Primary Difference between Innovation and Operations

Innovation is a learning process, the product of which is new applied knowledge. Operations is an established process driven by existing knowledge. Operations generate today's value, while innovation creates tomorrow's opportunities. The primary difference between operations and innovation is uncertainty. It eludes planning, prediction and containment.

What makes innovation unique as a business process is that creativity and routine are intertwined throughout the process. The routine tasks have little value by themselves however; their purpose is to support the knowledge discovery process.

Different Strategies and Routes to Success

When managing daily operations, you know what results should be, what steps are required to achieve them, and who should do what along the way.

Managing innovation is quite different from managing operations as you always have less information available to make choices than you'd like. In addition, innovation has not a single goal, but multiple and unclear goals, and each of these goals can be reached through multiple routes.

Different Management Tools and Thinking

Managing innovation requires specific approaches. If you try to manage the uncertainty inherent in innovation with tools and thinking designed for the relative certainty of operations, you'll run into trouble... You'll be continuously surprised as your assumptions prove false. The most effective way to deal with uncertainty inherent in innovation is to have a learning process that systematically confronts the unknown with new hypotheses, tests them, and eventually creates a new knowledge.

When innovating, you cannot figure it all out and ahead of time and stick to one plan; so, don't wait - just go for it, learn and adjust as you go. That's why successful innovators get used to moving forward, backing up, going sidewise, chasing parallel paths for a while, consolidating, and then going forward again.

Adapted from "Relentless Growth", Christopher Meyer