The “New Normal” demands an honest look inward and an unadorned examination of one’s own development and innovation skills. To do this, companies have to learn to renew their DNA independently and regularly.
Entrepreneurship and a spirit of innovation. These action-guiding principles will be decisive for the future viability of companies after the COVID-19 crisis. The majority of local entrepreneurs are convinced of this. But it’s not that easy. The safe comfort zone view of the bigger picture alone is not enough to make your own organization “fit for the future”. Inspiration that is not implemented is not enough to defend your own business field against small, agile competitors. Innovation theater, i.e. pretending to want to but actually failing to make it, is no longer enough. Often it is no longer about defending something. The new grows quietly and unnoticed in the neighbor’s garden and suddenly it casts its shadow in your own! The redesign of the company’s DNA to innovate is becoming an all-important skill for executives.
Good at optimizing, not so good at exploring
Many companies are “world champions” at optimization, but not so good at trying things out. Bringing the experimental innovation and the efficient existing business under one roof requires foresight and courage. Just tentatively trying out “lighthouse projects” alongside the core business is not enough to bring successful innovations to market.
Innovations need freedom and systematic experiments in order to be able to develop. The second, more innovative operating system of a company in the age of the “New Normal” is not a competition to the first, but an addition that helps to establish a lively and innovation-friendly ecosystem. That is viable in the long term because it has learned to renew its DNA independently and regularly.
Innovation needs collaboration
Individual company actors can be creative and have promising ideas. However, the difference between an idea and an innovation is made by the system. It is only the way in which a company takes up suggestions, how systematically experimentation is carried out and how decisions are made that determine whether they can be a success on the market. The 59 innovation genes describe these action-guiding principles in our book “Corporate Innovation Mindset”.
It needs a system to change a system
The systematic development of a company towards a hybrid operating system is in practice not a controllable and planned process. The prescribed linear change often fails. Trying to change companies top-down has reached its limits. Change usually never happens fast enough. This is ensured by the company’s “immune system”, which ensures the necessary stability. Behavioral routines and patterns that have been learned over the years lead to blockages that inhibit performance and innovation.
Irritation has priority
Change work means working on the system and not on people. Because people do nothing else than to behave in the given system according to the explicit and implicit rules and habits. How do you succeed in transferring innovation genes as action-guiding principles into your own corporate DNA? The tools of change work must therefore be practiced as a disciplined exercise in constructive irritation. This is what systems theory teaches us. Hence, irritation is the only way we can act on a system. In this context, the well-known organizational sociologist Niklas Luhmann speaks of “usefully illegal” initiatives in order to look for solutions to problems together ”.
With the submarine strategy to the game guide for innovation
These “spontaneous, rule-compliant attempts at adaptation” on a small scale, which can simply be tried out, are promising. Even without an official mandate or a blessing. If these attempts succeed, they can grow into meaningful development initiatives, similar to submarines, which operate imperceptibly to enemy and friend and which do not generate large waves, which then advance the entire company.
The story of the book shows how, suddenly and unexpectedly, using the “learning by doing” principle, you can learn moves and tactics for the interplay between research (exploration) and the exploitation of existing things (optimization) yourself. It shows how the redesign of company genes and the development of instructions for innovation work, and how systems can renew themselves.
Learn more?
In the book you will find out how to design these experiments in the form of deep dives and sprints in your company „Corporate Innovation Mindset“ by the trio of authors Markus Berg, Valentin Nowotny and Klaus Weissmann.
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