Sustainability & Efficiency via Radial Innovation

​Do you only know how to innovate linearly/cumulatively? That's both exhausting and wasteful. Learn to add radial innovation to your team to work more efficiently, effectively and sustainably. You then only innovate linearly when you really have to.

Analyse your own specific set of different business cycles and 'clocks' as opportunities to vary your own team's work process. Characterise these different 'epochs' that occur in your own business on different time scales and strategically adopt one of a  set of radial innovations from a central core to match the new epoch as it occurs.

Examples of epochs are classic business cycles - cycles of customer demand and associated expansion or contraction of head count or activities, calendar year budget cycles, project lifecycles, new functionality versus technical refactoring sprint cycles, seasonal cycles of full availability and reduced availability due to holidays, competition cycles (new entrants, aggressive price wars), product lifecycles - product launch to product maturity, team creation, team renewal after turnover, etc.

Radial Innovation: Instead of linear progress to your supposed destination, choose from a set of different 'directions' and adaptations to match the expected epoch

Business is obsessed with innovation and 'not being left behind', but in reality most of business innovation is about adapting to business cycles. Constant linear, supposedly cumulative progress can be exhausting, but in Nature, radial innovation means plants acclimatise to their surroundings and the next generation acclimatise differently, but from a pre-set range of different radial innovations to meet their own generation's epoch. This is a far more efficient & sustainable way to innovate as you don't need to reinvent the wheel in every 'new' generation.

This more organic radial innovation can be useful at every level of organisation. If your team seems stuck in its process and is too repetitive, likely it is not radially innovating. Likewise, if your business is constantly innovating 'linearly' every 6-12 months, likely it is not innovating efficiently. That would be like a clock that invents a new digit for every new datetime.

Introduce more radial innovation into your linear innovation process and watch your team flourish and grow as it saves energy and effectively takes to new epochs in its stride.​​

Contact adam@turingmeta.org to set your team on the path to efficient and sustainable radial innovation. Workshops, 1-1 sessions and retreats are available.