Core Innovation, Adjacent Innovation, and Transformative Innovation

I want to frame innovation in a three-tiered classification system that helps me as I direct the work of the American Choral Directors Association. Using the categories of core innovation, adjacent innovation, and transformative innovation, my aim in my work is to survey “Promising Practices” in the choral art, as well as survey innovation taking place at the core of my focus area of artistic expression.

 

As Executive Director of the ACDA, it is my joy and opportunity to view and experience a wide variety of choral practice in the United States and beyond our borders. As you would deduce, my motivation is first and foremost to assist our members to fulfill our mission, which is to inspire excellence in choral music. Four pillars—education, performance, composition, and advocacy— form the outline in my own exploration of innovation, since these pillars are the foundation of ACDA's mission.

 

First, I find it helpful to realize creativity and innovation are on something of a continuum for all of us. A head-turning, game changing innovation for one of us may be just another day at the office for another. I also want to say up front that some organizations don’t need their heads turned nor their game changed, and I am not suggesting extreme degrees of innovation are necessary. Secondly, I am personally guided by the knowledge that business leaders, academics, and venture capitalists all agree that organizations that are able to survive, demonstrate the following characteristics:

 

1) They are ruthless about change;
2) They are not afraid to explore their current successes for new turns;
3) They make frequent, but small, changes that bring in new ideas.

 

As I continue to blog on the topic of innovation,I want to identify three kinds of innovation as personal categories of thought and action for the larger topic:

 

Core innovation draws upon what anthropologists call cultural ratcheting. It requires first and foremost, the ability to pass on knowledge from one individual to another, or from one generation to the next, until someone comes along with an idea for an improvement. We take ideas of others and put our own twist on them, adding one modification after another, until we end up with something new. I don’t view core innovations as high-risk ventures, but rather, ongoing vigilance to maintain as we do our daily, routine work.

 

Adjacent innovation takes place when organizations move outside of themselves and work with those who overlap some part of their core mission. These collaborations have a bit more risk involved than core innovations, but have larger payoffs by combining the intellectual efforts, human efforts, and financial resources of more than one entity. The risks of adjacent innovation are the increased effort required by collaboration, working within the uncertainty of an outcome, and the inevitable tension that comes as a result of this level of innovation.

 

Transformative innovation—To do truly different things—presupposes an organization has to do things differently. It generally needs different people, different motivational factors, and different support systems. And indeed, these game-changing and head-turning innovations do not come without substantial risk. The reward, however, is a new and improved organization or way of doing something.

 

Malcolm Gladwell has taken on this topic in his book, The Gift of Doubt (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/24/the-gift-of-doubt). Quoting Albert Hirschman and the power of failure, “We may be dealing here with a general principle of action,” Hirschman wrote:  Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.

 

 

 

According to Harvard’s Theodore Levitt, “There is no shortage of creativity or creative people. The shortage is of innovators.” All too often, people believe that creativity automatically leads to innovation. It does not. Creative people tend to pass the responsibility for getting down to brass tacks to others. They are the bottleneck. They make none of the right kind of effort to help their ideas get a hearing.

 

The fact that you can put a dozen inexperienced people in a room and conduct a brainstorming session that produces exciting new ideas shows how little relative importance ideas themselves have. “Idea men and women” constantly pepper everybody with proposals and memorandums that are just brief enough to get attention, to intrigue and sustain interest—but too short to include any responsible suggestions for implementation.

 

Transformative innovation is sustainable and “implementable” creativity.