Tools for Innovation Implementation

There are often many challenges when it comes to putting innovation into practice. So how do you meet these challenges head on? According to Marc Ventresca, Programme Director on the Oxford Strategic Innovation Programme from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, you start with the three Rs of implementation.

Transcript

When you’ve been close to innovation, when you’ve either been someone who’s trying to lead innovation, you’ve observed someone trying to do that, what do you think about? What are the kinds of issues you notice? What do you worry about, when someone says, “We’re going to make things different here”?

I think if we reflect for even a few minutes, we’ll come up with a number of considerations: we don’t all agree, the boss isn’t on board, we don’t have the resources. We have a pretty familiar litany of reasons why it’s hard to do innovation, why it often fails, and the kinds of conventional reasons people offer for that.

To speak to that, I want to work with you and talk through a couple of very basic ideas, both about how we think about what organisations are and what they do, and what effective leaders do. I want to share with you this visual that we have. We’re calling it the three Rs of implementation.

The three Rs are: what are the current rules of the game, what are the current resources available to you, and what are the relationships that you have?

So, rules of the game are the values and norms held by the dominant coalition. They reflect how we do things in this organisation – what’s appropriate, what’s expected. Rules of the game can be both explicit, visible, but also tacit. So the work of understanding the rules of the game is a non-trivial task.

Resources can be people, staff, time, money, expertise. In other words, both tangible and intangible resources.

And finally, relationships involve network connections, social ties, linkages between your unit and other units.

Rules of the game, resources, and relationships are not meant to be narrow and specific. They’re very general ways of looking at a situation, beginning to always say, “What are the rules of the game here? Why is that important?” Because the rules of the game can define which resources are valuable or not. The same resource, the same expertise – in two different settings – in one, it may be valued and taken seriously, in another, it may not be valued.

Right, same thing with relationships. Are these strong and weak tie networks, are these social connections? Are these connections born out of common expertise or common interests? In other words, in this case, we’re saying, the rules of the game, resources, and relationships are three ways of assessing and taking account of, “What do you have available to you, to act in this organisation? What do you have available to you to get things done?”

The three Rs you can use in two ways: diagnostically and prescriptively. So first, the three Rs analysis says, “What’s the situation today? Who is the dominant coalition? What are the rules of the game that are in place? What are the resources I have now? What are the relationships I have now?”

That’s also the beginning, then, of building an action agenda to say, “And what kind of resources do I need to build to be more effective here?” or, “What kind of relationships are important here that I need to engage with or develop or deepen?” And when you begin to think about this, you realise, if you have resources and relationships, you may well be able to redefine the rules of the game.