The innovation discipline

I am reposting a comment I left on Scott Berkun’s Harvard blog post which he titled “Why Innovation is overrated”

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As a couple of others have pointed out, you seem to be differentiating innovation based on semantics and you definitely are confusing it with invention in parts of your blog post.

“These are all companies that figured out how to make really good, high quality, affordable things. None of these companies were the first in their field: Apple did not invent the cell-phone, nor the touchscreen. Google did not invent the search engine nor pay per click advertising. Pixar did not make the first motion picture. And even if they were the first, the world would not care. We care because they made things we love. Making good things people love is the true spine of these companies successes, and it’s a stronger framework for managers to use when trying to learn from their examples.”

Innovation is not invention
Innovation does not require you to be first to market
Innovation is not just about products
But you could say..Innovation is a disciplined approach to creating great products/services.

Another point you made was ..

“The truth is making really good things is difficult — it requires a commitment to craft, an attention to detail, and a love for work that has always been rare. And while we’d never call these three attributes innovations, it’s the success of creating an organization that rewards these things that leads to the products we often herald, after they’re done, as innovations. “

You are correct in that it doesn’t matter what you call it while your are doing it. But with the definition above, you’ve really not describing anything specific or prescriptive. I would argue that just as management frameworks are the collection and systemization of practices already in the industry, innovation is the development of principles and frameworks of approaches to “making really good products/services” which are already in the industry.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the innovation approach is popular now. Industries who have already adopted management practices, TQM, Lean, Six Sigma and numerous others which have come out of the many business schools are now looking for the next discipline which will allow them to compete successfully in a global economy by making great products/services.

If you really want to get a better sense of the emergence of the innovation discipline from what used to be a diffused and fragmented process, I would recommend talking to companies like GravityTank, IDEO, Ziba, Jump or go visit the Institute of Design.

Ahh – Only if I had searched google for micro productivity

A quick search on google – and what do i find, but this post..

According to a McKinsey & Company study of US economic activity, “Raising the productivity of employees whose jobs can’t be automated is the next big performance challenge.” The study argues that “as more companies come to specialize in core activities and outsource the rest, they have greater need for workers who can interact with co-workers, partners, and vendors,” supported by highly personalized organizing and communication tools. 40 percent of labor activity, says McKinsey, comes not from making things or from traditional transactions but from what the consultancy calls the “Interaction Economy,” which it defines as the “searching, coordinating, and monitoring required to exchange goods or services.” This interaction economy emphasizes collaboration, social intelligence, tacit knowledge, and ambiguity, as much as it values workers’ ability to make individual decisions quickly and organize tasks and time efficiently — in a nutshell: it puts a much stronger focus on the non-formalized, individual productivity or “micro-productivity” of employees. McKinsey says that this area of productivity involves the highest-priced labor of the most valued knowledge workers and yet remains the hardest to measure and manage.

They stole my word! I don’t know why McKinsey insists on clouding it’s statements with jibberish – After reading all that, all you are left with is that micro-productivity is = individual productivity. Great.

I think my usage is much better – small steps made each day/week towards the completion of each of your goals = micro productivity.

I’m sure somewhere, GTD guys are bemoaning my lack of organization and prioritization but I just cant seem to behave any other way.

Is it ADD or micro-productivity?

I was lying in bed, reading my latest book when I realized that this was in fact, the 4th book I had started and was in the midst of. I thought about this for a second and realized it wasn’t just books I was so ADD about. Here’s current what I’ve been doing this week in slices of 15-30 minutes.

• Reading the 4 books I mentioned (The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria, Test Fire by Ben Bova, Sketching User Experience by Bill Buxton and Heaven & Hell – War diary of a german paratrooper by Martin Poppel)
• Writing 6 blog posts – drafts – none have been published
• 4 company ideas this week – in various stages of planning (can’t reveal these)
• 6 pc games that I was alternating between (Medal of Honor, Company of Heroes, Total War 2, Crysis, Rise of Nations, Sins of Solar Empire – can’t you tell I like strategy?)
• 3 business school classes (no choice there)
• 1 full time job (same as above)
• 3 HBO series I was watching (Sopranos, Wire & Generation Kill)

Is this ADD or can I coin a better sounding term for this – micro-productivity. I like the latter much better.