Innovation and Organization - The Two Horns of Dilemma

Are you creative? Do you want to do things differently? If I ask these questions to anybody, I am pretty sure in most of the cases I will get affirmative answer. At the same time I know, I will get response in negative, if I frame the same questions in a different angle. Can you show me an instance of your creativity? When you went to do X, why didn't you take a different approach? When the first set of questions talk of one's dream, the second set of questions is entirely practical. My argument is what barriers a person faces while trying to do things differently?

First and foremost why we do it? The answer is, yes we all know, it is for our bread and butter. For the sake of argument I am just ignoring all seers who work because of passion. They cannot be the basis of my discussion as they are not common people. But the fact is whatever we do, we do it for money. Either we work in an organization or we run an organization. The primary fact is that we are bounded by some rules and disciplines which are either self imposed to do better business, or are imposed on us.

The next obvious point is what makes an organization to restrict creativity. The faux pas is that an organization is not at all bothered with creativity, unless it itself is in very creative field where innovation is the basis of its business. Primarily the domain of an organization never collides or merges with that of innovation. Every organization has a goal and the goal is to do business and make its position better. Now to make yourself better, you need to compete with others. And to win in that zone, you have to be quality wise perfect, time wise accurate, cost wise cheaper and service wise excellent. Time effective accuracy is always the goal of an organization and perfection its motto. And it cannot compromise in time and quality. Where organization sees perfection, innovation looks forward to improvement and improvisation. A machine is better resource to an organization than a human being.

Innovation is a time consuming process. If we consider the most effective innovation technique which talks of ethnography, virtual ethnography and lead user method, all of them basically studies an environment, collects data over a significant period of time before coming to an altogether different approach. Ethnography is basically a study of subject in its own environment. Virtual ethnography talks of alternate approach when the direct study of subject is not possible. Lead user method in brief is, instead of reinventing wheel why don't you find a user who invented it and then improve its functioning; or change it to suit your purpose. In all the cases it takes a lot time for study, data collection, research and then coming to the conclusion. Who can afford to give you time in this age of cut-throat competition?

So when we are under the purview of an organization (I consider one's own business is no exception as he is still guided by delivery, client satisfaction and his own survival in the market), you can not afford to try. But shall it be discouraged, if we do a thing differently. The answer is not at all, if your procedure outperforms the traditional practice and people can feel its benefit in terms of time, quality and cost. As I already said organization is neither against nor supportive of innovation, you can always give a different hand but you must be very sure that it will work.

When a creative mind falls under that situation, he suffers from dilemma. His heart says to try it differently where his brain says why you will take risk by not following conventional proven method. The catch22 is most of the small or medium sized, even big cannot afford to experiment. They always welcome research and development, but outside current scope.

To conclude, innovation is something which you can practice in parallel but mingling it with your current job is next to impossible. Innovation can be practiced for a task which is over but not for a process which is under way. Innovation can be a habit which is practiced elsewhere and can be inducted after success. But if you try to apply it in your running projects, then the syndrome of dilemma will grip you and will be a good excuse for you, for not being creative, forever.

Anirban Bhattacharya is an open source programmer and has almost 8 years of industry experience. For the past 5 years he is an active coder in LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) technologies. He has wide knowledge in project management and software development life cycle. He spends his free time in writing technical articles for his blog.

His past experience has enabled him to gather knowledge on various open source technologies, PHP frameworks and other related areas. He can be contacted at anirban76b@gmail.com

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