Innovation - Game-Changer or Improvement Seeker
2019, March 23rd
With the “9Levels of Innovation” you show one’s colors und identify how you successfully evolve the innovation power of your company.
Today’s article I would like to start with a provocative proposition: “Everybody is naturally innovative!” The ultimate question is: What is your best way to express your innovation power? This article reveals different innovation categories and cultures. And it comes even better, you can learn, how to elegantly surf them.
Innovation is a topic that has been written about many times already and, above all, there exist a lot of different definitions on innovation types and methods. A couple of months ago I got the request from a supplier of raw material to facilitate an innovation workshop at an international conference. Their central question was: “How can we not only be perceived as component deliverer by our clients, but as service provider or even as innovation partner?” This gave me the idea to view the topic from the 9Levels perspective. The 9Levels describe the evolution of how people, teams and organizations live and work together. Each level implies new perspectives of the world, different paradigms and value systems. In this article we have a look at those paradigms and examine how they inform our thinking about innovation and corporate culture.
Each level is associated with its own color. In this article I focus on 4 of the 9Levels by investigating the innovation aspect.
It’s important to note: In this model no level is better or worse, than the other! It’s about the right fit to the market, the environment and the people.
The fascinating thing is: Each next level evolves as a reaction to the limitations and boundaries of the previous level.
I invite you to ask yourself whilst reading through the different levels: What is your preferred work and innovation level and how does your team or organization function?
1. The Blue Level – Systematic Innovation
Do you know the statement: “If we just deliver high enough quality, the customers will come by themselves anyway!” The values quality, stability and discipline are very important to Blue. Just as much Blue loves to work in structured and process-oriented ways. Therefore also creative impulses and spontaneous ideas are introduced into a structured innovation process with clear rules and regulations. This could be e.g. the employee suggestion scheme or a separate department for innovation management. The ideas are judged by predefined criteria. Consequently very creative ideas may get sorted out, because they don’t match the catalogue of criteria.
In addition the strong department thinking (silo thinking) results in not involving other functions and external suppliers are viewed as pure component deliverers like in the example above.
Blue companies are very good in Improvement Innovations: Improvement of quality, processes and enlargement of the current product range (line extensions). You often find blue organizations in the healthcare sector and the automotive industry.
Tip: Process-oriented idea finding workshops can be an effective method to develop ideas in cross-hierarchical and cross-functional ways and to ensure acceptance in the blue corporate culture.
Question: Are you an Improvement Seeker? Someone, who recognizes in an instant, how to refine and improve a product, a process or an idea?
In case a blue company is challenged to adapt to new market conditions or new products and processes need to be developed very quickly, it can be appropriate to build a 2nd organization beside the main organization, e.g. a R&D department as a satellite, which gives creative personalities freedom to work with unusual approaches.
Or the whole corporate culture develops towards Orange.
2. The Orange Level – Performance-oriented Innovation
“Higher, faster, further!“ is the motto of Orange. New ideas are mainly developed, if they serve the personal and the company success.
In Orange a stronger market orientation and targeted orientation towards customer needs take place. External suppliers are seen as pure service providers, cause the “customer is king“. The increasing perception of other players in the market can easily shift from a sportily competition towards a tough competitive battle.
All those elements influence the innovation culture: Generating new ideas is triggered by internal and external competition. New ideas are rewarded by financial incentives and visibility.
In order to calculate the short-term financial profit and growth of a new idea, business cases are conducted. They also encourage the entrepreneurial thinking of the employees.
Orange companies are very good at elaborating customer needs and fulfilling them in a direkt way. Technical Innovations and Efficiency-Innovations also belong to their strengths. Many of our Western organizations have a strong base in Orange.
Tip: Due to the strong focus on “quick wins“, it is important for the execution of more long-term and larger innovation projects to incentivize milestones and to communicate successes on a regular base.
Question: Are you a Performance-Innovator? Is your idea finding spurred by competition and incentives for your achievements? Do you often have ideas, how to increase the efficiency of products and processes?
When the insight is induced, that a company could be even more successful by increasing the collaboration of teams or the employees are just perceived as cogs in the machine and the human aspects got lost, an opening towards the green corporate culture takes place.
3. The Green Level – Collaborative Innovation with We-Feeling
In green corporate cultures the values cooperation, dialogue and diversity are emphasized. A high team-orientation is prevailed.
