Innovating For A Better Future - With Dr Ken Dovey
HOW TO BUILD A BETTER FUTURE
Innovation is a deeply, deeply social phenomenon that requires many people to come along for the ride. It’s not easy! So, where to start? What are the principles? If you want to make the world a better place by building new products or services, or simply by creating better ways of doing things inside your organization, then this episode is for you!
KEN DOVEY – INNOVATION RESEARCHER AND LEADER
Dr Ken Dovey is the deepest thinker on innovation that I know. For two decades, Ken led the Master of Business and Technology program at the University of Technology, Sydney. The MBT was an elite postgraduate program that took professionals with a technology background and transformed them into some of Australia’s most innovative leaders. Before that he held the Chair in Leadership Studies at Rhodes University in South Africa. But as you will hear, he is SO much more than an academic; from leading multi-racial sporting teams in apartheid South Africa to working alongside CEOs attempting to turn around megafactories, he’s made the mistakes, celebrated the wins, and learned his innovation lessons the hard way – by being there.
Ken is also a great friend, and 100% committed to helping others and contributing positively to the world, which means he always ‘tells it like it is.’ There are so many gems in this wide-ranging conversation. Get ready for a treasure-trove of honesty and wisdom.
Enjoy!
CHECK OUT THE PODCAST TRANSCRIPT →
INNOVATION STARTS AND ENDS WITH PEOPLE
If I had to pick one phrase to capture the entirely of our conversation, it would be Ken’s one-liner, ‘Social innovation precedes technical innovation.’ But we covered so many sub-themes! Here is a list:
Sources of courage
Power and control
Intrapreneurship
The importance of humbleness and the creeping arrogance that comes after success
Enabling (and strangling) creative freedoms
The special advantages of owner-led companies
The challenge of sustaining innovation as organizations grow large
The problems when identity is tied to expertise
Learning from collective courage / peer-group power in the sporting context
The critical importance of ‘reading the context’ in a business environment
Differences between technical innovation and business-process innovation in enhancing (or diminishing) the power and position of senior managers
The importance of visibility of behaviours
The power to be harnessed from shared values and purpose, especially when the purpose links to making a positive difference in the world!
But again, they all connect back to that single overarching theme. Innovation is social. It is political. It is a collective outcome. It universally starts, and ends, with people.
FURTHER READING
Some excellent papers below on SEMCO, the case-study we talked about where Ricardo Semler transformed an elephantine corporation back into a stunning innovation machine:
Fisher, L., 2005. Ricardo Semler Won’t Take Control. strategy+business, Winter 2005 / Issue 41.
Semler, R. Managing Without Managers. Harvard Business Review, September/October 1989
And the paper below will give a deeper understanding of intrapreneurship and the hard social realities of leading innovation inside the large organization. Ken and I explored three case studies in three industries where organisations failed to realise the value of the talent they recruited to lead innovation.
Dovey, K. and McCabe, B., 2014. The politics of innovation: Realising the value of intrapreneurs. International Journal of Learning and Intellectual Capital, 11(3), pp.185-201.
MORE ON INNOVATION
We’re going to ask Ken back on future episodes, so he can share more lessons on power, intrapreneurship, and the innovation strategies we can all put to good use. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed listening to him as much as I enjoyed recording this episode with him. His insights and generosity have made an enormous difference to my life, and I know thousands of others say the same.
If you found these insights valuable, please share them. The more people out there who understand the positive social foundations of innovation, the more people who are equipped to make good things happen.
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