Many organizations treat innovation as something technology focused; a new product, a new feature, or perhaps a form of underlying component like a new chemical compound or software infrastructure component (e.g. use of a large language model or blockchain). While these can be considered innovations, there are many additional forms. We’re going to cover a few over the next three posts and close out with how linking these can create more resilience/adaptability for an organization. So, put aside your thinking that all new innovation is around AI, or more generally technology, for a moment, we’re going to review some other types of innovation with examples. (And this list is by no means exhaustive.)
Product and Services Innovation
Let’s start with the obvious – products and services. Your organization may be able to innovate the product or service you provide. For example, if you are a member-based organization, you may provide various products to your members. Perhaps there are ways you can innovate on how they are packaged up for consumption, such as smaller or larger pieces. If you provide services to others, perhaps there is some interesting quality that can become a part of it that makes it more useful.
Product and service innovations are also some of the easiest for others to replicate. So, if your organization is totally dependent on providing a specific service and a competing organization also provides the same kind of product or service, you can be displaced by them or perhaps the service or product will become commoditized and valued less by those you serve. As strange as this sounds, a non-profit or association that relies only on a product or service that others also provide can be replaced by a for-profit business.
So, what are some of these other types? Over the this and the following two posts we’ll dive into several types of innovation to hopefully provoke some thoughts for how your organization does business.
Let’s get started with…
Process Innovation
You can think of it as the workflow or method for how deliver a service or build a product. And there is likely to be more than one of these flows, working independently or in concert. The overall workflow may have many substeps and decision points; and even these could have flows.
A process innovation changes the nature of the workflow. Let’s provoke some thinking with at three different approaches to process.
Assembly Line
An assembly line process is where a product or service is created though distinct steps one after another. When it was created, the concept of an assembly line, frequently attributed to Henry Ford, was considered a very innovative process. The people could focus on just 1-2 simple tasks as the product being built moved along. This concept could easily be applied to
- homeless meal preparation arrangement
- building disaster relief kits
- putting together information packets for a conference
Where might you apply an assembly line concept beyond your current usage?
Assembly Cell
Another arrangement is for the staff building or delivering a product or service to come together and do this together collaboratively. This is commonplace for a surgery. This was a major reinvention in how a lot of software was being built starting in the 1990s; up until then much software was built by passing through different functional groups until it was deployed onto the servers in more of an assembly line fashion. Now it is built, tested, and deployed collaboratively. Where else could this assembly cell apply? Could it also apply to meal or disaster kit preparation?
Pull-based Process
A pull-based process responds to demand as opposed to anticipating that demand. Toyota is famous for managing its vehicle production in this manner based on the demand from sales. As you can probably imagine, this can work in conjunction with either of the prior processes; an innovation can be an adaption to a process currently in use, not necessarily a wholesale replacement. We can easily think of some meal preparation scenarios being a pull process based on when a person requests it. What are some others?
Structure Innovation
Structures are how we are organized in the work functions and staff in the creation of value. Most people think of this as how an organization is built up hierarchically from ever more specialized functions or from teams to programs up to its executives, but it is much more than that. In fact, the hierarchical arrangement itself can even be challenged.
Again, let’s look at three examples that could provoke innovations within certain organizations.
Autonomous Teams
One structural innovation could be the use of autonomous teams; these teams carry both the responsibility and authority to do everything they are assigned. In software development, this changed the nature of the responsibilities people took on as they had less daily performance direction from management. There are plenty of other teams that work even more autonomously; firefighters or paramedics come to mind.
Where might an organization give staff an outcome-based direction with some simple constraints and turn it loose without need for additional approvals?
Job Design
Job design is the collection of responsibilities, tasks, skills, authority, and feedback needed for an individual to perform their work. How these are put together creates the system under which individuals perform. The design exists whether explicitly articulated or is just implied.
How does the design encourage success? How well can individuals handle the complexity of the task(s) at hand? How much skill is needed?
This structure is the most basic building block of an organization. Hackman and Oldman in their 1980 book Work Redesign provide an excellent model for constructing the design for individual and their participation in group work; it can provide a good orientation for innovating at this level.
Self-Management
At the most macro-level, we could use self-management as a means for the entire organization to operate without a hierarchy. Self-management can be thought of as every staff member having the authority to direct their own work and to collaborate with whoever else in the organization is needed to successfully execute their responsibilities (essentially they create and even evolve their job design). The Self-Management Institute is a great source of information for this topic. It was formed by the founders of the food product company Morningstar. Many worker cooperatives, such as Innovaya Consulting, also are structured in this manner.
To Be Continued
In upcoming posts we’ll visit other innovation types. In the meantime, begin to think how these may begin to link together. What would your specific process and/or structure innovation be? How would you test that it would be accepted and would deliver the results you want? What might be needed to ensure the process innovation might work well with your chosen structural innovation?