The idea development is perceived as a common project. Different departments and functions are invited to participate at innovation workshops, because heterogeneity is seen as catalyzers for new ideas. Popular methods are e.g. the World Café or Open-Space-Workshops.
For the harmony loving “comfort-we“, combined with the desire for integration and consensus, it could be difficult after a strong idea phase to make clear decisions and move forward to the implementation phase. Decisions often mean to say goodbye to less interesting ideas. But Green doesn’t want to offend anybody. In the implementation phase sometimes endurance or even fighting for an idea with a high personal dedication is needed. Disruptive innovations can even generate losers in the system. All 3 points are rather difficult for green cultures.
Green cultures are excellent at collaborative idea finding. The broader heterogeneity indulges a greater customer understanding, so that Green is going beyond the pure customer satisfaction, like in orange cultures. They are seeking for the WOW-effect, the Customer Delight. Agile organizations are associated with the green level.
Tip: Freedom and empowerment are the keys for new ideas in Green. By including various groups and functions the ideas gain broad acceptance in the company. Focusing on the implementation is very important, e.g. with „who is doing what until when“. Otherwise struggling with a “creation jam“ can provoke frustration in the long-term.
Question: Do you do you look at Diversity? Do you view it as an inspiring enlargement of your own perspective or is it rather a cumbersome friction with dissidents? Do you have your best ideas whilst exchanging with others?
When the broad participation and the strong desire for consensus and harmony lead to a tiredness of meetings (“meet until death“ syndrome), the market demands a higher pace or disruptive business models are required, yellow ways of working get developed.
4. The Yellow Level – Co-creative Innovation
Yellow is THE innovation level: Innovation is generated through Co-Creation with internal and external partners of the network. The friendly co-operation is initiated “on-call”. Our supplier mentioned earlier would be seen as inspiring innovation partner.
In Yellow multi-perspectivity and competence are important values and they are specifically utilized for innovation. Freedom, individuality as well as life-long learning are precious conditions for generating new ideas.
Innovation rooms or innovation labs bring developers of ideas together whilst using a selected diversity and giving room for creativity. Game-changing innovations, business model innovations and disruptive innovations get the freedom and simultaneously the protected space for early trial & error testing and learning. Also the basic innovations of the 6th Kondratiev are associated with the yellow level.
IT, Biotech or Consulting Start-Ups are often formed by yellow founders, who feel that the previous organizational cultures have grown to narrow. They are driven by a “great idea“ and share it with their co-creative partners and employees.
As already mentioned e.g. R&D units are built aside the main organization in order to drive certain innovation projects forward with a higher speed. For example currently I’m involved as a consultant in a highly innovative digital health project, which should establish completely new business models within the company and with their clients.
Tip: When yellow start-ups are starting to grow, the challenge is to integrate orange success-oriented elements or blue structures of reliability and to still keep the yellow innovative power.
In the case of a yellow satellite organization the integration of the newly developed product or the new business model in the main organization requires special attention.
At the same time it is important to accompany temporarily delegated employees after the yellow project was closed. Last year for example a coaching client came to me, because she experienced the return to the green organization as a massive culture clash, so that she was even thinking about leaving the company.
Question: Do you prefer to work in flexible networks and co-creative ways? Are live-long learning and repeatedly newly inspiring projects more important than status or security?
Last but not least I would like to close the loop to our supplier of raw material: The change within their company needs to come first, so that they can meet their clients on the targeted level and then their clients can perceive them differently.
I’m curious: Which innovation type do you feel most comfortable with? How would you assess your team or your organization? The questions on the respective level can help you to make a better assessment.
I invite you to experiment with the particular level tips and to start surfing on the different levels.
Enjoy applying this in practice and rest assured that your innovative ideas thrive,
Annette Freund
FREUND INSPIRED MOVE
Annette Freund is Founder and Managing Director of the consulting company FREUND INSPIRED MOVE in Switzerland. She is inspired by change processes: Strong Individuals! Reforming Teams! Transforming Organizations!
She provides her services in German and English speaking environments.
www.inspiredmove.ch
Inspired by:
(1) Rainer Krumm – 9Levels of Value Systems
(2) Rainer Krumm, Christian Buchholz – Innovationskultur
(3) Frederic Laloux – Reinventing Organizations
(4) Marc de Jong, Nathan Marston, Erik Roth - The eight essentials of innovation
(5) Leo Nefiodow – The sixth Kondratiev
Picture: © alphaspirit / fotolia.com