"Innovation is a natural and desirable outcome of human interaction, yet it is systematically stopped in organizations, often by the very people who say they want it and who stand to benefit from it."
- Creative People Must Be Stopped, page 1
"This book organizes these innovation killers into a conceptual framework that demystifies what innovation is, how it happens, and how we stop it without even trying."- Creative People Must Be Stopped, page 1
Drawing on lessons learned from human nature, team dynamics, organizational culture and past innovation successes and failures, many of the natural roadblocks and systematic stoppages of innovation have been isolated by Owens. As he states, there is a certain “regularity to the kinds of questions that will come up”. Because of this, Owens feels there is no reason or excuse to put yourself and your innovation in a position to be unaware of oncoming torpedoes. He provides a “kind of vision correction that will enable us to see in advance the vital factors that determine our chances for success when we embark on an innovation. This is what the constraints framework is designed to provide”.
Creative People Must Be Stopped describes in detail 6 key areas and dominant types of constraints that will be the most problematic for innovation leaders:
1. Individual constraints
2. Group constraints
3. Organizational constraints
4. Industry constraints
5. Societal constraints
6. Technological constraints
“If we can identify the key constraints for a particular innovation,” writes Owen, “we can usually come up with ideas for interventions that increase the odds that our innovation will succeed.”
"Being successful at innovation means identifying and negotiating your way through multiple levels of constraints."- Creative People Must Be Stopped, page 226
So much is said about thinking “outside the box” that we totally forget to factor in the box that we are trying to break away from. Akin to a Greek tragedy, this can become the fatal flaw inherent in most innovation efforts.
Owens believes the central question to focus on is: What are the biggest challenges we face in the innovations we are trying to build? Innovation efforts, he feels, can be made more strategic – ensuring better success rates – by identifying, understanding, and overcoming the particular constraints they face and building responses to them into our innovation plans.
To ensure you make constraints analysis a key component to your innovation plan, he adds steps and hardwires this analysis component throughout the traditional innovation process:
Define Intentions -> Generate new ideas -> Assess concepts -> Set direction -> Refine and resolve -> Focused implementation
Throughout the process, make sure to go through a checklist of questions that review potential innovation killer constraints at each of the 6 levels: individual, group, organizational, industry, societal, technological – they represent the box you are working to escape.
"Without an explicit plan for your team, you have to rely on members’ intuitive ideas about how the process of innovation should work."- Creative People Must Be Stopped, page 233
Innovation is about “the new” and “the future”. While we cannot know anything with any certainty at the beginning of the innovation process, Owens still recommends creating a “product plan” in the form of a rolling schedule: mapping out, in advance, the kinds of general activities, time increments needed to be set aside and potential resources that can be used. You “don’t need to know exactly what we’ll be doing, just that we’ll be doing it”. Adjustments can be made along the way.
This plan accomplishes a number of things: reduces some of the needless uncertainty for the team, makes your action plan more easily visible opening up to team input and debate, and allows you to map out your management steps and see them in context to the larger firm operating schedules and resources available, lessening any corporate conflicts. This plan should also enforce committed, vigorous and critical thinking up front, spending significant time and resources in the early stages when investment is low and when the possibility for implementing valuable changes based on new insights is high.
The product plan should be initiated by having all team members enter into a team contract, drafted by the team and signed by all members, that outline goals for the innovation project, how they will make decisions, resolve disagreements and outline what constitutes respectful behavior. Teams having these contracts in place tend to successfully resolve conflicts themselves as all members understand expectations from the start.
Creative People Must Be Stopped does a great job in answering the age-old question of ‘Why is Innovation So Hard?’ with essentially a simple answer: because we don’t anticipate in advance the inherent constraints of coming up with new ideas. Owens posits that innovation failure is “bound to happen when we rely on our vague intuitions and don’t have a clear idea of what innovation is or how it really works”. His book becomes a practical guide to a more thorough way of thinking about innovation – one that acknowledges the real world environment in which it operates before applying valuable resources of time, money and effort. It will replace frustration with a cool, practical approach.
David A. Owens is professor of the practice of management at Vanderbilt’s Graduate School of Management where he also directs the Executive Development Institute. Specializing in innovation and new product development, he is known as a dynamic speaker and is the recipient of numerous teaching awards. He provides consulting services for a wide range of clients around the world, and his work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, London Guardian and San Jose Mercury News, as well as on NPR’s Marketplace.
