From: Jonathan Vehar
I was just at the Chicago PDMA’s excellent conference on innovation. I enjoyed a presentation by Guy Merritt from Tellabs, who is their Broadband Products Division Director of Engineering. Here’s a man who clearly loves their fiber-optic telecom product, revels in the engineering process, and can talk about the intricacies of VOIP, SIP VDSL, VDSL2, MoCA, and many other things I don’t pretend to understand.
What I loved about his presentation, and which was wholeheartedly echoed by Roger Jellicoe the "father" of the brilliant Motorola RAZR wireless phone, was that after 18 years or managing engineering projects in the high-tech arena, he realized the most important thing in developing new products was the people, not the process. In other words, people are the most important tool available to bring forth innovation. "All the product development books are bunk," said Jellicoe. My provocative reflection: the books and processes tend to focus on the lowest common denominator of people and try to manage them. Instead I say, let the individual greatness of people shine through to bring forth innovation.
I realized at the Innovation Immersion this year that there are too many people focusing on Innovation as the end, not a means to an end. After all, innovation is an enabler for business growth, and should be regarded that way. We’ve been working deliberately with our clients to figure out what innovation means to them and why they want to spend resources to make it happen. With a medical device company that we’re working with, we’re sitting down with a team leader to deliberately plan the following: 1) what’s the desired outcome? 2) how will you know when you’ve achieved it? 3) what are the measurements along the way, and 4) how will you share this with everybody?
Cutting edge? No, but it’s missing in the innovation efforts of too many companies with which we come into contact. It seems that there is a fear of drawing a line in the sand to which people will be held accountable. Is it risky? Yes. But remember: what gets measured gets done. Your people deserve nothing less.
About Jonathan Vehar -- Jonathan is an InnovationIgniter Faculty member and developed a powerful video module on "Think 360." He is a partner in New & Improved®, LLC, an organizational development firm focused on people skills for innovation. We train and facilitate people to generate great ideas and work to bring those to the "marketplace," whatever that means for them. As a full-time practitioner in the field of innovation for 13 years now, and a facilitator of innovation teams for 18, I’m still amazed at how much there is to learn.
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