No one wants to innovate - they have to.

Why would anyone want to innovate?

Despite the excitement of finding something new, despite the potential success of a breakthrough concept, despite the honor history affords to innovators like Thomas Edison, Steve Wozniak, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Madame Curie, Galileo, Henry Ford and many others, innovation remains a high-risk, difficult and painful process. Innovators routinely face mistakes, dashed hopes, financial stress, and constant uncertainty. It’s hard, painful, unpredictable, and sometimes even embarrassing. Innovations that are ahead of their time have a tendency to fail. Innovations that are too late are usually eclipsed by others. Recent history is filled with expensive and publicly known failures such as the Apple Newton, the Sony Betamax, credit default swaps, the Bush doctrine and Crystal Pepsi. Most organizations have any number of failed new projects and initiatives that no one really wants to talk about.

Most people and organizations aren’t very good at innovation. It requires them to challenge everything they know to be true, and it quite often doesn’t work.

It’s far better to continue doing things the same way you did before. It’s far more rational to keep things going as long as you can. It’s far easier to keep selling the same stuff over and over again to customers and clients. Why innovate, when you can just gradually improve? Why innovate if you can get better at what you are doing now? Why innovate when it might cannibalize your existing products and services. Why innovate if you can apply proven formulas to solve problems?

A terrific way to avoid actual innovation is to create an innovation or best practices program. Most programs ask employees to submit their innovation ideas through some kind of application process. Ideas are then collected centrally - sometimes through sophisticated database applications, sometimes through varying versions of the old suggestion box. Once collected, they are judged by a panel of some kind, to determine which ideas are awarded recognition, prizes and ultimately implementation.

Wonderful ideas are usually acquired in this kind of program, and very quickly, employees will figure out what kinds of ideas are most likely to win recognition and prizes....ideas that help reduce costs always do well, as do ideas that can easily and quickly be implemented - usually referred to as "low-hanging fruit". Employees feel like they are part of an innovative culture, managers feel like they are innovating their company, and everyone is rewarded for good ideas.

Programs like this are easy-to-do, inexpensive and a lot of fun. Unfortunately, they don't actually innovate. They can incrementally improve existing models, but they can't really create new ones.

It's a paradox of innovation and human nature: Everyone wants to innovate and wants to create breakthroughs, but they rarely do. Our governments talk up the need to innovate and our politicians note that our country's success is built upon constant innovation. Our businesses constantly claim innovation as a differentiator and as a key to success. Individuals talk about reinventing themselves, becoming better people, losing weight, becoming more enlightened or quitting smoking. Everyone wants to innovate...but unless they have to innovate, there are too many reasons not to.

Innovation sometimes reminds me of dance. When anyone witnesses a great dancer such as Fred Astaire, Margo Fonteyn, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Martha Graham, or Cyd Charisse, it is likely that they want to dance as well. Who wouldn't want to tap accross the dance floor like Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers on your arm? Who wouldn't want to glide through the air as elegantly and beautifully as Cyd Charisse? Everyone wants to dance - just like everyone wants to innovate.

Professional dancing, however, is an incredibly difficult profession. It takes years to learn how to perform most dances even adequately. Dancers endure brutal days of practice, constant exhaustion, little time for intellectual or social pursuits, permanently damaged feet and destructive diets all for the chance to make little money in a short career that is over before they reach 35 years of age.

Although everyone may want to dance, very few actually go through the difficulties and sacrifices in order to become a dancer. This was very well understood by the choreographer George Balanchine who said, "I don't want people who want to dance, I want people who have to dance."

Innovation, like dance, doesn’t happen because we want it to happen. It happens when we have to do it...when there is no other choice.

Innovative people and organizations tend to become innovative for one of three reasons:

1. They are unable to function, compete or thrive within the existing model - so they change the model to suit themselves.

Individual innovators find themselves inventing new products, new ideas and new ways of doing things because they are incapable of thriving with the old ways. Even if they wanted to conform, it might not be possible for them to do so. Most innovators find it very difficult if not impossible to follow directions – instead, they find it easier to innovate. How well for example, would Richard Branson do if he applied for a job at an established Fortune 50 company? Could Steve Jobs fit in well as a manager at IBM? How often do entrepreneurs continue to serve as a manager when they are acquired by another company?

I recently spoke with a colleague that consults companies on innovation projects, and he confessed to me, "It would be so much easier if I could just do things the way everyone expects. I would probably make more money, I would have more time off, and I wouldn't be so stressed out all the time...but I don't know how to do that. I have to innovate, there's no other choice for me."

2. They are new to a market, organization or game, and can't hope to compete with the existing leaders - so they change the rules of the game to favor themselves.

Xerox dominated the copying business for decades. Whenever a new competitor like IBM tried to gain a foothold in that market, Xerox always won. They were just too big, had too strong a relationship with their customers, and had too much of a head start. But then came a camera company called Canon. They didn't bother to play at the Xerox game of selling large photocopiers to large businesses - instead they came up with a small, less productive, less expensive copier that small businesses could buy and put on top of a desk.

In a few years, the small business market became the small and mid-sized business market - then large companies realized that they would do better with a larger number of small photocopiers vs. a few large Xerox copiers. Canon is now the giant in photocopying, and Xerox is playing catch up.

Canon's innovation changed the rules of the game so they could win. Without innovating, they couldn't even enter the market - so they had to do it.

3. The environment has changed so much that an individual or organization can't thrive anymore, so they change to adapt to a new reality.

This is where almost everyone finds themselves today. The economy has fundamentally changed, and only those who innovate will survive, much less thrive. The current downturn reflects two fundamental assumptions that everyone depended on and built their organizations upon whether they realized it or not.

In the 1990's and into the new century, business models assumed, conciously or not, that there was an unlimited and reliable supply of energy. With oil easily available and less than the cost of bottled water, everything from manufacturing to professional services could do more in a larger geographic footprint at a lower price than ever before. Now, without a consistent supply and price, it is difficult to make those business models work as well as they did only a few years ago. Without cheap and plentiful energy, we have to innovate alternatives.

Also in the 1990's, equity and debt financing became so easy to obtain and so inexpensive that companies could create much higher margins from almost any activity. Whether we realized it or not, much of our activities were based on different forms of leverage. Now that capital is difficult to source and ultimately more expensive, we have no choice, we have to innovate what we do and how we do it.

Innovation only happens when there is no other choice. With the changing of our economy, many more companies and individuals have to innovate for the first time. In the past, a few individuals and companies innovated to make things better for themselves, to allow themselves to win when they didn't have all the cards in their favor. Now, everyone is in a position where they must innovate if they wish to survive.

Why would anyone want to innovate? They don't.

But they must innovate if they want to succeed.