Insights from Two Innovation Conferences – Inovo
These two conferences, held this year on subsequent weeks in Boston, represent a good opportunity to assess the current state of the art in innovation thinking and practice. The two conferences are different in their structure, approach, content and attendance. The FEI conference has been around since the early 2000’s (this is the 13th annual conference) and attracts providers and practitioners from a wide variety of companies and professions.
The attendees of FEI tend to be more junior than those at FEI and the keynotes are more ‘big’ names, not necessarily in the innovation ‘profession’. For example, Dan Pink, the author of ‘Drive’ was a keynote at FEI. His talk about motivation was peripherally related to innovation and was interesting – if you had not read the book or heard the same talk numerous times before. The ‘vibe’ at FEI is one of people new to the profession learning the ropes. You can imagine a ‘typical’ attendee at FEI as someone just hired into the innovation team at a large corporation being sent by their manager to go to FEI to ‘get up to speed’ on the latest thinking.
The IRI has been around for 76 years and this was their 76th annual meeting. It shows. While the subject and focus of IRI and its annual conference is ostensibly about R&D (the conference was called R&D and MVP) the real driver of conversation at the conference is innovation with a strong dose of technology. In contrast to FEI, the keynotes were, for the most part, by people who are leading the innovation efforts in their companies. The discussions were deep and substantive and the attendees are experienced and well beyond the ‘innovation 101’ stage. All together, the two conferences covered the spectrum of the state-of-the-art in innovation thinking and practice today.
Conference Insights
It is useful to take a step back from the specific keynotes, presentations, workshops and personal interactions to identify common themes, weak signals and trends in innovation. Here are some observations from spending time at both of these conferences, listening to all the keynotes, attending the seminars and workshops and having numerous interactions with a variety of individuals involved in the practice of innovation.
What does this mean for innovation? It is not enough to just acknowledge and parrot the big trends that everyone knows, organizations really need to be able to find the weak signals and indicators of change that are not obvious but that can provide real, proprietary value. Emphasizing technology can be a key differentiator but the technology in and of itself is not sufficient to drive innovation.
What does this mean for innovation? A company needs to organize and positioned itself properly if it is to do both sustaining and strategic innovation. It needs the right framework and processes, tools and methods for doing what are two, very different activities requiring different types of people and approaches for success. Balancing the needs of these two, often conflicting, organizations under one roof is an ‘unsolved’ problem. Many companies are experimenting with the right approach to do this but there is no ‘best practice’ yet.
What does this mean for innovation? Software Tools to support front-end analysis and decision making tools will become more and more prevalent and valuable. The emerging use of AI has the potential of removing human bias, making use of more comprehensive data and structuring innovation analysis and decision making in a more rational manner. The key will be the ability of software support system to deal with unstructured, qualitative, incomplete and ambiguous data, but this is exactly what emergent AI systems are showing promise doing.
What does this mean for innovation? Regardless of any process, methods or tools employed, regardless of any organizational structure or innovation strategy, the success or failure of any innovation initiative is highly people dependent. An innovation team operates, communicates and interacts with itself, with the external community and with the larger organization. The personality, skills, experience, mindset and capabilities of both individuals and the team is of critical importance to success. New paradigms such as the concept of a ‘purpose built team’ that is more like the team brought together to produce a movie is one metaphor that is being discussed and experimented with.
What does this mean for innovation? It is clear from numerous examples and experience that opportunity discovery is not a solved problem. Part of the issue may be confusion around the term ‘idea’. There is still a lot of talk about ‘coming up with ideas’, ‘testing ideas’, ‘managing ideas’, ‘executing ideas’ when perhaps a better term to use is ‘opportunity’. Many companies are swamped with ideas but lack meaningful opportunities. Once the discussion is about opportunities, not ideas, then opportunity discovery becomes very relevant.