Permanent Innovation

Proven Strategies and Methods of

Successful Innovators

Langdon Morris
Preface by Hartmut Esslinger

Notes on the Revised Edition, 2011

The Revised Edition of Permanent Innovation has updated and improved a

number of key points from the original book. This Notes document
consists of the “Author’s Note and Preface to the Second Edition,” which
explains the changes, the one page definition of “permanent innovation,”
and an excerpt entitled “Starting with the Strategic Perspective,” which
covers an important improvement to our understanding of the innovation
process.

To download the complete version of Permanent Innovation please go to

www.innovationlabs.com

INNOVATION ACADEMY
An imprint of InnovationLabs

© 2006 & 2011 by Langdon Morris.

Some rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4303-0886-7

Cover design by Bryan Coffman

Photo: GrahamF, wunderground.com
 Author’s Note
And Preface to the Second Edition

Several years ago Bill Miller and I published 4th Generation R&D, a
detailed study of the process for achieving breakthrough innovations.
We are gratified that the book remains in print, now beyond its 10th
printing, and that it has become a standard reference work in R&D
management and in academia.
Over the intervening years as I worked with many companies, it became
obvious that there was a need for a more general book that provided an
overview of both the strategic and the human dimensions of innovation,
and of the business processes to support them. This material should be
useful not just for R&D managers, but also for people from top
management and throughout the organization who were concerned with
the innovation performance of their firms. This was the goal of the
present book, Permanent Innovation, which was first published in 2006.
During the five intervening years since Permanent Innovation was first
published we have continued our work on innovation with many
organizations around the world, and this disclosed additional themes
and topics that drew us into further explorations. As result, I’ve just
completed a new book, The Innovation Master Plan, which continues to
take our work further. The two books are therefore friendly
companions, intended to complement one another.
However, in the process of preparing The Innovation Master Plan I also
discovered that some of the concepts presented in this book were
incomplete, and needed to be updated. Consequently, I’ve prepared this
revised, second edition of Permanent Innovation to reflect these
improvements.
The major improvement involves a common misperception. Many
people believe (and I used to be one of them) that innovation starts with
“ideas.” People, the common view holds, come up with ideas, and then
they turn them into innovations. The managed innovation process was
therefore assumed to begin with ideation.

Notes on the Revised Version of Permanent Innovation • 3

After following this approach for some years ourselves we’ve found
that it’s not an accurate description of how innovation actually happens,
nor is it an effective guide for how it should be managed. Instead, the
most successful innovators are those who begin from a strategic
perspective, thinking broadly about their goals and the key trends in
society and technology, in order to define their strategic intent.
(See page 6 below.)

They then develop detailed models of risk and reward as it pertains to

the uncertainty of innovation development, and all this gets translated
into “innovation portfolios” of their innovation investments.
The design of this portfolio embodies a set of themes and goals, and
also identifies many unknowns, or questions. The pursuit of answers to
these questions is the purpose of research, and the output of research is
then the input to ideation.
In this way, the innovation process is inherently strategically aligned,
risk-managed, and goal-directed. And as you undoubtedly noticed,
ideation is definitely not the beginning, it’s the middle, and hence the
need to revise the Permanent Innovation model to reflect this more
accurate and more useful understanding.
And it turned out that there’s so much to explore in these concepts that
the idea to write The Innovation Master Plan became a reality.
Other than that, the only other major changes from Version 1 to Version
2 of this book is that chapters 5 and 6 switched sequence to reflect our
improved understanding of the innovation process, and the short chapter
on innovation infrastructure that used to be in Permanent Innovation
was removed entirely, in favor of a much more complete discussion of
the same topic in The Innovation Master Plan.
Finally, as the world changed a bit from 2006 to 2011, many of the
stories and examples were updated to reflect the evolution of the market
over these five very interesting years.

Notes on the Revised Version of Permanent Innovation • 4

 Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.
We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle

The Definition of Permanent

Innovation
Innovation is the process of creating new ideas and turning them into
new business and social value.

Permanent Innovation is the process of doing it continuously, as a

matter of strategy, method, and habit. It happens in organizations that
embrace innovation as a core value, practice innovation as a core
methodology, and produce innovation as a consistent output.
Permanent Innovation is thus a strategic and human process much
more than a technological one, and we achieve excellence at it
through thoughtful repetition of the right methods.
The notion of permanent innovation may at first be startling, and it
may even seem to be a contradiction. The concept of permanence
implies stability and the absence of change, while the concept of
innovation implies constancy of change and novelty. Combining
these two, however, yields an important synthesis: the practice of
innovation not as an occasional occurrence, but as a repeating
process of value creation and organizational adaptation.
Permanent innovation thus contrasts with random, intermittent, or
one-shot innovation processes, none of which are sufficient for today’s
markets, and none of which are the basis for the excellence we aspire
to. In these times of accelerating change and increasing competition,
Permanent Innovation, with a focus on the human dimensions of
innovation, is an absolute necessity. Its principles are contributing
significantly to the success of leading companies around the world.
This book is about how to achieve it.

