Innovation and Improvement: A Distinction Without a Difference -- Operations -- Innovation

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Innovation and Improvement: A Distinction Without a Difference

The processes of innovation and improvement are much more intertwined than we generally like to believe.

My principal business consists of giving commercial value to the brilliant, but misdirected, ideas of others... Accordingly, I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it." -- Thomas Edison

Isn't it interesting that one of the greatest innovators of all time emphasized his ability to improve things much more than his ability to invent them? Or perhaps better said, he considers the process of constant improvement to be a very big part of invention, and of conceiving new ideas.

As the debate about innovation versus improvement (still often called the "Six Sigma versus innovation" debate) continues, I find it increasingly difficult to differentiate the two concepts. In fact, I'm not sure there is one.

Quite interestingly, if you really study Edison's history, you'll find that he didn't consider himself much of an inventor at all -- that characterization was assigned more often by the history books than by Edison himself. Rather, Edison considered himself someone that would relentlessly pursue improvement.

Here's another famous quote from Thomas Edison: "Your idea only has to be original in its adaptation to the problem you're working on."

The reality is that all things in business -- and in life -- can be boiled down to one simple term: problem solving. This is to say that everything we do is with the intent of solving a problem. In fact, a business doesn't even exist if it doesn't have a customer with a problem to solve. Even a not-for-profit organization exists to solve one or more problems. Everything we do, every day, is done to solve a problem.

We work to earn money so you can put food on the table: Problem solved. We set our alarms in the morning so we can wake up in time to get to work -- so we can put food on the table. Problem solved. We exercise to improve our health, physical or mental. Problem solved. We go to the movies to relax, thereby solving the problem of not feeling relaxed.

There's nothing we do, ever, that we can't ultimately reduce to problem solving. So if everything is about problem solving, both improvement and innovation must ultimately be about problem solving, too. Innovation and improvement are just generally seen as different approaches to problem solving.

However, even that distinction is becoming hard to see. Most productive innovations require tremendous, effort, after the "Aha!" moment, to realize their potential. It took Charles Darwin more than a decade to develop his theory of evolution (The Origin of Species). Samuel Morse spent years coming up with a workable Morse code and the technology to use it. Sure, he had an "idea" one day, in response to a perceived problem of communication. But it was decades before the telegraph began sending messages.

Here's the part most people don't understand… most "Aha!" moments do not result from a momentary burst of brilliance or because there are pinball machines in the lunch room and neon colored walls throughout the office. Rather, most breakthrough ideas are the result of relentlessly pursuing a solution to a known problem.

Extensive study, experimentation and systematic exploration of reams and reams of data are what is needed to fill the brain with the information necessary to produce what we often think of as a spark of brilliance. The effort to simply improve something, using even a very structured approach such as Six Sigma, is usually the catalyst to that moment of brilliance. In fact, it can be said that Six Sigma is not the antithesis of innovation, but rather one of its greatest enablers.

The conclusion I am fast coming to is that we are trying to make a distinction between two processes without there being any real difference at all. We brand one approach as good and the other as bad. Or we decide that one approach is appropriate for some situations and not for others. The reality is that innovation and improvement are much more interconnected than we want to believe. You can't really have one without the other.

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