How can we do this starting small? Let's do a test of that big problem and,
and just start small. And so they started with solar lighting.
And they're trying to figure out let's just do solar lighting in the parking
lot. How about you know, there's a path in the
parking lot, let's just do solar lighting there.
It's a really small project, this teeny tiny project.
Could you possibly do it? Well, they did it.
And by doing it they learned that it was technically possible.
Okay, so now we know how solar electricity works.
We know what we have to do in terms of wiring.
But also they learned, that managers had a very different idea of what good is,
than others, than, than the people doing the project.
They, had very different ideas about who gets to decide about what's good, and
what, what gets done. And also what they learned was that they
had brought in this person called the director of global innovation, and this
person realized that they could not get the project done, even as something as
simple as putting lights in the Parking lot, solar lights in the parking lot, had
to get the CEO to continually intervene to make this thing happen.
So imagine having to start it off into the big project of moving the
administration building off the municipal electric grid, it would have created all
kinds of problems. So in this small project they're able to
see the problems. Right?
Create the, and then be able to work through them and understand how it is
we're going to work through this, especially when we take on a big project.
And so in this case we may have to restructure the organization to make sure
that the director of global innovation has the power to do what their being
asked to do. That or just ask them to do something
different. The other thing is with this managing
small and starting with small project is we get to, basically we get to debug the
process. You get to work in a controlled
environment, you get to work in a controlled context, you are doing a
project that you know is manageable, that you know is doable.
Work on that, understand the process before we start on these big expensive
projects that are really important to the organization that, whose failure will
actually mean the difference, you know, in, in terms of your career an what it is
you do in those organizations. Another way to help manage risk.
Okay. Another way to manage, another way to
manage risk in organizations is to build, innovate, what I'm going to call an
innovation portfolio. That is a series, a set of things that go
together. So portfolio is just a, you know, it's a
variety of projects that are in various stages of development.
it could be one of these things, it could be multiple projects with different
goals, so I have different projects on it, you know, they're all trying to do
something different. I can put the one project on it and have
multiple approaches in that project or even if I have a big project that I can
take the components of that larger project and sort of lay those out and
begin to see. So let me show you in a moment lay this
out okay. The dimensions of these innovation
portfolios. I mean the important things to be
thinking about are about time, like how long.
You know, what is the window of opportunity?
How is this a short term thing, a long term thing?
We're going to think about investments. What do I have to actually put in in
terms of, you know, the kind of resources that we've talked about in the
organization level, you know, time, people, capital, the those things.
Then also what are the risk, reward trade offs?
You know, how likely are to succeed? Is there a high cost of failure, and what
is those costs? And so, normally, in organizations, we
may discuss these things, but not in any kind of orderly way.
That is, we may have a discussion about them, but the discussion is not, thorough
and it's not control and it's not done in a way that actually information is being
processed. It's often done in a way that is emotion
processing and not information processing.
