How to encourage innovation

At CivTech, our mission is to drive daring and innovation in the public sector by collaboratively solving challenges that make people’s lives better – and in doing so create generations of sustainable, high growth businesses.

Encouraging innovation is a big part of our job. But how can this be done?

Understanding innovation

It’s important to understand the meaning of innovation. There’s an awful lot of complication put out there about what it is, but in truth, it’s simple. It’s what occurs when someone improves on or makes a significant contribution to an existing invention, product, process or service. 

Equally, it’s important to understand what innovation isn’t. It’s not invention, where there’s the creation of a product or introduction of a process for the first time.

A great example of innovation is the smartphone. When Apple launched the first one in 2007, there was absolutely nothing in it that was in any way ‘new’. The components, such as LCD screens, processors, the battery and the telephone elements were mainstream tech. So was the music player.

But it was the combination of these things that made the smartphone so innovative. Suddenly we had small computers in our pockets that just happened to play music and make calls.

Innovation is about exploring the possibilities that exist in new technologies and knowledge to radically alter and improve the way things are done.

Innovation is not new. It’s just a fancy word for something that humans have been doing since the cognitive revolution some 80,000 years ago.

Hand axes are a good example. These tools first appeared around 3 million years ago. The basic design stayed much the same for millennia. 

Then around 15,000 years ago we started improving them. We found and developed new materials, new skills and new techniques to manipulate the material. We rapidly refined the shape into incredibly sophisticated and efficient designs.

And to consider the difference between invention and innovation, think about the wheel. As far as we know, this was invented some 5,000 years ago, and we’ve been innovating it ever since. From the huge, roughly hewn, crude ‘chunks of wood’ that formed the original design, through countless iterations to all sorts of modern, elegant, diverse and efficient designs we have now.

The inventors of the wheel from 5,000 years ago would undoubtedly be amazed at the sight of a modern wheel for a bike. They’d be stunned by how light yet strong it was; the notion of ‘spokes’ might astound them, that something so thin could be so strong. They wouldn’t understand the technologies used to produce it, its steel and carbon fibre composition. 

But undoubtedly, they’d recognise in its shape, the thing they invented.

Historically, the way we innovate has stayed much the same over time. It all starts with a need, and the exploration of possibilities. And it always starts with an open question:

How might we improve this?

Understand the problem

Innovation occurs when you identify and understand the problem that needs to be fixed. Ideas for new technology, products and services are all very well, but if they do not solve a problem that will make someone’s life better, in any way, then what is the point? 

Understand your problem, the impact it causes and why it needs to be fixed. Then communicate this problem well to the widest possible audience of people who have the skills and experience to help you fix it. 

Any individual, team, innovator, entrepreneur, small or large business – literally anyone – can offer a solution. 

Why spread the net so wide? Because you don’t know where the right idea might come from. 

Make innovation business as usual

Modern large organisations – both public and private – have tended to stifle innovation.

They often have a standardised system of operations, a focus on delivering ‘business as usual’, and an understandable aversion to risk.

None of these things are bad. In fact, they’re strengths, the things that make it possible for large organisations to work efficiently and effectively. 

But a strength overlayed becomes a weakness.

Standardisation of systems and processes, if overplayed, can lead to singular ways of doing things and singular ways of thinking. A focus on delivery can make organisations blind to what’s around the corner. And a risk-averse approach can stop new thinking in its tracks.

Historically, forward thinking organisations tended to create special teams set outside the main system as their ‘innovation drivers’. To illustrate this, we can consider the most successful Volkswagen vehicle of all time: the modern Beetle. While its origin is subject to apocryphal storytelling, what’s often said is that it was the result of a team at the company designing and engineering it despite explicit orders from the hierarchy not to. After they closed the final original Beetle factory down in Mexico, engineers and designers got together in secret, hired a warehouse by themselves and designed the new Beetle. This was successfully presented to Volkswagen, and became a huge hit.

The Nokia flip phone is another example. A special unit sited 40 km away from Nokia’s headquarters, with a different company culture, created the phone that dominated the mobile phone market before the arrival of the smartphone.

All of these can be traced back to the original ‘outside team’: Lockheed Martin’s SkunkWorks.

They’ve allowed large organisations to innovate on the outside, while they delivered business as usual.

But this approach is not fit for a world where the rate of technological change and sheer abundance of new possibilities to deliver better services and products has never been greater.

No team, no matter how talented, is going to know every possibility. Which is why we need to embed innovation throughout organisations and take an approach in which innovation becomes part of business as usual. For most, this is a significant culture change, and won’t happen overnight. But it is possible. And we are here to help.