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Dhiman D Chowdhury

guideline of best innovation practices

How do you manage innovation? A

It seems like we all are increasingly seeking to be more entrepreneurial. These days, innovation is no
longer a buzz word; it is in the priority list for startups to large sized corporations. However, despite the
growing passion for innovation, many lack ability to execute. It is not about having ideates or a strategy
for creativity makes you more innovative in many cases, even a promising project will fall flat without
gaining traction.
Studies show most organizations suffer from dyslexia of understanding their own cognition. Many
organizations that fall flat on innovation are usually those having aged syndrome. These organizations
are usually big and often suffer from growing pain while others gradually degenerate to entrenched
behavioral pathology: extreme form of this behavioral degeneration is known as passive aggressive
behavior. At surface, such organizations are clam and sprinkled with few world beaters who seem to be
at loss not knowing why most promising projects are not gaining traction. The passive aggressive
originations are great examples to learn things that should be avoided. In contrast, some of the willing
big corporations developed a way to cope with the challenge, occasionally hiring consultancy firms to
instigate change. Yet these steps are merely inadequate to steer an organization towards innovation and
merely amount to dosing fire.
Innovation Culture
An important beginning instead would be, to pay attention to important antecedents of innovation
culture perceived organizational fairness. My research shows, this subtle element is linked to many
other interrelated rudiments such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment that collectively
shape how people behave in your organization. Evaluate your management practice and make it more
sensitive to human side of things e.g. collaboration, unification, goal orientation and task orientation &
relationship orientation (Prasad, Martens & Matthyssens, 2011) etc. Guide this management practices
around core Value: create a Core Value for your organization. Align the core value of your
organization with innovation value chain: idea generation, conversion and diffusion. This is the first
step towards achieving behavioral augmentation of your organization: value influence attitude and
attitude influences behavior (figure 1). Organizational Culture, for that matter is the collective reflection
of behaviors enforced by innate belief system and artifacts. In my article at Linkedin (Chowdhury,
2015a), I presented a behavioral framework for leaders and employees to foster innovation. This
behavioral framework, which I denoted as DCB (Deviant Citizenship Behavior) (Chowdhury, 2015b) is
posited to be an important step forward to implement innovation culture in the organization. It is an
endogenous quality that requires organization to be risk tolerant, having strategy towards innovation
and create appropriate organizational support system that is conduit of innovation. For example, Google
created an organizational structure that accommodates unconventional management practices within
traditional system. Organizations that are willing to foster innovation must trained leadership teams to
adopt innovation work behavior (IWB) giving meritocracy priority through behavioral augmentation
than the hierarchy.

Figure 1. Value, attitude, Behavior and Culture (Chowdhury, 2013).

The next step towards innovation culture is creating environmental support through artifacts, context
specific knowledge system (Chowdhury, 2013), risk tolerance, strategy and change management. This
environmental support is essential: studies show organizations that failed to implement innovation
culture lack adequate understanding of environmental support system for innovation.
Innovation Process
Innovation culture is an important step forward but delivering innovate products and services required
more than just cultural initiatives. In human centered design, the process of innovation is viewed from
socio-technical system perspective, meaning the two competing systems are one instead of separate
systems. It is a balancing act in which design problem is taken from work participants rather than
pursuing it as context-free technical issue. Conversely, in user centered approach, usability is given
priority rather than social context of use (Gasson, 2003). Both approaches seem omit focus on
customers. In contrast, 3Ms lead user model is a step forward in customer centric approach to
innovation (Eisenberg, 2011). According to Eisenberg (2011), the lead user model goes a step further
than traditional model of seeking use cases through customer feedbacks, looking not only to the typical
customer, but to those users whose needs and preferences lead the market.

Figure 2. Innovation Process.

This insight of lead user model is important in the pursuit of ideates since simply having an idea
without its firm basis may not produce optimal result. However, there are exceptions such as iphone,
Blueray DVD players that are supported through creative marketing. So, if your organization is not
prepared for creative marketing and cost associated with it to influence buyer behavior, lead user
model worth the effort. Create a selection panel for quarterly review of ideates to be undertaken for
further work at invention stage (figure 2). However, an effort of invention must take into consideration
the contextual (what problem you are addressing and how useful it is for your
customer/marketplace?) and generative (are you taking entrepreneurial or customer perspective into
context and/or combination thereof? Is this a purposeful technology? Is your organizational aspiration
aligned with the discourse of invention?) aspects of the undertaking.
Achieving organizations financial objectives should be central: studies shows success rate of innovation
is poor (1% to 7.5% only) in many industries. Such poor success rate is often due to poor innovation
practices.
I recommend that organization considers unified model of development in which traditional product
development continues without interruption while budget and process structure is created to support
research oriented projects, e.g. disruptive product development. Moving forward with an invention
would be to create prototypes. At this stage depending upon organizational practices, appropriate
process and technology should bring together to support productization. One of the key practices that
will enormously benefit organization is to conduct BRR (Business Requirement Review). What are the

tangible and intangible benefits can be realized by this productization. Simple ROI and NPV analyses
may miss intangible benefits of the proposed product and hence, create a cross functional panel to
evaluate intangible benefits if any. Once BRR is complete, moving forward with productization should
use same NPI (New Product Development/Introduction) process that is adopted in your organization.
Note: If you are interested creating innovation practices in your organization, please feel free to
communicate with me.
Reference
Chowdhury, D.D., 2013. Deviant Citizenship Behavior towards Sustainability. Working paper.
International Journal of Management, Economics and Social Sciences, 2013, Vol. 2(1), pp. 28 53.
Chowdhury, D.D., 2015a. Leading Innovation: Transform yourself and your organization. Available at
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leading-innovation-transform-yourself-your-dhimanchowdhury?trk=prof-post
Chowdhury, D.D., 2015b. Deviant Citizenship Behavior: A Comprehensive Framework towards Behavioral
Excellence in Organizations. The East Asian Journal of Business Management Vol.5, No.1 pp.13-26.
Eisenberg, I., 2011. Lead-User Research for Breakthrough Innovation. Research-Technology
Management, Volume 54, Number 1, January-February 2011, pp. 50-58(9).
Gasson, S., 2003. Human-Centered vs. User-Centered Approaches to Information System Design. The
Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application (JITTA), 5:2, 2003, 29-46.
Prasad, B., Martens , R. & Matthyssens, P., 2011. Managerial Practices for Increasing Perceived Fairness
in Interorganizational Projects. The Open Management Journal, 2011, 4, 28-38.
Tanev, S. & Frederiksen, H.M., 2014. Generative Innovation Practices, Customer Creativity, and the
Adoption of New Technology Products. Technology Innovation Management Review. Available online at
http://timreview.ca/article/763 .