I just finished “Innovation to the Core” by by Peter Skarzynski (Author), Rowan Gibson (Author)

This is a modern, up-to-date, and indispensible book on Innovation.

More precisely on how to make Innovation a core capability of everything you do in your company.

Anybody who is deeply or remotely

involved with innovation

must read this book.

It’s a book that explains why radical innovation is the only option forward.

It’s a book that clearly explains the tension between efficiency and innovation, and what to do about it.

Both efficiency and innovation have value. More, they should be equal partners ! If you are serious about innovation, then you should spend at least as much on your innovation program as on your efficiency program. Check out how much resources you spent this and last year on efficiency. Take that amount and number of FTE’s and there is your budget for innovation for the next 2 years.

So it is not about being Lean OR Mean,

it’s about being Lean ànd Mean !

My biggest lessons learned from this book:

• Dare to challenge everything, and especially your company “orthodoxies”, the taboos that have been taken for granted for the last 10-20 years.
• Let the focus area of your innovation emerge bottom-up. Don’t define your innovation priorities in a leadership group. If you want everybody to be an innovator, you need input from everybody at all levels in your company when defining your innovation architecture. If not you end up with an impossible sell exercise towards the basis afterwards.
• Make your executives and regional heads accountable for innovation. Some companies make 30% of the bonus dependent on innovation objectives.
• There is an enormous responsibility for HR in getting the creative and innovation skills trained across the company at all levels.

But THE biggest lesson learned is probably about the difference between managing the supply and the demand for innovation ideas:

• I believe most of us do a decent job on the supply side: we have plenty of initiatives and tools to gather, generate and follow-up on new ideas. That’s the supply side
• But there remains a lot to be done on the demand side. I love the suggestions in the book that each division, region, product manager, etc is held accountable for at least picking-up 3-4 ideas coming from the supply side. Stronger: each of these groups has to reserve 10% or more of their existing budgets to spend on innovation projects. And this without changing the existing performance metrics.

Getting innovation into the objectives of managers is key. The book refers to this as the

“Management Process Make-Over”

Regular readers of this blog know that i have a strong opinions about:

Radical innovation vs. incremental innovation

The role HR has to play

Getting innovation deep into the DNA of your company, at ALL levels, all regions, all divisions.

This book only confirms and reinforces the thinking that i have previously shared in following posts on this blog:

• Innovation at the core and beyond the core
• HR and Innovation
• Brand, Workforce and Innovation
• Google’s 90 days planning cycle
• Our company is infected !
• If you can’t manage, measure
• How real is your innovation ?
• The Holy Fire