Time for another innovation song....
This formed part of my keynote session with Tim Minshall at the R&D Management conference last week. Their title was 'Innovation in an era of disruption' and Tim and I were exchanging ideas on how we might learn from the many innovation responses to the current pandemic crisis - and carry some of those lessons forward. Cue for a song to distil some of the key messages......
You can find a transcript below:
Innovation’s always been about surprises
The game’s no fun without that
Just sometimes you can have too many surprises
When they come all at once they can knock you flat
It’s worst when they come at you from different directions
And then seem to land all at once
Your carefully planned innovation systems
Start to buckle with the force of their punch
There’s the one’s that sneak up on you, unawares
And the ones that jump out in plain sight
The ones you see coming from over the horizon
But you think, I’m OK, just sit tight
If we can just keep our heads down, somehow muddle through
Then we’ll get back to what is normal and nice
Let the dust settle, relax into our armchairs
After all, Lightning never strikes twice
Which is fine - until the next time those alarm bells start ringing
And the panic stations buttons getting pressed
It’s then we get to wishing we’d done some more preparation
Some way to help avoid the stress
So how can we innovate out of a crisis
Can we prepare ourselves for the next wave?
What kind of lessons could we carry forward?
How can we learn to behave?
Chorus
We need imagination
We need collaboration
Knowledge integration
Mobilise what people know
Focused inspiration
Improvisation
Lots of exploration
To get some innovation to go
If we want to stay alive, we’ve got to learn to duck and dive
There’s lots of things that we should try and do
Loosen up our minds, leave certainty behind
Being agile’s what is going to pull us through
Learn to work with what we’re given, frugal innovation
Sometimes it’s the case that less is more
Rapid prototyping, probe and learn’s the right thing
There’s lots of different roads we can explore
If we listen to the crowd, broadcast the problem far and loud
And listen to the answers coming back
Get them looking at the problem from their different perspectives
We might just find the answer that we lack
We need Re - combination, Re - configuration
Re - framing everything we know
Re-evaluation of our final destination
Pivoting’s the way to go
So next time a crisis hits you and you wonder ‘what can we do?’
Here’s some innovation thoughts to bear in mind
Use your creativity, build a capability
Develop routines for the non-routine - it’s got to be worth trying
We need imagination
We need collaboration
Knowledge integration
Mobilise what people know
Focused inspiration
Improvisation
Lots of exploration
To get some innovation to go
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here