Conservative Innovation
We used the phrase "Conservative Innovation" in Chapter 7 of Make Poverty Business to describe the need for companies to implement innovation which builds on corporate strengths and manages risk, rather than being a high-risk, entrepreneurial roll of the dice.
Peter Wilson's company, Libra Advisory Group, works with multinational companies to achieve conservative innovation for enhanced profits, reduced risk, poverty alleviation and economic development.
In Make Poverty Business we introduce the idea of conservative innovation as follows:
There’s been a lot of rubbish written about innovation, some of it by us. During the breathless dot com boom, companies everywhere were being exhorted to act more like entrepreneurs, to take bigger risks, to forget everything they thought they once knew. Of course most of it turned out to be nonsense. The entrepreneurs that were held up as heroes mostly failed and the companies that most embraced innovation have gone out of fashion. If we are to make progress on profitable poverty reduction, which is really only a special case of innovation, what lessons can we learn from the varying fortunes of the idea of innovation? How can we develop truly valuable opportunities and implement them effectively in a company without risking our own careers or the company’s profits?
We do not underestimate the difficulty of all this – one of our friends has just been promoted to his first really serious job in a major multinational and been told he’ll be sacked unless he meets his annual targets. It’s hard for him to focus on corporate reputation or long-term profitability or, for goodness’ sake, poverty reduction when his mortgage and his kids’ schooling and his status in the industry depend on how much profit his small bit of the company makes over the next twelve months. He cannot act like an entrepreneur because he doesn’t have the same incentives as an entrepreneur.
For our friend’s benefit we like to talk about “conservative innovation”. We use “conservative” not only because it makes a nice contrast with “innovation” but also because we specifically want to draw on the work of conservative thinkers who have analysed the proper balance between change and continuity. Our aim is to help you think through what might realistically work in your company with its specific history, skills and culture, not to give you a lot of high-risk stuff which seems to have worked for other people.
To learn more about the ideas behind conservative innovation, go to Make Poverty Business. For advice on implementing conservative innovation within a multinational corporation, go to Peter Wilson's company website, Libra Advisory Group.
