Sometimes I feel that my team is tired of the topic of innovation. We all understand that this is the main purpose of the R&D department’s work, nevertheless this fatigue comes, especially in the early stages of projects. New concepts are born, and eventually you have to choose the one that will be implemented and meet the expectations of the organization – it will sell well, with high margins, for a long time.

I wonder – what are the reasons for fatigue, when do they start, how to counteract it. How to make it minimize this effect. 

Probably it all starts at the recruitment stage….

Recollection of several similar situations that have occurred over the past several years.

I am at a recruitment interview as a hiring manager. On the other side of the table, the candidate, a person with several years of experience in the automotive or related industry. When asked why are you changing jobs, I hear “(…) I want to do something new, so far I’ve done interesting things but they are repetitive, and my influence on the final design is very limited, I’d like to design new products, processes. I would like to see my constructions on the street, show someone – I invented it, I designed it (…)” 

It’s been a while, we’re working together in the same team. I’m looking at the same person at another creative workshop, where the team and I are looking for an innovative product idea, in an application area, that we are just getting to know. In short, we are working on a new product for the portfolio.

I see a tired look, a lack of enthusiasm, maybe a slight concern. I hear comments like “I can’t think of anything more”, “well, maybe that’s enough?”, “we’re going in circles”.

My first thought – where is the enthusiasm and desire to create new things from the interview? What happened during that time? 

My second thought – maybe we are doing it wrong? Maybe it can be done in a different way, that allows the creative nature of the people in the team to flourish?

I don’t have a simple answer to these questions. Instead, I have some observations, deepened by analysis, that have allowed me to confront these questions. And more importantly – when necessary to react.

They are not arranged according to any key. They do not occur together in every situation. Nor are they a closed catalog. 

Observation: If you try a dish for the first time – there is no guarantee that you will like it. 

When I first got the offer to build a team, I had a lot of doubts and even fears – will I be able to do it? Will people want to work with me in a leader-employee relationship? Will this role give me satisfaction? In retrospect,
I judge that this choice gives me much more positive than negative emotions. 

It doesn’t always have to be this way. When hiring and promoting people in the team to new roles, I had the opportunity to observe this adaptation process from the outside as well. 

Some people grew quickly in their new role. Some so much, so that their appetite was greater than the growth opportunities the company gave them. 

There is also a group of people, who did not find in the new role what they were looking for. 

If I try a new dish, that contains many unfamiliar ingredients, spices and maybe the processing is new to me – I never know if I will like it. I can only find out after the first bite. And sometimes I need several bites. I need to taste different parts of the dish on the plate, to judge whether I like the whole dish. Or maybe it’s just some of the ingredients I don’t like. I never know until I taste it…

The same is true of a new role. In the beginning, we don’t know what it really consists of. We have certain perceptions, observations of others, opinions, but we don’t have our own experiences that allow us to say unequivocally:
I like it, I want more – or: No, it’s not my taste, I’d love to try something else. 

When inviting someone new to the team or offering a new role to a current team member, I assume in advance that this person will need time to decide, whether what they have decided on is what they want to do. Sometimes it’s
a few months, and sometimes it’s a few years. Each of these trials can end up like trying a new dish. How can I help with this trying? How can I help with the adaptation?  

I can suggest other seasonings that may make adaptation easier. Spices could be tools that help create innovation, mentoring in moments of doubt, or gaining new competencies in training or while participating in specific projects. 

An important lesson I draw from this observation is that the risks of hiring people in a role that is new to them, should be discussed with the wider team. By this I mean those who work directly with them, their supervisor, the HR department. Their opinion, on the one hand, helps to make the decision to hire or promote, on the other hand, helps to adjust their expectations of the employee who will soon join the team in a new role. 

Observation: everyone understands innovation a little differently.

At several workshops, I asked participants, what they understood the innovation we were looking for to be. I received very different answers:

• Something that no one has invented yet
• Something that our company does not yet have in its portfolio
• Something that will be the cheapest
• Something that someone will want to buy
• Something that is feasible
• Something that solves our customers’ problems
• Something that builds on existing solutions but significantly improves them
• Something that can be patented

I once had an interesting conversation about the source of innovations and their value. The division ran along the axis: innovations as the result of
a spontaneous thought process and innovations that are the result of methodical work. Opinions were divided. Valuing by source was not clearly evaluated as useful or not. 

