The Innovation Genome

So you are housed in an enterprise. You look and there is a digital revolution in-progress, outside. Today’s start-ups are disrupting yesterday’s established businesses. Disruption is moving exponentially. Mindsets are still linear bound. 

You want to open the door and let the fresh ideas flow in. That’s only natural. Everyone wants to be part of an exciting tomorrow.

So you jump right out. You read all the innovation books. You even go beyond your comfort zone and gobble up some of those innovation blogs out there. With fancy headings such as innovation genome! You keep going. You consult top minds. You shell out top dollars. Gurus hit you with innovation mantras from all directions.  

‘It is about changing the culture. It is not about setting up an innovation garage. It’s about embedding innovation into processes, into people. Give people 20% of their time and ask them to innovate. Include innovation as a competency. Setup a measurement framework around it. Give your workplace a cool look. Offer people free food. There is a strong correlation between good food and good ideas’.  And on and on and on the advice flows - free, unhindered, in waves, like a cool breeze on a hot, sultry day.

Yup, you get all this. Sure, that is where I want my enterprise to be, sans the free food bit. 

But of course. Hit the culture with the innovation bug. Sit back relax and enjoy the show. Innovation will become a way of life.  Transformation, second nature. Who would want anything different?

But hey, still quite foggy up there on the how? How to get to this nirvana stage. Change culture, sure. But how?

Life is probabilistic. Innovation too is not deterministic.

Give the following recipe a shot. Maybe the probabilities of success will fall in line for you.

First and foremost find someone super special to lead your innovation effort. The special bit in this deal is ‘passion’. The one and only competence.  A passion to experiment, to change, to challenge, to research, to connect, to deliver. Someone who loses the context of space and time when in the flow of innovation. Driven. Not by insipid mission statements. Nor enamored by marketing collateral. Driven by a deep inner sense of purpose. To experiment. To look for new ways. To discover new value for the enterprise. To disrupt existing norms. To leap into and beyond the exponential curve.

Don’t even start till you find this person. You need a pivot for innovation. To catapult it into the heart of your enterprise. You need someone special.

Once on board, your job is to clear the deck for him/her. There will be pain all around. The not invented here syndrome will bite from all directions. Escalations galore. Territorial scuds will land on your door steps every day. Summer will arrive early in your work life. Heat will emanate from all corners. Relax. Take meditation classes. Do Yoga. Take a walk. Go for a run. 

The agenda for innovation has been set. The magic has begun. Passion is like a magnate. It is already attracting and multiplying. You just be the shield for the leader and his/her ever growing network of peers. Provide the nurturing ground. For passion to sow the seeds of innovation. These seeds will grow and change the culture, organically.

There are a whole raft of other things you can promote. Create an ecosystem of partners. Find some funding. Recruit more staff. Create a garage to give innovation an identity. Create some governance. All crucially important. Sure, do these. But after the first two are in place. 

The key is finding a passionate innovation leader and then clearing the deck for him/her to operate. Those are the two stands of the innovation DNA. The powerful double helix. Once in place, these will rapidly replicate and before you know it, an innovation culture will cultivate in your enterprise. 

Fresh air will flow freely inside and within....

open sourcing imagination #2

It's been a while since I penned down my last blog. This is typical me. Gain interest, lose interest, all at a rapid pace. But hey, it's a rapid world out there. Startups form and die, before you even know they were formed. Kickstarter gives us a live, streaming insight into the future, previously folks used to track patents to peep into the future. Nanotechnology is converting the paradigm of humanity from dealing with scarcity to dealing with abundance. My kids do 5 things at the same time using 3 devices and 4 channels. Robots are using evolution algorithms to learn to talk to each other. evolution Algorithm!  You must be kidding me, no one taught me that when I did my double master degrees....

so hey, with all this evolution around me, I am entitled to my own sand dunes of interests....

I was having a kadak chai with a business partner today and I saw his eyes gleaning whilst reflecting on the times we live in. I saw a reflection of my soul in that glean. I feel totally inspired everyday, just with the mere fact that i live in these times. There is entrepreneurship blossoming at every corner of the world, there are people from all walks of life giving wings to their dreams. And technology underpins most of those dreams.  My daughter follows this YouTube superwomen. She is a producer n director of a great show, which is a satire on Indian families dealing with contemporary times. Superwomen has over 1.7 million subscribers. She also does all three roles in her production. The father, the mother and the daughter. A celebrity, an actor, a director of this age.

An idea, a camera, an Internet connection and off you go....

Imagination is now open sourced. You can download thoughts from the stream of information flowing in front of you, convert these thoughts into ideas and start something big.

Here are some of my thoughts,  open sourced, creative commons licenced to build...

Startup cafe

Cities such as dubai could do with startup cafes where people from the innovation ecosystem come to intersect, discuss and build ideas, over a chai n a muffin. Folks with ideas, folks with money, folks with resources and folks with a good appetite. The menu card should not only tweet the trending chai flavours but also hot ideas being liked and under formation in the cafe.  A physical space for human beings to invent, share and eat.  A startup cafe.

Appstores blossoming at a garden near you

A godzillion apps are being built. But hey the big players such as Google and Apple seem to have a monopoly over app stores. Have the times arrived for verticalized app stores? Maybe one for retail, one for travel, one for banking et al. Sharpens the focus and removes latency and friction for someone looking for an app. Best to register those domain names,  just in case the idea picks up..www.ideas.appstore.com!

One second advantage

" I go where the puck is going to be"  the one second advantage of prediction. An art a science .. a game changer. Perhaps the next ecosystem for India and Indian companies to nurture. Ingredients : math, science, computing, art all mixed together and then delivered at scale. I would start with data science courses in the schools n universities to build capabilities ground up, just like we did with computer engineering all those years back...perhaps pilani can be the next bangalore. Companies should then form vertical cognitive and prediction hubs, as each vertical needs the models to be calibrated and fine tuned.  Generic data science and machine learning competence centres will not cut it. Go deep, go vertical, go forth...

Around

Humanity only looks down nowadays. Just walk around and watch. People are walking heads down, deep in love with their mobile devices. Chatting, posting, reading or just staring at their devices, praying for a notification to arrive. Something, an email,  a ping, something........

someone create a simple app for them please. An "around" app. It runs on all those devices, all those wearables, on everything that makes humanity gaze down. And all it does is to remind human beings to look around them,  smell those roses a few centimetres away, gaze at the tallest building in the world, admire the eyes of another fellow human passing by and around, look beyond at the horizon at the unique cloud formation. Link into the real world.
look back, look left, look right...look around.

That's it for now.