Innovation and the future of work go hand in hand. Innovation in technology is changing the nature of the work we do. We need innovation in the ways people acquire skills and knowledge so they’re prepared for this kind of work. We need innovation in our social support systems to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to train for and connect to decent work throughout their lifetime.
In this context, I and the rest of the Economic Graph team get a lot of questions about innovation. Innovation is something we all want, and also something that seems elusive and ill-defined. Many don’t know how to correctly recognize or encourage more innovation, despite our recognition that we need lots more of it.
Given the need to reorganize our society around innovation to meet the challenges and opportunities in the future of work, it’s appropriate to take a few minutes to reflect on what innovation is - and what it’s not.
#1: Innovation isn’t something you do, it’s doing something better.
Innovation is not a goal. Creating value for our customers is a goal. Making products that improve the fit between members’ skills and their careers is a goal. Ensuring that our platform is accessible and valuable to every member of the global workforce is a goal. Helping governments better understand their labor markets is a goal.
Innovation is the way we change our products and processes to achieve those goals. There is no place in the corporate strategy for “innovation,” beyond continually renewing a corporate culture that supports innovation. In short, innovation is the how. Achieving our company vision is the what.
#2: Progress, not perfection.
Thomas Edison's light bulb debuted in 1879, over 75 years after the invention of the incandescent lamp in 1802. Edison and his team were focused on solving one specific problem - finding a stable conductive element that would last long enough and be cheap enough to make light bulbs commercially viable. The team tested over 6,000 possible materials before they settled on carbonized cotton, which lasted only 14.5 hours. It took another six months of further testing to discover carbonized bamboo, which increased the filament lifespan to 1,200 hours.
Even for revolutionary inventions, innovation is predominantly small and cumulative. It’s one hundred, one thousand, or a million little things that, taken together, make a big difference. In effect, innovative organizations don’t solve one big problem, they solve ten thousand little problems.
#3: If you can’t measure it, you can’t achieve it.
If innovation is doing something better, the ‘something’ must be clear and measurable. If you want to organize a group of people around a common goal, you need unambiguous feedback on whether the group’s efforts are paying off.
No metric is perfect. There is an enormous body of academic literature dedicated to demonstrating the ways in which every measure we can conceive is flawed in one or more important ways (I won't go into it here). Pick one anyway - or two, or three - and plan for regular reviews to assess its continued usefulness for moving your organization in the direction of its vision.
#4: Build to scale.
I regularly hear about new education and training pilots that are trying out new, innovative ways to deliver education and training, certify skills, reach people with mobility challenges, and connect to jobs. Often these pilots are successful, but never go anywhere. As I often hear and have experienced myself, scaling is hard. Part of that problem is that many of these were designed as pilots, not as programs.
A successful pilot with no way to scale isn’t innovation. It’s a miss. Planning to scale from the beginning ensures that a successful pilot has a pathway to become a program, product, feature, or service for everyone. Designing to scale means building your product or program from the beginning so that it can be deployed across your entire target population in a fiscally sustainable manner.
#5: Safety first.
Innovation, like entrepreneurship, is a process of discovery through experimentation. The outcome cannot be predicted, and therefore there must be room to fail hard, and fail safely. This is probably the hardest part, but no less critical, for successfully building an innovation culture.
Innovative organizations achieve their goals by building an innovative culture that values and rewards taking intelligent risks, seeking regular feedback, measuring success, and building collaborative, respectful working relationships.
This isn’t easy; this is hard. Reinforcing an environment where people feel they can have stupid ideas and try weird stuff that probably won’t work without taking a hit on their performance reviews or compensation or working relationships is really, really difficult. But it’s necessary to successful innovation. Celebrating intelligent risk-taking (instead of success or failure) can be a big step in the right direction.
