Business challenges do involve product and service design. However, often there are much bigger organizational challenges at play preventing an organization from reaching its potential. These challenges incorporate processes, business models and organizational design. Innovation is not focused on hi-tech or products or services. Any challenge you’ve got – we can’t do this, we can’t do that, our business model is not working – whatever it is you need to have people who want to make change – you need a great change making process. We really dislike the term managing change, managing change means we are going to make change whether people like it or not. We’re going to shove it down their throats. Adaptability is the name of the game and adaptability means we’re driving change.

If you recall some earlier topics on adaptability, any good organization is deliberately proactively driving change. They are looking for ways to make things better internally and externally – one of the biggest things they do well is called problem finding. Problem finding doesn’t mean a new product or a new service. It means something you can’t do and you have internal customers, external customers and you want to have people who are not sweeping problems under the carpet. These folks are flagging them and defining them. When you are re-doing process redesign you don’t want to be strictly looking at optimization and implementation – that is where Six Sigma and Lean efforts work. That’s fine but if you keep focusing on that you’re going to be getting incremental changes. You want to bring innovation in where you can do the right hand side of the Simplexity wheel as well – where you start looking at breakthrough challenges in processes and business models – these are the potential game changers. That completely changes the focus from strictly products and services.