The Ten Principles of Permanent Innovation

InnovationLabs, an innovation consultancy, has published a new book called Permanent Innovation by Langdon Morris, this new book takes the following approach to innovation:

“Innovation is the process of creating new ideas and turning them into new business value. Permanent Innovation is the process of doing it continuously, by developing an organizational culture that embraces innovation as a core value, practices innovation as a core methodology, and produces innovation as a consistent output.”

The book describes “The Ten Principles of Permanent Innovation” the set of principles “are intended to be your map, for they are vitally important to a successful journey.”

The Ten Principles of Permanent Innovation

1. Innovation is essential to survival, and all innovation is strategic. Since innovation is literally how organizations create their own futures, innovation as a process and an organizational priority cannot be separated from the development and implementation of strategy.
2. There are four types of innovation: incremental, breakthrough products & technologies, new business models, and new ventures. Taken together, all of your innovation initiatives constitute a portfolio.
3. The longer you wait to begin innovating, the worse things will get. Companies that procrastinate usually pay a heavy price in the form of lost market share and lost profits, and ultimately the lack of innovation can significantly diminish their future prospects. The competition isn’t waiting, and you shouldn’t either.
4. Innovation is a social art; it happens when people interact with one another. People are the core of any innovation process. Their insights, concerns, and desires shape the pursuit of new ideas and the countless decisions to be made in the process of transforming these ideas into value. Consequently, managing innovation is largely a process of managing people, and also managing the principles and practices according to which their work is organized.
5. Innovation without methodology is just luck. There are lots of creative people in your company, and given half a chance they’ll probably create some great innovations. But if you rely on their random efforts then you’re risking your future success on chance, and that’s not enough. You have to develop and apply methodologies, the right methodologies, to make the shift from luck to consistency, predictability, and sustainability.
6. All four strategic innovation viewpoints are critical to success. You can’t rely just on the innovation efforts of top managers, nor of your own people in the field, nor of what only insiders can create. The complete innovation methodology has to leverage all four viewpoints: Topdown, Bottom-up, Outside-in, and Peer-to-peer.
7. Great innovations begin with great ideas; to find them, identify unknown and unmet needs. There are many different kinds of needs. Among the most significant for innovators are the ones that no one has recognized, for these offer the potential to create breakthroughs that bring significant added value and competitive advantage. So how to find them? There are dozens of tools explained here that you can apply to come up with new ideas. Experiment with these tools and you’ll surely find some that work well in your organization.
8. Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim, Fire. Yes, it’s a cliché. But it’s also true. Effective innovation requires very careful targeting. Why? Because there are so many possibilities to chase that you have to make sure you’re going after the right ones. Besides which, innovation is expensive both in terms of cash and time, and good aiming enables you to use your resources wisely.
9. Prototype rapidly to accelerate learning. The goal of any innovation process is to come up with the best ideas and get them into market as quickly as possible. Thus, the innovation process is a learning process, and learning faster has enormous advantages. Among the methods for learning that you can choose, prototyping is one of the most valuable because it so effectively condenses the learning process. Rapid prototyping is therefore central to most forms of effective innovation methodology.
10. There is no innovation without leadership. Companies are amazing expressions of human society. The fact of organizing thousands of people to create and deliver products and services around the world to thousands or millions of customers is a remarkable thing. But the ability to do this brings some unique challenges. In particular, the impact of the organizational hierarchy has tremendous influence on the culture of any company, on its ways of working, and the results it achieves. Thus, top managers can be powerful champions of innovation, or dark clouds of suppression. It’s up to leaders to ensure that their words and their actions support and enhance innovation efforts and methods, and that at the same time they work diligently to eliminate the many obstacles that otherwise impede or even crush both creativity and innovation.

This is the website for the book, you can download the book for free or you can purchase the book here.

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