[music] Welcome back to week 4 of the Strategic Innovation class. This week we're going to talk about organizational constraints. Before we start talking about that, let me just review where we've been. We talked about individual constraints, and that was the idea that, that psychologists have, for example, that, that the important thing about innovation is the idea. If we don't have a good idea, we don't have innovation. And in fact, that is true. And so we talked about was bringing information in, because if we're going to have an idea it's based on something, so we gotta bring that information in. And we talked about intellection, different ways of thinking, different problem solving strategies and we talked about expression. Getting the ideas back out, because remember an idea does no good in our head. And so, that was the individual level. Then we took these individuals and we put them into groups and we talked about how groups operate. We talked about things like emotion, culture, the environment within which a group works. Also the process, the step-by-step way that a group gets through what it needs to do. And so these are the kind of things that groups work. And so now what we're going to do is take these, so we took the individuals and put them in groups, we took the groups and we're going to put them in organizations. And we're going to look at what organizations happen. What has to happen there. The organizational structure is sort of one way of thinking about this. I like to call these the business school constraints. These are sort of the kind of constraints I teach in business school the kind of things that we talk about at a place like this in terms of strategy, structure, resources, those kind of things. And before I get too deeply into it I want to go ahead and show you the agenda for this week. The agenda is, start with a story. I'm going to share the story of Xerox PARC. It's the story as I've researched it. We're going to talk about business strategy that is the strategy that an organization has. To what extent is that potentially a constraint. We're talking about the organizational structure as a possible constraint. We're going to look at resource allocation. First of all the amount of resource the organization has then also the allocation of those resources to what extent does that cause a constraint as well. We're going to talk about measuring innovation and what the value might be to be able to measure how it is that you're using your resources from an organizational perspective in terms of delivering innovation for your organization. And then of course, in each of these steps we are going to be talking about how do we overcome these constraints as we go along. Some of the questions that we want to answer this week have to do with for example why, why are some organizations innovative, more innovative than others? And so I shared with you all a set of the fast company top 50 organizations, and we all had something to say about which one of those were overrated. Like why would some organizations be innovative, and some organizations not? We'd love to have an answer to that. It probably has more to do with what's going on inside an individuals head. Structure why would structure effect innovation? How would that the way that, that people are in relationship with each other, why would that effect innovation? Because we know that hierarchy are sort of bad for, for innovation and we believe that, why would that be? What is going there that makes us have that opinion and can we sort of back it up with research with data. How does having an innovative strategy, does it make you innovative? You could say, okay, RF strategy is to innovate. Is that going to automatically make us innovative? It's a good question. Is it enough to have a strategy or is there something more that's required? Another question, does the size of the organization effect you ability to be innovative? You know, the more people that you have the more difficult it may be to get anything done, to, to change, you know, change direction, there, there's a difficulty to, to get, to move the, the organization forward from the innovation perspective. And then also should you feed innovation or starve innovation? And this is something we know. There are stories of starving artists or, or, you know for example Steve Wozniak, who's the, sort of the digital Mozart of the digital design, as a young kid, he could only afford so much money for parts for his computer. And so he had to use them in very, very innovative ways. He really sort of created a whole new architecture of thinking about how computers work inside only because he didn't have enough money. So is that something that we need to be thinking about. And then how would you measure your firms innovation. If you could say my firm is more innovative than that firm, how would you measure that? How do you know? And we've seen some of the folly of, that is some of the ways that we may not completely believe innovation is being measured is when we looked at that list of top 50. When we looked inside and we talked about it carefully, we saw that we weren't completely convinced. So what might be some better ways to measure innovation?
