Incremental not breakthrough

If you're truly innovative in what you offer, brilliant at what you do and good at communicating that, surely you won't have any competition.’ This approach is at the core of Seth Godin’s book the Purple Cow, and of course he is correct.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with some stellar senior people about innovation projects my colleagues and I delivered in 2010. Rather proudly, half of the 10 initiatives were instigated or delivered by me (the relevance of that little nugget is purely for my ego and not the substance of the blog).

For me, I thought the value of our dialogue wasn’t in what we had delivered or even the ‘outcomes’ of delivering the initiatives. Although some are pretty sexy. No, the real value is in how the initiatives had been originated, implemented and overcome the challenges.

As I talked through initiatives that had cost from virtually nothing up to a million dollars, I reinforced that most projects were incremental to what we were already doing have therefore been more widely adopted, and those that were more disruptive, while attracting more interest, have not been adopted without on going intervention.

Sadly, what these global senior leaders, and I think most leaders in general, fail to appreciate is, incremental, all other things being equal, is more sustainable than breakthrough. And that most important. in achieving an incremental approach to innovation, organisations should enable everyone in the organisation to originate, implement and overcome challenges.

Innovation is not the exclusive domain of the guy in the corner with the iPad and job title, it should be in every colleague’s job description, annual objectives, scorecard or whatever format you use. Everyone should be charged with continually innovating, not to break through, but to incrementally improve our offer, deliver it better and communicate it more effectively.