Radical innovation

Radical Innovation is a serendipitous result of many self-organizing employees using simple rules to learn from profuse trial-and-error experiments. Radical innovation requires self-organizing employees because innovation is actually a cumulative result of failures, culminating in a critical inflection point: self-organized criticality (SOC). Unchoreographed self-organized stochastic noise (failures) should be not only tolerated, but is essential for innovation.[1] Hence, learning is an important aspect of innovation. Learning, however, requires the foundation of psychological safety and secure emotional attachment to provide the resilience necessary for risking new things despite the likelihood of failure.[2]

Radical innovation must satisfy three conditions

  • Radical innovation provides 10x improvement in customer benefit, whether in terms of speed, cost, or other aspects of customer experience.
  • Radical innovation creates value in a fundamentally different way than other incumbents do.
  • Radical innovation provides a platform upon which other incremental product and service providers can build their offerings.[3]

To successfully navigate the VUCA environment, Sunnie Giles, an expert on radical innovation, asserts that organizations must harness complexity rather than trying to control or reduce it. Efforts to reduce external complexity made companies successful in the industrial era (post Industrial Revolution, before the digital revolution), using tools such as Six Sigma and ERP. But the business environment has changed from complicated to complex, and these efforts no longer lead organizations to success. Instead they need to harness complexity by increasing the variety of input (diversity of thought), speed of communication, interdependence among employees, and density of interactions among employees. All of these efforts lead to learning from profuse experimentation—the spontaneous result of which is enabled by psychological safety and secure connection among team members.[4]

Notes
  1. Newman, Daniel. "Preparing For The Future By Embracing Radical Innovation". Forbes.
  2. "What is radical innovation? - Definition from WhatIs.com". SearchCIO.
  3. Giles, Sunnie (2018). The New Science of Radical Innovation: The Six Competencies Leaders Need to Win in a Complex World. BenBella Books. ISBN 978-1-946885-23-4.
  4. Giles, Sunnie. "How VUCA Is Reshaping The Business Environment, And What It Means For Innovation". Forbes.
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