I did Podcast this month on the use of technology to increase innovation. Now I’m not a fan of innovation for myself. If you have something that works, innovation can be bad because it can break what works. But if this does not work or works badly and you looked at your previous practices by you and others, then innovations play a role in solving a unique problem that seems unsolvable or unacceptable.
Innovation is difficult, once I got into a quarrel with the CEO of Ford regarding innovation and told him that the path he was on would probably lead him to being a former CEO, unfortunately I did a lot in my career, and even more so because I am right. My worst was with Steve Ballmer in Microsoft, who really got angry at me before he was released.
But there are three solid steps that can be used to improve innovation in the company.
First step: Innovations are not a final goal
Innovation is a way to solve the problem, but it is often not the best way. It’s like looking at surgical segregation and wondering that it would be great as normal practice, when it is great, when you lack resources, to help everyone and would be a disaster in most other cases. You do not measure people in the field of innovation, you measure them at achieving goals, and if they have introduced innovations to achieve these goals and the result works, you do not punish them. Too often, people are punished for doing something in a way that was new, but otherwise it does not harm the company simply because it was not like doing it.
So innovations are a tool and to ensure that this tool is not abused, you must put it in context with the result. If someone introduced innovation and fucked up something, because he did not bother to find out how to be punished, but if someone who stands in the face of an unsolvable problem, innovation will be introduced and still failed, should not be punished, because even through it failed, they used innovation correctly.
Skunk Works
One of the most successful ways to manage innovations is creation Skunk Works Design teams. These are teams of highly qualified people who deeply understand the problem, but tend to rebel. What you do is send them to the location from the company, give them a decent budget, provide them with basic resources, and then remove unnecessary shackles, which corporations placed on employees.
I saw this work many times when we fought for a product that would satisfy the unique market or the need for customers and had to think outside of the box to get there. In this way some of the more innovative IBM products were created. Working in IBM, in the company, I noticed that too often there were almost more people who would block an innovative approach than tried to implement them. This was caused by many problems, such as fear of overstating, fear of a fool in the face of a better solution, fear of losing status and fear of changes. Skunk Works, made the right one, can do all this and result in a much faster, better solution than it could be achieved in the company.
Being a tolerance failure
Innovation has great potential for failure, which complies with its great potential for surprising success. But if people are afraid of failure, they will be afraid to try something new, and therefore they will not be able to introduce innovation in this problem. It was one of the “discussions” that I had with this Old General Director of Ford, he agreed that you must be tolerant of mistakes, but said that if someone made a mistake with the reception of F-150, which would be metaphorically shot. This meant that he was not tolerant of errors and that the F-150 was threatened.
You need a carrot and stick approach, but if you risk introducing innovation and succeed, they should be publicly rewarded, and part of the prize dialog box should be on mistakes, which ultimately caused the success that passes this defeat, if it is in the way to success, in order. The sound is for people who introduce innovations when innovations are not needed, which means that it can be avoided. People innovation, because they do not want to make up for lessons, they should be punished because they are harmful to their company.
Summary: What AI brings to the table
So you can make innovations in the creation process, you can create skunks robots to focus on innovation around a difficult problem, and you can reward good innovative practices and punish bad, so what does Ai bring to this process?
AI can create conceptual variants at machine speeds, and offers such as omniverse nvidia can allow simulations of the result in virtual environments, thanks to which the cost of these errors is minimized. Thanks to the tools of artificial intelligence, you can quickly manage at a disturbing pace that could destroy companies if this failure is in the real world and influence real people. But thanks to strong simulators, you can test the offer in Metaverse so that no real person is damaged, and knowledge about the effort remains included in the company.
Thus, AI can do two roles, one allows you to really quickly create many concepts of solutions, and assures, in Metazowat, a way of testing the most convincing of the group in an extremely safe and private way, significantly increasing the likelihood of a positive result.
In short, although I was not a fan of fast failure, mainly because of the damage to the company and its reputation, if this failure is made public, with artificial intelligence you can faster and more safer, making it also a much more profitable path to success.
