(Pt.3) Competitiveness and Innovation

This weeks episode is part three in our five part series on "What's Driving Demand for Psychological Safety". Tim and Junior discuss why the need for innovation sparking demand for psychological safety and how innovation is just as much cultural as it is technical.

(01:11) How do you win in a competitive landscape? In short, you can win one of two ways differentiation (product, market, model, operations) or you can win on price. Both of these require innovation.

(05:48) Whose job is innovation? There is a myth that innovation lives at the top of the organization with a select few individuals who meet around a big long table and decide the future of the organization. That is an old mindset that is handed down from the industrial revolution. In reality, it's much different than that. Innovation is the responsibility of everyone.

(14:21) Innovation is a cultural competence. Innovation is just as much part of an organization's cultural competence as it is an organization's technical competence. Some may think about innovation and they think about tools, they think about infrastructure, they think about new technology, new software, whereas they don't spend as much time thinking about the culture of the organization and all of the enabling factors that must be in place in order for the organization to accept any deviations from the status quo (innovation).

(26:36) Most innovation comes from creating marginal gains not big breakthroughs. There are fundamental disruptive or major innovations, but most of it's incremental, most of its derivative, we're talking about marginal gains, we're talking about the 1%, we're talking about these little things that we can get better at.

(31:31) Extending challenger safety and the removing personal risk from challenging the status quo can enhance the speed of innovation. Without it you will be defensive and fail to innovate at or above the speed of change in the market.

Important Links
Don't Let Hierarchy Stifle Innovation Podcast
The Intersection Between Diversity, Inclusion, and Innovation
Don't Let Hierarchy Stifle Innovation Article
5 Steps to Create Innovation with Your Team
Stage 4 Challenger Safety Podcast
Stage 4 Challenger Safety Article
Surfing the Boundaries of Chaos and Innovation with Professor James Evans Podcast