Chapter 3
Innovation Agreement
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Written & Read By
Doug Hall
Apply the learning from the book to your innovation challenge and business right now!
The Driving Eureka! Video Workbook is a companion to Driving Eureka!, Problem-Solving with Data-Driven Methods & the Innovation Engineering System. This video workbook will bring to the book to life and take you step-by-step, applying the new learning to your real work challenges.
It’s incredibly simple, focused, and easy to incorporate into your day.
Chapter Excerpt
A Major Mistake
As we embarked on bringing system thinking to the world of innovation, we made a major mistake. We assumed that everyone understood what innovation was and why it was important.
The mistake was discovered and quantified during a quarterly review of data from our Innovation Culture survey. The survey measures employee and management perceptions and their mindsets toward innovation. We have fielded this survey before every innovation project the Ranch and the Innovation Engineering community have run since 1995. What we learned was shocking.
7 out of 10 managers DON’T AGREE
that there is a need for their organization to innovate!
8 out of 10 managers see NO URGENCY for their organization to innovate!
It was an embarrassing moment for me. For years, I had mistakenly thought that everyone saw innovation as I did. The reality is that the majority of managers and business leaders don’t see innovation as needed or urgent.
As an aside, we missed this data insight because of the way we had been reporting the data. For 20 years we reported results relative to a world-class standard. During this analysis we looked at the data in the absolute, not on a relative basis. The result was an entirely new insight.