Preparing for Innovation – The Innovation Matrix
Here we explore different types of innovation. We encourage you to focus on the approaches you would need to use to be successful when creating innovations that fit into the different types.
We ask you to examine the Tushman O’Reilly Innovation chart2 which is reproduced below. It shows a laddering approach to innovation. The level of complexity, creativity and degree of change tends to increase as you go ‘up the ladder’.
Look carefully at the descriptions of each type of innovation. Your role and what you do in the Army would make a difference to the kind and types of innovation that you are likely to encounter and create.
Click to enlarge.
Source: O’Reilly, C. A., & Tushman, M. L. (2004). The ambidextrous organization. Harvard business review, 82(4), 74.
There are 6 types of innovation in the map. The map has two main anchors:
- information about the level and type of innovation; and, importantly,
- information about the likely user or recipients of the innovation (the stakeholders).
Let’s explore the map in a little more detail before you get started on your exercise. We’ll start with innovation and stakeholders.
You will notice that we divide the Innovation anchor into 3 groups.3
Incremental Innovations: These are small improvements in the provision, which might be existing services or goods, operations, processes, policies. It might be that something is made better, faster or cheaper. Although these improvements may be difficult or expensive, they draw on an existing set of competencies and processes and usually in a partly predictable manner.
Architectural Innovations: These are technological or process advances that fundamentally change a component, element, or direction of your organisation, division, team, or operations. Architectural innovation can occur through seemingly minor improvements in which existing technologies or components are integrated to dramatically enhance the performance of existing products or services. These architectural innovations, while not based on significant technological advances, often disrupt existing offerings and change the way that individuals and teams do things.
Discontinuous Innovation: These are radical advances that may profoundly alter the basis for operation and or purpose in your broad context. This is a new way of doing and thinking and requires a fundamental rethink of your operations and purpose. Major or discontinuous innovations and the resultant changes are those in which major improvements are made, typically through a major change in technology, or a significant advance in technology.
Stakeholders
We use the term stakeholders in many contexts because of the broad range of individuals, teams, divisions, organisations, and even countries, that might be the ‘user’, ‘target’ or the ‘recipient’ of an innovation. When you are thinking about the stakeholder, please try to be as specific as possible. It is also possible that you might have a group of stakeholders who are the likely ‘users’ of the innovation. You can have multiple ‘users’ in the Stakeholder box by the way.
By the way, there will be more about stakeholders later.
As a guide, we have put in the words Stakeholders/Users/Situations as a guide. You will also notice that we divide the Stakeholder anchor into Existing and New.
Existing are those who are already using or know about whatever it is that you are providing.
New are those that either are not familiar with what it is that is being provided, or as yet have not begun to use it. Already you can imagine that the situation might be different.
When you put these anchors and their groups together, you can see that you have six combinations.
Source: O’Reilly, C. A., & Tushman, M. L. (2004). The ambidextrous organization. Harvard business review, 82(4), 74.
Ambidextrous Organisations
Before we send you off to explore these concepts on your own, there is one more concept that we want you to take in. Ambidextrous organisations refers to teams and people who are able to create and cope with ‘business as usual’ improvements and incremental innovations, and major purpose-shifting innovations, at the same time. We think of these as mindsets and capability sets. Each set has its own distinct strengths and requirements, and also its challenges.
We group the different types into the language of ‘exploiting current capabilities’ which we will represent with a blue circle, and ‘exploring new options’ which we will represent with a green triangle. We have a third concept to add, the ‘decide’ or ‘wisdom’ square which is the organisational or team capability that makes key selection and retention decisions about what to keep and support with resources and time, and what to do less of, retire, or put aside for another time. We show this as a red square.
We stick with this language: blue circle, green triangle and red square.
We know that there are other systems that use colours and shapes. These shapes with their colour in this exercise are not to be confused with ‘hats’, animals or personas. The shapes remind us of the capabilities and attributes of the type of thinking and actions and the time, effort and focus that is required. We put these onto a grid to make sense of the whole set and to help us think of how the organisation might be able to ‘see’ its innovation landscape.
Click to enlarge
You will notice that we have the shapes on two axies. The ‘x’ axis is time, and the ‘y’s axis is focus. Generally speaking, green triangle thinking and the resultant innovations require less time and often less focus to conceptualise and ‘mock up’.
Ideas and concepts, especially for services, processes and systems, can often be ‘easier’ to come up with. Of course, the actual creation and bringing to life can be another whole issue. But generally these potential innovations require less time and focus. It also means that there can be many of these!
Hence the need for the red square: the decision box. This requires specific skills, decision criteria and another whole set of ‘eyes’ and ways of thinking. We sometimes call this the ‘wisdom’ component of innovation decisions.
Then we have the blue circle. These usually require significant time and focus. These are the ways of working, the ‘business as usual’, the things that we know have worked for us over time but need to change. These are the ongoing, usually incremental changes and modifications that require retraining, rethinking and modifications, that for some are actually more difficult than the big impact significant shifts.
It is pretty likely that you have already started to match the boxes on the innovation map with the shapes on the ambidextrous organisation framework.
Generally speaking, the innovations map out like this (but not always, of course!):
Stakeholder/Innovation and Explore/Exploit Illustration
EXAMPLE
The switch from fixed landlines to in-home wireless handsets didn’t change the basic functions of a telephone. It allowed for much more convenience and flexibility in the ways that telephones were fitted into homes and the way they were used. However, the advent of mobile phones was a complete change of technology and usage possibilities. The next step, smart devices, completely changed the concept of a telephone!
References
- Anthony, S. D., Cobban, P., Nair, R., & Painchaud, N. (2019). Breaking down the barriers to Innovation. Harvard business review, 97(6), 92-+
- O’Reilly, C. A., & Tushman, M. L. (2004). The ambidextrous organization. Harvard Business Review, 82(4), 74.
- Ibid.