Thus, innovation becomes a matter of setting up the most appropriate interactions and obtaining the most valuable feedback for minimum effort: maxi feedback for minimum effort. By definition, most of these interactions will be with the outside of the organisation, clients and suppliers. In fact, this process is similar to communication. Communication succeeds when it produces reliable information and comprehension. It also explains why innovation looks and feels so much like learning.
In a learning process it is of vital importance to identify the sources of learning; both inside and outside the organisation. One of the underlying reasons for the intensification of digitalization is that feedback loops have been accelerated and enriched by the ease of treating and transmitting data, and turning into usable information. Innovation is like risk management in that it is information and comprehension hungry. Good stakeholder management sets up communication, but instead of perceiving communication as providing information, consider it more as consulting stakeholders to obtain information and comprehension. Innovation is more than ever a managed learning process about the customer and the technology.
Neither of these commercial or technical channels should be too narrow. Customers are composed of buyers, users, operators and transporters, preparers and consumers, while experts can cover any activity that ends with “ility” and much more, such as availability, accessibility, portability, manufacturability, maintainability, as well as speed and performance, safety and security. Innovation begins to resemble the requirements management process, but with one major difference: It builds upon the continuous interaction between perception of the problem, and delivery of the solution.
Among the key sub-skills are the ability to set up valuable experiments and prototypes, and the ability to extract valid and actionable metrics, which are leading rather than trailing indicators. In other words, these skills are all about the ability to obtain critical information early and to act by re-designing and co-creating the next steps. Current technologies allow us to advance much further and more quickly through more knowledge creation iterations.
Recently a team of six astronauts, four men and two women, spent 8 months simulating life on Mars in an isolated artificial environment on the slopes of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. One of the critical learning messages was the challenge of having to wait 20 minutes to obtain feedback from the outside world and the massive amount of extra time necessary to solve problems simply due to a lack of an interactive Internet connection!
That’s how important innovation iterations and innovative interactions have become!
If you are launching or implementing innovations within your organization, trust your learning path to the team of experts of Opteam.
IAN Stokes
Expert en Management de Projets
Ian est impliqué dans la facilitation et l'amélioration des processus de gestion de projets, le pilotage de projets technologiques et de développement de produits, la gestion du changement, par l’adoption de méthodes agiles qui sont centrées sur le client et le travail transdisciplinaires dans le contexte de projets complexes. Il a une grande expérience internationale et interculturelle.