INNOVATION
What Drucker Wrote About Successful Innovation
Simple lessons from business thought leader
People struggle to fully understand innovation, to define innovation, or what it means in an organization.
I recently read a great business book, “The Essential Drucker,” which is a collection of his writings.
This article is a whirlwind tour of what I learned.
Purposeful
Drucker said that “purposeful innovation” is the result of detailed analysis, systemic review, and a lot of hard work. As such, it can be taught, learned, and replicated anywhere.
Purposeful innovation starts with analyzing opportunities. It’s an organized search, conducted on a regular basis in business. Drucker identified seven sources of opportunity that drive innovation:
- An organization’s own success and failure, and also that of competitors
- Incongruities in a process like manufacturing, distribution, or in consumer behavior
- Process needs
- Changes in industry and/or market structure
- Changes in demographics
- Changes in meaning and perception
- New information, new knowledge
The best innovators use their entire brain, both sides, left and right. The true skill is to engage — observe, go look, ask, and listen. They look at data and they observe behaviors, design, and people.
Simple
For innovation to be successful, Drucker noted it must be simple. Simple and focused. By this, he means that it should only do one thing, otherwise it leads to confusion and therefore will not work.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
— Leonardo Da Vinci
Effective innovations are incredibly simple because it focuses on a specific need to satisfy, evident by the end result that it delivers.
This makes innovation seem pretty simple, right? Well, it can be.
Small
Drucker advocated that effective innovations start small and never try to be too clever. Keep it simple was his mantra. Starting with small bite-size chunks allows for adjustments. Pivots. Starting small keeps the functional requirements of the audience front and center and investment modest.
Innovations must be easily adapted by ordinary people, or “by morons or near morons” according to Drucker.
Another thing that Drucker said was not to innovate for the future, “never try to be too clever”, rather innovate for the present. Any innovation has the potential to have long term impact, but if you can’t get it adopted today there won’t be a future.
Final Thoughts
According to Drucker, there are three conditions that must be met for successful innovation, which are:
- If Innovation is to work — It requires knowledge, ingenuity, creativity. Plus, innovators rarely work in more than one area, be it Law, IT, health, finance, retail, or digital. He said that this type of work requires commitment, diligence, and plenty of perseverance.
- To be successful — Innovators must build to their strengths by looking at an array of opportunities and asking which best fits? fits our business — a good fit between motive, selection criteria, and business strategy.
- Innovation impacts — Society and the economy. It changes consumer behavior or reacts to changes. It can also be in the form of a process change, in terms of how companies produce or deliver something. What’s important is that innovation must be close to the market, the consumer. Continuously focused on market conditions and drivers.
By its nature innovation is risky, like any economic activity. That said, sticking to the way things were done yesterday is far riskier than creating tomorrow.
Innovators uncover risk and seek to mitigate it. They are successful by systematically analyzing opportunity. They refine the opportunity and set about exploiting it.
Successful innovators are creative thinkers, not risk-focused, rather opportunity-focused.
