In the past, organizations tried to win by controlling as many physical resources as they could. They wanted factories, and financial control and distribution. “Buy more widgets” they screamed at consumers, as they tried to outdo each other in efficiently producing products and service in a race to ultimate commoditization of everything.
The idea that innovation is speculative and risky is usually a sign that a company has experienced significant innovation trauma in the past.
There is no doubt that having fresh, new ideas is one of the important things you have to have if you are creating an innovation effort. With no ideas, after all, there is nothing to work with. But the problem is that almost everyone forgets it takes more than a great idea to create an innovation which is actually valuable.
There are few better examples of the challenges of scaling an innovation program to decent financial returns than Proctor and Gamble, the consumer products multinational.
Ideas are always a creative response to a problem without a present-day solution. People dream them up as the wonder what they might do to solve their problems, and they draw on inspirations from their environments around them to do so. What people forget is that neither their problems, nor the inspirations from which they draw solutions, are exclusively theirs. Everyone else is likely to face almost the same challenges. And they’ll certainly come up with similar solutions.