Is Innovation Engineering?

This took me a long time to understand.

I have spent a very long time trying to understand how to have good ideas. How to innovate. One could simply spin on one’s office chair, stare at the ceiling and wait for inspiration to strike. However, there are more reliable approaches that can produce a large volume of better ideas supported by good evidence. A long time ago I decided that I would make it my business to understand, apply and record how this is done. I became a specialist in innovation practises.

Or so I thought.

I work within a team who I consider top notch. We look over the horizon as far as we can to predict the future, we identify problems and opportunities and we propose solutions. We innovate every day.

Or do we?

My bubble was burst when I eventually decided that a book, YouTube channel, numerous articles, even more articles, a smartphone game, an Instagram, and a long career in which I have successfully predicted the future and proposed suitable concepts, were sufficient to label me innovator, and perhaps a reasonably competent one at that.

Little did I know.

Flush with my carefully curated skill stack I applied for a new job. A local university had published a vacancy for a professorship, and my ego rather likes the idea of being professor. In this case, the vacancy was seeking a Professor of Innovation.

That is a job title that I covet. I drew together all the evidence in my possession, and constructed a perfect pitch that was sure to attract the attention of those seeking a Professor of Innovation.

I wasn’t even considered for an interview.

I suppose one does require a little hubris merely to apply for a lofty position, and in my opinion I’m quite good at what I do. It’s therefore not surprising that my ego was somewhat punctured by this unexpected outcome. After grumping around the house for a day, I investigated further. The answer was staring me in the face.

Innovation has little to do with engineering.

The application for this professorship was handled through the business school. I should really have recognised this, but in my enthusiasm I missed this biggest of clues.

Innovation has two definitions.

In one definition, innovation is all about identifying complex problems and offering creative and potentially disruptive solutions. In my working environment this is an engineering skill. Interviewing the customer. Formally defining their problem. Deriving a suitable concept. Finding the funds. Raising a requirement. Exercising the tools and techniques of engineering to realise a prototype. Incorporating these technologies back into the concept. Ultimately presenting the now instantiated concept back to the customer as Minimum Viable Product. From here, the end has now connected to the start and we cycle round again and again until we possess a desirable concept that we know can be realised by technology. To me, innovation is an engineering discipline exercised by engineers.

In the other definition, innovation seems to be all about building businesses. Identifying a market. Understanding the customers. Raising finance. Constructing the required business functions. Assembling these functions into a working business. Understanding and managing the financial flows within this mechanism. Marketing the whole thing. Drawing customers to your proposal. Making a profit. I suspect that much of the world employs this second definition, which leads me to a problem.

I know absolutely nothing whatsoever about building a business.

There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. I exercise my innovation skills within a large and well established corporation. I am embedded at the bottom of a deep deep well, and above me is the entire product development process, which in aerospace could be decades deep.

I already labour within a complex, well defined and perfectly functioning business model. I have no need to build another. Even if I tried, this would achieve very little.

In fact, one of the great challenges when innovating within an established business is to offer disruptive concepts, proposals and advice to a mechanism that already knows who its customer is, what problems they suffer and what solutions they will gladly purchase.

If something changes to disrupt that trio of established customer, problems and solutions then it’s up to the innovator to detect this as early as possible and suggest some mitigation. Under these circumstances, those with innovative solutions will often find themselves competing with this established order, and for good reason.

No one is going to risk the business on your pet project.

The innovator’s argument must be watertight, and the innovator must be prepared to make this argument often and for a long, long time. If we have the stamina, we may eventually and slowly shove that Overton window over this disruptive idea sufficiently for a wider discussion to ensue. And for this reason, an afternoon’s business consultancy is unlikely to transform the business. You must be in it for the long haul.

As a result, I don’t build new businesses. I work within the existing one. This has drawn me to an inevitable conclusion.

I’m not innovating at all.

In fact, after years of study, perhaps I dont know anything about innovation. This begs a question. What have I been doing all this time? Under what umbrella does years of training, skill and disruption actually rest? The answer is quite obvious. It has a name.

Invention.

The problems I have been pursuing, the concepts I have created and the technologies I have realised are all the products of good invention. The methodologies I apply are good inventive practises. I guess that doesn't make me innovator but inventor.

Innovation and Invention can be easily confused. They also no doubt overlap in their objectives and some of the skills required to realise each. Inventor hands over to Innovator, and Innovator hands back to Inventor, but the skill stack of each seems to be quite different.

Under this convention, it’s no surprise that I wasn't even interviewed to become Professor of Innovation. Perhaps I know nothing about innovation at all. However, now that I understand the difference, a whole new job title sprang into view. A job title that an engineer such as I can truly covet. An aspiration to pursue with gusto.

Professor of Invention.

That’s the job title I want.

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