Innovation Isn’t ‘Creativity,’ It’s a Discipline You Manage

Innovation, like “quality,” is one of those notions that’s fuzzy to a lot of managers. If it’s hard to measure, it can be hard to think about. But Esther Baldwin is out to change that.

In her 20+ years at Intel Corporation, Baldwin has launched the Innovation Center in Shanghai, China, and built global data centers in Japan, the UK, and US. Now, as research proliferation manager in Intel’s future technologies research organization, her focus is on introducing ways for companies to use information technology more smartly in filtering, capturing, and analyzing innovation ideas. She argues that innovation can be comprehensively managed as an organization-wide discipline—and that companies that who succeed at it will find unexpected opportunities for growth.

Baldwin spoke with MIT Sloan Management Review’s editor-in-chief Michael S. Hopkins.

You’ve written that innovation can be managed as a discipline. Let’s start with that.

I think that there’s a lack of understanding for the potential of innovation and information technology innovation. There’s such an opportunity to create breakthrough systems, to fuel growth, to completely transform the ways that companies are managing themselves on the front end and the back end of their processes.

Traditionally, people think innovation is just about creativity, about being able to create ideas. In fact, it’s a very disciplined area. Companies really can manage innovation in the ways that they manage quality.

The opportunity is to use IT innovation to manage overall innovation?

Definitely. Innovation, as a pure discipline, is the management of the process from cradle to grave. You go from observing a need to coming up with an idea, developing prototypes, and proving your theories. These lead to shifts in design and development, manufacturing, production, marketing, even in refining the business model.

IT innovation, on the other hand, allows you to take advantage of leaps in technology. It allows you to use tools to become more productive, to work faster, cheaper, smarter. It gives you more information and creates wisdom so that you can make better decisions. Thinking about the technologies of the future can spark thinking about new business prospects.

It’s not absolutely necessary to use IT technology to manage the innovation process, but IT innovations will certainly make it easier.

Give us an example of how you’ve seen IT technology help manage—and even shape—the innovation process.

Well, first, it’s important to remember that it’s often the people who are closest to your customers who understand what changes need to be made. There’s a big opportunity simply to capture what people are hearing and filter that information back.

Second, it’s important to remember that you don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of money on this. There are ways to implement IT innovation, or, in this example, figure out ways to help employees share their observations, without purchasing a license for a hugely expensive tool.

One great example is an updated suggestion box. In the past, people would write suggestions on pieces of paper and physically put them in boxes. But reviewing those suggestions was a management nightmare because there was no focus, there were no specific topics.

However, if you use a database tool that is designed for capturing ideas, you get to both capture and filter in better ways. Often you’re looking for ideas about Topic A, but people are giving you ideas about Topics B and C, too. You really want to focus on A today, you don’t want to be distracted by all of the B and C topics, but you don’t want to lose them, either. Good, simple software allows you to filter the B, C, D, and E topics that are creating noise and distracting you from your current mission, but let’s you revisit them later. It’s easy to search the database when you’re wondering at some point later if somebody had an idea on Topic B or Topic C. With paper, those ideas often would be lost.

So it’s filtering, it’s capturing, it’s analyzing information. The tools that allow you to do that today were not available ten years ago. Simply put: You don’t have to be a technology company to be using information technology.

What other capabilities should people be thinking about that maybe they’re just not aware of?

Let’s go back to what we first talked about, which is this idea of innovation as a discipline. A lot of managers just don’t imagine that you can manage innovation with rigor and with measurement. But you can, with the right tools.

A problem is an asset, a need is an asset—I like to call them innovation assets. And companies can use what we refer to as an ideation campaign tool to capture people’s ideas in a way that is not a burden for them to use. Pieces of paper are a burden, Emails are often a burden. Database tools can be simpler.

What’s more, sometimes people don’t even need to use the tools—that is, many tools can do the work themselves. For example, equipment and machinery needs to be maintained, and sensing tools that know what is happening with the equipment can work in the background and send a signal to a maintenance technician that says, “You need to speed up preventative maintenance.”

You mentioned a parallel with the quality movement.

You know, it’s interesting: At the beginning of the quality movement, there were people that didn’t listen. They thought that quality meant that you just needed to produce more parts than you needed so that you could throw away the bad ones.

We now know that that’s ludicrous. We know that quality is not black magic. People like W. Edwards Deming took the process to Japan and revolutionized manufacturing there, and we learned from that. Innovation is at the same point.

Intel thinks very positively about innovation as a discipline. Martin Curley and I wrote a book for Intel Press called Managing IT Innovation For Business Value. What we do is introduce people to this idea that innovation can be measurable and manageable. We want people to really think about this.

Do companies meet with internal resistance when they start thinking about managing innovation?

Sometimes companies see resistance from the traditional innovators. They’re the people currently getting rewarded and recognized for being innovators, and it’s threatening to them to think that everyone can do this. It’s important to enlist them and get them to understand that you’re giving them tools that can keep them ahead of everyone else because these tools are going to make them better innovators.

Resistance may come from the finance department. It can be hard for IT professionals to measure things like employee productivity, and it’s hard for finance people to accept something that isn’t as easily measurable. It’s a challenge for an IT professional to go a finance person and say, “We would like to implement innovation as a discipline, and we need funding for tools.” The finance person, he wants to hear about ROI.

What are some the things you think companies can do to get started?

In our book, there’s a self-assessment that managers can take. I think the self-assessment is, in and of itself, a teaching tool. When you ask somebody if they are mentioning innovation in their business meetings and they have to answer no, it’s an incentive for them to think, “Perhaps I should be mentioning innovation.”

Companies that don’t formally practice innovation as a discipline may have incredible innovation happening in their organizations, but it may be happening in silos: in research and development, or in their market analysis. There are almost certainly opportunities to think about how you recognize and reward innovation and how you get people excited about discovering what things don’t work so that they can find things that do.

It’s also important to get people who are good at one skill together with people who are good at another. Most companies have networkers, people who know everybody in the company, and you want them telling everyone about the great ideas floating around. There’s a very social aspect to this, and it’s critical to adoption. IT technologies like social media—chat rooms, video-conferencing rooms, social media websites—can all nurture innovation.

There’s no question that it can be difficult for managers to stay current with all of these technical trends. But it used to be that they had to go and whisper to a friend, “What is this cloud computing? Can you tell me about that?” That can be humbling. The Internet makes it so much easier for us to get current. So I would encourage people to investigate new trends online. I’ve talked about one today: Innovation as a discipline. Go out and search for it. You will be astounded at the consultants, the businesses, and the tools that are available.