Since it is the case that each of us understands innovation differently, does this fact help us when we work as a group to find a new product definition, or does it get in the way?

I think that as long as each of these perspectives inspires the search for and generation of new ideas, this diversity is a good support. 

However, if one of these approaches starts to block creativity and becomes an explanation for why you can’t come up with something new, then this
is a situation where I have a need to react. 

If there is someone in the team who expects himself or herself to come up with something, that no one has come up with before, and that thought is paralyzing to that person, I try to remove that block. How can I do that? I can ask, to try to build ideas on those that others have proposed earlier in the meeting (the scaffolding principle). It can also be helpful to set an expectation, such as “We are looking for an innovative solution but it can be based on solutions from other industries.” It often helps to divide the task into smaller ones (the salami slices method), e.g. “We’re not just looking for ideas for the whole product today, we’re also looking for ideas for individual product functions or features. Don’t have an idea how to combine this function with the rest? That’s no problem, we’ll think about it later.”

Another example concerns patentability. My first experience with patenting is, that no matter what the idea was about, we always found existing patents for something more or less similar. This fact, however, should not be discouraged. After an in-depth analysis of the patents, it very often turns out, that what is the essence of our idea in terms of a specific application can be patented and will be a significant added value to the new product. I mention this especially when there are people in the group, who have had no contact with the patenting process.

A big roadblock often turns out to be, feasibility analysis at the idea generation stage. My impression is, that this mainly applies to engineers, who are reluctant to submit ideas that they cannot, at least in their minds, assign to known manufacturing processes. A variation of this blockage is also contradictions. I’m thinking of ideas such as: this should be bigger but lighter, or this should be sometimes transparent and sometimes black. By the way, contradictions can be the source of very powerful patents, as TRIZ methodology tells us. 

The more experienced professionals attend creative meetings, the more importance I attach to this barrier, the size of which is directly proportional to their experience. The greater the experience, the greater the barrier. In such a situation, I remind them that there are no bad ideas, and each idea, even the most abstract one, can inspire other ideas. Sometimes it also helps to say “Today we are not in the phase of industrialization, today every idea, including those from the science fiction group is valuable. If not for you, perhaps it will be an inspiration for someone else.”

A common limitation is the estimated cost of the idea. I have an idea, but it’s so off the wall that it’s bound to be super expensive, so there’s no point in talking about it. At the exploration and idea generation stage, I always downplay the cost. This phase of the project needs all possible sources of inspiration. Cost, or the mentioned feasibility study, is an obstacle to idea generation. That’s why I tell myself and others then, that our only limitation is our imagination. Other resources, for the duration of the meeting, are unlimited. 

Observation: Intuition is a good thing but sometimes it is not enough. 

In any situation that requires me to act, I appeal to my intuition first. Which is natural because it is a subconscious process. The more often I succeed based on my intuition, the more I trust it. 

However, there are times, when I see that what seemed to be an obvious solution – does not work. In my opinion, there are two main areas of a leader’s activity where intuition is not always a sufficient source of knowledge or rather experience. The first is teamwork, the role of the leader and everything related to soft skills. The second is innovation. And it is this one, that I want to focus on now. 

When I met the challenge of needing to find an innovative product, I did what my intuition told me. I gathered a team, organized a series of brainstorming sessions, applied a list with evaluation criteria and … realized that this was not enough.

The second workshop conducted in the form of brainstorming was difficult for the team. After all, they had already presented all the ideas at the first meeting. There were some interesting hybrids of previous ideas, but the number of ideas was disproportionately small to the number from the first meeting. The third meeting, conducted in the same convention, was already
a real torture for each participant. 

This was the moment when I realized, that I lacked knowledge and experience in this area and it was high time to learn. I started reading about design thinking, methods for stimulating creativity, and discovered the
tool-rich and consistent TRIZ methodology. This was the beginning of the path I am walking today, which seems endless but at the same time very inspiring. 

In the beginning, I also invited coaches and trainers to help me and my teams understand the basics, start using the tools correctly and ultimately create innovations. 

I didn’t stop using my intuition, after all, it’s impossible, but today my intuition draws experience from this knowledge I’ve gained over the past few years. 

Observation: an experiment is also a source of inspiration.

When I plan an experiment / test in the area of my competence and knowledge, I always try to predict and estimate the possible result.

