David A Owens - Creative People Must Be Stopped: 6 Ways We Kill Innovation

Contents

Praise for Creative People Must Be Stopped

Read Creative People Must Be Stopped only if you are serious about making stuff, and making stuff happen. This is a survival guide for navigating a world that is dangerous for good ideas. And it is required reading for the creative people who love them!

Peter Durand, founder, The Center for Graphic Facilitation, and creative director, Alphachimp Studio Inc.

This is no rarefied academic treatment on innovation as an abstract ideal, but a nuts-and-bolts handbook to dissecting our thought patterns about innovation. Owens dispels the myth that innovation is a binary trait that either exists or does not in a given product, process, or business model. Creative People Must Be Stopped addresses the myriad ways that novel ideas can fail in the marketplace. Working through a combination of thought experiments and real-world examples, the book demonstrates how failures in understanding the context for innovation can prove every bit as deadly to progress as failures of imagination.

Mark Rowan, president, Griffin Technology Inc., maker of iPod, iPhone, and iPad accessories

Creative People Must Be Stopped is among the best books ever written about human imagination in the workplace. David Owens is a master innovator, having practiced his craft as a product designer, researcher, teacher, creativity coach, and executive. The breadth and depth of his experience fills every page of this little gem, which is chock-full of hundreds of big and little steps that you can take right now to do more creative work and to lead more innovative teams and organizations.

Robert Sutton, professor, Stanford University, and author of the New York Times bestseller Good Boss, Bad Boss

Copyright 2012 by David A. Owens. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Owens, David A.

Creative people must be stopped: six ways we kill innovation (without even trying) / David A. Owens.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-00290-2 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-12900-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-12901-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-12902-9 (ebk)

1. Creative ability in business. 2. Organizational change. I. Title.

HD53.O94 2012

658.4063dc23 2011032504

This book is dedicated to my lovely ladies, Jennifer, Charlotte, and Adelaide

Introduction

Creative People Must Be Stopped!

Given that a search on the term innovation returns more than forty thousand book entries on Amazon.com , does the world really need another book on the topic? Maybe the better question is Why do so many organizations continue to kill good ideas and fail in their innovation attempts despite this wealth of research and advice?

Innovation is a natural and desirable outcome of human interaction, yet it is systematically stopped in organizations, often by the very people who say they want it and who stand to benefit from it. I term these systematic stoppages innovation constraints .

Over the course of ten years of research, teaching, and consulting, I have identified the six dominant types of constraints that can keep creative new ideas from being formulated, developed into marketable products and services, or adopted by the intended users. This book organizes these innovation killers into a conceptual framework that demystifies what innovation is, how it happens, and how we stop it without even trying. In my executive programs, workshops, talks, and consulting engagements, thousands of managers, executives, and innovators have successfully used the framework to diagnose the primary causes of innovation failure in their organizations and to develop strategies for overcoming them. My goal in this book is to bring this power of understanding, diagnosing, and removing constraints on innovation to many, many more.

Although this book relies on academic research in a variety of disciplines to help explain why things happen the way they do, it is above all a practical guide to a new way of thinking about innovation, complete with diagnostic and other tools, as well as suggestions for action. It is not, however, a laundry list of Do this, dont do that advice. Rather, this book is aimed at giving aspiring innovators and managers of innovation the conceptual and practical basis they need to develop their own actionable insights and smart strategies for responding to the challenges of coming up with exciting new ideas and bringing them to fruition.

CHAPTER 1

The Context of Innovation

Why Everyone Wants Innovation but No One Wants to Change

Figure 1.1

Our firm was in a bit of a slump. We had a hugely successful product a few years ago, but now we were facing increasing pressure to come up with the follow-up product, the next big thing. One day the big boss called the team into the office and said,

People, this is serious. It has got to be big! Look, I really need you to think outside the boxdont constrain yourselves! Listen, I really want you to push the boundaries way out there on this one; remember, were talking blue-sky this timea real breakthrough!