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Managing Innovation versus Managing Operations |
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By Vadim Kotelnikov. Main source of information: "Relentless Growth", Christopher Meyer
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"Not only do the traditional management skills not work, they'll smother innovation quicker than you can say." – Dr. Kevorkian |
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Primary Difference between Innovation and Operations Innovation is a learning process, the product of which is new applied knowledge. Operations is an established process driven by existing knowledge. Operations generate today's value, while innovation creates tomorrow's opportunities. The primary difference between operations and innovation is uncertainty. It eludes planning, prediction and containment. "What makes innovation unique as a business process is that creativity and routine are intertwined throughout the process". The routine tasks have little value by themselves however; their purpose is to support the knowledge discovery process. Different Management Tools and Thinking Managing innovation requires specific approaches. "If you try to manage the uncertainty inherent in innovation with tools and thinking designed for the relative certainty of operations, you'll run into trouble... You'll be continuously surprised as your assumptions prove false". The most effective way to deal with uncertainty inherent in innovation is to have a learning process that "systematically confronts the unknown with new hypotheses, tests them, and eventually creates a new knowledge".
When innovating, you cannot figure it all out and ahead of time and stick to one
plan; so, don't wait - just go for it, learn
and adjust as you go. That's why "successful innovators get used to moving
forward, backing up, going sidewise, chasing parallel paths for a while,
consolidating, and then going forward again".
Different Strategies and
Routes to Success
When managing daily operations, you know:
what results should be
what steps are required to achieve them, and
who should do what along the way.
Managing innovation is quite different from
managing operations as:
you always have less information available to
make choices than you'd like
innovation has not a single goal, but multiple
and unclear goals, and
each of these goals can be reached through
multiple routes.
How To Lead Creative People
By: Max DePree
Be wary of incremental changes – they
replace creativity and real innovation...
More
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