I meet the opinion that this is a waste of time and limits creativity – after all, this is a test, an experiment, so you don’t know what the result will be. I find
it difficult to agree with this, if the tested object or phenomenon is within the area of competence. 

The time spent on analyzing the potential variants of the test result gives
a lot of advantages. 

First, during the analysis I often come to conclusions that affect the definition of the experiment itself – I change its scope, course, boundary conditions, etc. Even before proceeding with its implementation. 

Second, by estimating the result of the experiment I can better understand the outcome. If the result coincides with one of the planned scenarios, I know why – I have analyzed it before proceeding. If the result obtained does not coincide with any predicted result, I have material to analyze: perhaps the result obtained is a missing scenario, that I did not take into account, or perhaps the course of the experiment was incorrect, which affects the result and the test should be repeated.

In areas unknown to me, I experiment. If I can’t predict the result, I don’t do it, I experiment.  The result obtained is usually difficult to verify. Mostly, it is input information for subsequent experiments, which are already more precisely defined and analysis of potential results is possible.

Observation: Product innovation profiled by business need is difficult, but not impossible. 

Where does the need in the company for innovation come from? 

When I started my adventure in the automotive industry, I didn’t think about it. Admittedly, together with a few people we introduced innovative solutions in the area of production processes, but no one had asked for them before. We had an idea, received a budget for its implementation and put the idea into practice. There was satisfaction, sometimes a bonus, but these were not product innovations. And they were not “on-demand” innovations.

With product innovation, this process is reversed, which is why it is often seen as difficult. 

What is the difficulty? 

For the past 10 years or so, I have been directly involved and co-responsible for the creation of product strategy, which ultimately influences the product portfolio in the company. The first step is an analysis of the market, trends and sales prospects, prepared by the Marketing and Sales departments.
The next step is the estimation of the development time and cost of introducing new products into mass production, carried out by the R&D department. The next step is to compare these estimates with the budget and availability of resources, over a time horizon of several years.
At the end of this road, a project list is created, which is carried out by the R&D department in cooperation with the necessary departments (Quality, Purchasing, Logistics, Production, etc.).

And now the difficulty begins. 

The R&D department, in accordance with the product strategy approved by management, implements the planned projects. In practice, this means that the R&D team has to find innovative solutions for a specific market segment and a specific application. This is the reverse of the process I wrote about earlier. Engineers don’t start with an idea, but with an application for which they have to find ideas. They have to do it within a certain time, within a certain budget. 

In this type of project, as a rule, spontaneous innovation is not the main driver, well, because it is impossible to manage spontaneity. Therefore,
I introduce a systematic approach to idea generation. And in such a process methodologies such as design thinking, agile, TRIZ and many others are invaluable. I participate in training, experiment and build my own base of tools that work best for my teams. It works. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but it works. I remember the first time I experimented with using new tools with my team, other than traditional brainstorming. I watched myself and others when we found completely new solutions, simply because we used perspective-shifting tools. Changing perspectives is a powerful aid to finding inspiration. The same people who were unable to come up with
a new solution after the second brainstorming session, generated more great ideas after applying the new methods. 

In my case, relying solely on intuition did not work. After learning and introducing new tools, a breakthrough occurred. Therefore, I believe that this process, despite the fact, that it is a big challenge, can also be very rewarding and fruitful. 

Why does innovation tire a team? Because the process can be tiring for both project managers and engineering teams. Time pressure and the expectation of breakthrough innovation do not go hand in hand. That’s why I look for new, fresh methods to inspire new solutions. My goal is for no one in the team to feel tired of the topic of innovation, because after all, they are the main goal. An indicator of success, will be when the slogan “innovation” evokes only positive emotions and comments. 

Summary:

• Not everyone who starts out in innovation will enjoy it. Hiring a person in a role that is new to them, involves risk. This is a trying time, which can end in satisfaction and fulfillment, or start looking for a new role. My influence – as a leader – on the end result is limited.
• Any way of understanding what innovation is that supports the process of idea creation is good. I react to any other so that it does not block the creative process. 
• I experiment as often as possible, but I do it differently in my areas
  of competence and differently in the area of ignorance. 
• I trust my intuition, but sometimes I need to “top it up” with external knowledge, training, meetings with coaches and trainers
• I consciously use proven innovation methodologies that perfectly support the process of finding new product and process solutions. 
• The only limitation in the idea generation phase is my imagination. Other resources are unlimited. 

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