To the Point By Deborah Sexton

Avoiding the ‘Death Spiral’ Why it’s so hard to be innovative. “T

he Innovation Death Spiral.” Sounds ominous, doesn’t it? While it could

be the name of a new science-fiction movie or the latest Xbox game, in fact it’s the title of a recently published report by global management consulting company Accenture (http://bit.ly/jiPLf9).

The innovation death spiral, according to the

report, is a phenomenon in which many organi- zations find themselves trapped. It begins when new products, “developed and launched with high hopes, end up yielding only disappointing results,” write the three Accenture executives who authored the article. “Nonetheless, once those products are out in the field, they soak up valuable resources.” The authors, who take a case-study approach

to the challenge of organizational innovation, claim that many companies focus too heavily on making low-risk, incremental changes to products within their existing mature markets, at the expense of aiming for truly transforma- tional changes that will allow them to grow and prosper. The more they focus on the small innovations, the more they’re perceived as being less innovative. And that downward spiral is hard to climb out of. Accenture doesn’t suggest that companies

completely abandon the smaller, incremental in- novations in favor of high-risk, game-changing ideas. Instead, the article recommends striking a balance between three different kinds of in- novation — incremental innovation, platform innovation (i.e., giving customers a reason to switch from a competitor to your brand), and breakthrough innovation. While the authors take their examples from

such consumer product companies as Unilever, their concepts easily apply to other businesses — including, I believe, the meetings industry.

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For instance, just as they note that Unilever’s huge product line historically limited its ability to focus on new-product development, handling multiple small meetings can cause planners to run them according to a tried-and-true template — “a kit of parts” is the way TED founder Richard Saul Wurman characterized most meeting formats in this month’s One on One interview (p. 83). By the same token, launching one single

high-risk initiative — say, a virtual component — isn’t such a great strategy, either. If the virtual part of your live event crashes and burns, you’ll want to be able to point to smaller innovations that were well received, to mitigate any financial losses or fallout from your constituents. Of course, there’s no clear-cut formula for

innovation for all organizations. There may be times when you focus more of your attention on low-risk adjustments or times when you might have to concentrate your efforts on a high-risk venture. And certainly the current economy makes innovation more challenging. As the Accenture article points out, it’s critical to aim for a balance between the small and really big innovations. Each year at Convening Leaders, PCMA’s

annual meeting, we take risks so you don’t have to — or perhaps I should say, so that you have fewer risks to take. Whether it’s the Learning Lounge we launched last year, a virtual meeting component, or tweaks we make to our format, we unleash new ideas so you can experience them yourself and figure out if they would work for your meetings. Stay tuned for more exciting developments at Convening Leaders 2012, Jan. 8–11, in San Diego. n

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INNOVATIONS, BIG AND SMALL: While Convene’s Innova- tive Meetings series is devoted exclu- sively to innovation, in every issue we offer numerous examples of the big and small changes planners have made to their events that pack a punch. In this issue, learn how the American Academy of Neurology used its Annual Meeting in Hawaii to educate the public (p. 34). Or how a small addition to its agreement with its AV pro- vider gave Learning Forward peace of mind (p. 36). And why it’s become per- fectly acceptable for participants at the Computer-Human Interaction Confer- ence to leave one session for another if they see a tweet about the other ses- sion being especially interesting (p. 38).

Deborah Sexton President and CEO deborah.sexton@pcma.org

www.pcma.org

DEBORAH SEXTON PHOTOGRAPHED BY MICHAEL ABRAMSON