from accumulating losses and progress that can't be accelerated by greater financial commitment. But, ramp up the financial investment too late and someone else may beat you to the market. The key is to identify which barriers to successful development can be accelerated by increased spending, and which can't.

I also liked how the authors of this book allocated some of this book to the importance of the demand side of the innovation equation. Companies that focus only on generating a greater number of innovation ideas without creating the conditions that increase the desire and capabilities of managers to develop an increasing number of innovation ideas, will face a higher chance of innovation failure over the long term.

Taken all together I found "Innovation to the Core" to be an interesting and important read for any manager looking to gain a deeper understanding of what's required for creating systemic innovation. The book was worth the time investment.


Related Articles:

• Part 1 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability
  
• Part 2 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability
  
• Part 3 of 3 - Building a Systemic Innovation Capability (coming March 18, 2010)

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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.