Systemic Innovation:

Lateral Thinking

Building Your Cross-Functional Excellence

Knowing how to transform stand-alone ideas, technologies, products and services into value-rich solutions

Why Do You Need Cross-Functional Excellence?

Although innovation is driven by technology, required competence extends beyond technical know-how. In the new knowledge economy and knowledge-based enterprises, systemic innovative solutions arise from complex interactions between many individuals, organizations and environmental factors. The boundaries between products and services fade rapidly too. If you wish to be a market leader today, you must be able to integrate in a balanced way different types of know-how that would transform stand-alone technologies, products and services into a seamless, value-rich solution.

No Idea is Wasted!

Your mind can accept only those ideas that have a frame of reference with your existing knowledge. It rejects everything else. If your knowledge is functionally focused, you'll be open to new ideas related to your functional expertise only and will miss all other learning and innovation opportunities. If you develop a broad cross-functional expertise, no new idea will be wasted. It will immediately connect with the existing knowledge and will inspire  you, energize you, and encourage your entrepreneurial creativity. The broader your net, the more fish you can catch.

Combining the Unusual

The vast majority of new ideas are not original but derived from something else. Most great ideas are really combinations of other ideas.⁴

When asked about the secrets of his success, Henry Ford answered, "The simple secret of my genius is that I created something new out of the ideas and inventions of others."

The Danger of Categorization

"It's a pity nature isn't divided into the same categories as universities."

We need categories to be able to handle the huge amount of information we use and control.

That's why we have a hierarchy of folders and files in our computer, and that's why universities are categorized into faculties and departments. Categorization helps you, but can also prevent you from using what you know about one field in another.

There is a well known problem in education called the transference problem. If you teach something in one context, students most likely will not be able to use that knowledge in another⁶ and build synergies.

Learn Playing More than One Note

If you learn not one, but the whole spectrum of notes, you will not have to play mono-tone music all the time. Your will discover much more opportunities and, by engaging your lateral thinking, self-motivation, and systems thinking arts and skills, create great symphonies and improvise whenever necessary.

The Growing Role of the Business Architect

In today's knowledge- and innovation-driven complex economy, business architects are in growing demand.  They are cross-functionally excellent people who can tie several silos of business development expertise together, create synergies, design winning business model and a balanced business system and then lead people who will put their plans into action... More

Leading Organizations

We all start our careers as specialists – men and women with narrow corridors of functional expertise. The goal of specialists is to optimize individual effort. Technologists want to design the best products. Salespeople want to develop the most effective marketing strategies... and on and on. But "to raise to the ranks of senior management, you must forgo this quest for personal perfection, seeking instead to balance the skills and capabilities of the specialists working for you."¹ You need to apply the balanced business systems approach and consider your business as a system of interrelated factors of strategy, owners, investors, management, workers, finance, processes, products, suppliers, customers, and competitors.

Cross-functional management (CFM) manages business processes across the traditional boundaries of the functional areas. CFM relates to coordinating and synergizing the activities of different units for realizing the superordinate cross-functional goals and policy deployment. It is concerned with building a better system for achieving such cross-functional goals as innovation, quality, cost, and delivery... More

Driving Radical Innovation

"Here is the paradox: You need a great team of people with diverse skills to perform a symphony well, but no team has ever written a great symphony!".³

While cross-functional teams are key players in defining and implementing incremental innovation projects, cross-functional disruptive individuals tend to be key players in defining radical innovation projects. Individuals who are likely to excel in a radical innovation project, besides having superior technical capabilities, should be goal-oriented, broadly educated, creative, extremely bright, not afraid to be different, integrative, flexible, passionate, entrepreneurial, aggressive, eager to learn business, able to take risks, and inquisitive.³

Managing Technology

In the new era of systemic innovation, cross-functional technology managers are in high demand. In the Silicon Valley, for instance, many companies found that when they moved to a flatter organization, they had plenty of top-flight technologists but too few technology managers. "These managers are skilled technologists who also value the contribution from other functions, and who play an active role integrating these functions during the innovation process".²

How To Lead Creative People

By: Max DePree

Managing Knowledge

The explosion of knowledge growth, combined with its rapid distribution, makes it difficult to stay on top of the available knowledge in any industry. Thus, a global knowledge economy rewards not only creators of new knowledge but also those who can identify and integrate knowledge effectively.²

 Case in Point  The Rise of the IT Architect

IT architects are in growing demand.  They are cross-functionally excellent people who can "tie several silos of expertise together," relate to business problems as well as technology, and then sell their ideas upward and downward in the corporate hierarchy. The position of IT architect has become increasingly important to the ever-changing IT industry, and is one that established corporations and start-ups are seeking.

"As IT positions become more specialized and include increasingly detailed responsibilities, there's a need for someone who can tie several silos of expertise together," says Al Volvano, a product manager for Microsoft's Learning Group. "Enterprise architects aren't just technology experts; they are leaders with broad IT knowledge, the savvy to apply it to business problems and the communication skills necessary to coordinate the people who will put their plans into action," says Bill Liguori, senior vice president and co-founder of the placement firm Leadership Capital Group.⁷

 Case in Point  Ten³ Business e-Coach

Ten³ Business e-Coach, a new-to-the-world product and the world leader in business e-coaching is a great illustration of the power of cross-functional expertise as a source of sustainable competitive advantage.  The e-Coach integrates synergistically and systemically many various expertises to inspire innovation and entrepreneurial creativity. Launched in 2001 initially as  a hobby and later on as a home business, by 2005 it has customers in more than 70 countries. This global success created no direct competition to Ten3 Business e-Coach however. Why? Because potential me-tooers had no cross-functional experts to develop a competitive systemic e-coaching service and keep upgrading it continuously with the same speed.

 Case in Point  Nurturing Cross-Functional Experts at Hewlett-Packard

Most companies tend to recruit, train and promote people within functional corridors. But Hewlett-Packard (HP) breaks the walls, creating a carrier network that begins with the recruitment of diverse people in terms of their skills and personality and then promotes horizontally, as well as vertically throughout the company. "Typically, HP employees move through four to six functional areas in the course of their carriers. This creates broad knowledge of the company and fosters the kind of teamwork other companies covet".¹ When it comes time to promote, managers don't look who is next down the carrier line, they look for the best people. Neither employees should follow a pre-defined path to a particular post, nor need they to get a bigger title to be given new responsibility.

 Case in Point  Genetics

Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, combined mathematics and biology to create the science of genetics. "Working in a small monastery garden in 1850s, he crossed different varieties of peas to see which characteristics were inherited. He conceived the idea that the inherited traits were based on pairs of units that we know now as genes, and these genes followed simple statistical laws."⁴

 Case in Point  Printing Press

Around 1450 in Strasbourg, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press by combining two existing ideas. He coupled the flexibility of a coin punch with the power of a wine press to invent a method of printing with movable type.⁴