Notes on the Revised Version of Permanent Innovation • 5

Starting with the Strategic Perspective
Excerpt from page 87

Every idea is born in its own distinctive moment of inspiration. But

what has inspired the inspiration? Most ideas emerge as a result of a
process, a process driven by questions, or by curiosity, or by problems that
need to resolved. When my grandfather was interested in something, he
said hw was going to “cogitate on it,” and he would sit quietly thinking
about something, and ideas would gradually come to him.
For the purposeful innovation process in organizations, what we need
is not random ideas that come from random cogitation, but rather ideas that
address quite specific interests and needs.
Therefore, the starting point for innovation is strategy, the intentional
definition of organizational goals and objectives. If your organization has
defined its strategy, then the search for innovation should build upon it. If
you don't have a strategy to work from, then you’ll need to develop one, or
else you’ll be in danger of going off on a random chase for wild geese, and
most of the ones you’ll stumble upon will provide the value you’re looking
for.
For the purposes of innovation, the strategic perspective will then be
translated into an innovation portfolio. This portfolio will be managed, like
all investment portfolios, to balance risk and reward, to assure that the
organization is taking necessary and appropriate risk to prepare for the
future.
The design of an ideal innovation portfolio is detailed work because
it requires that we consider a very wide range of issues, and still reduce
them down to some choices – we will choose to invest in this project but
not that one, although both are interesting, because we have limited capital.
The design of the portfolio will also disclose gaps in our current
knowledge, and we’ll have to fill those gaps through research, both in the
hard sciences and technology areas of the modern technological revolution,
and also from the soft side of consumer attitudes and behaviors. That
research will be one of the major inputs into our focused process of
developing ideas.
Ideation is also a broad topic, which we’ll explore in depth in the
following chapter.
The resulting Insight is not so much a stage, as it is a moment in time
when the result of our effort comes together and a specific path to the future
becomes clear, which leads us then to 2 aspects of development, innovation
development and market development.
Notes on the Revised Version of Permanent Innovation • 6
 And the financial rewards come at the end of the process, when we
close the sales and earn the financial return on all of our work.

Very broadly speaking then, innovation occurs in five stages:

1. Defining the Strategic Context for innovation and then shaping

the accompanying Portfolio;
2. Research to expose New Knowledge, which leads us to create
great Ideas;
3. Insight: with a clear view of the future we see the great new
products, services, and business models that our organization
will use to get there;
4. Innovation and Market Development, transforming great ideas
into great innovations;
5. Sales, the delivery of value to the marketplace, and the
transactions that provide economic return.

The Innovation Process

The 5 stages of the innovation process.

Avoiding Linear Thinking

Effective innovation methodology shapes the pathways by which

individual ideas will be developed, and just as important, it’s a broader
process which improves the odds that good and great ideas actually do
arrive with regularity and that they are developed to their full potential.
Methodology also involves searching for and systematically filtering
multitudes of new ideas, applying processes for turning the best ones into
innovations, and using tools to help bring them to market, which in the case
of breakthrough innovations is itself no simple accomplishment.

Notes on the Revised Version of Permanent Innovation • 7

 In describing innovation methodology, however, we face a challenge
that’s inherent in the need to describe a complex process, which innovation
is. These five major stages have lots in common, and when you’re working
at innovation it’s nearly impossible to actually go through a linear process
from one step to the next in an orderly fashion.
In fact, creative and innovative processes such as this, like all
problem-solving activities that involve complexity, are iterative. They loop
around, meaning that in the process of searching for great ideas the mind
leaps forward and back, stimulating new ideas while assessing old ones,
planning detailed innovation roadmaps that stimulate still more new and
raw ideas. You return again and again to the various phases in an
unpredictable sequence, and each time you revisit a stage where you’ve
been before your ideas are a bit more developed than they were.
This is not a bad thing; in fact, it’s both natural and excellent, as
experience has shown that iterative processes yield results that are far better
than linear processes because they build on natural a human attribute, the
capacity to improve through learning.
So don’t be deceived by the apparent order of the processes as I
describe them here. In application they’re very messy, properly disorderly
and rich in nuance and ambiguity, and also rich in joy, discovery,
pleasurable interactions, intense arguments, and insights, experiences that
come in a fascinating interpersonal and intellectual process that is also a
critically important one.

•••

Notes on the Revised Version of Permanent Innovation • 8

 About the Author

Langdon Morris is a co-founder and partner of

InnovationLabs LLC, one of the world’s leading
innovation consultancies. He works with organizations
around the world to help them improve their proficiency in
innovation.

He is Senior Fellow of the Economic Opportunities

Program of the Aspen Institute, Editor of the Aerospace
Technology Working Group Innovation Series, Associate
Editor of the International Journal of Innovation Science, and
a member of the Scientific Committee of Business Digest,
Paris. He is formerly Senior Practice Scholar of the Ackoff
Center of the University of Pennsylvania and Contributing
Editor of Knowledge Management magazine.

He is author, co-author, or editor of eight books on

innovation and strategy, various of which have been
translated into six languages, author of many articles and
white papers, and a frequent speaker at workshops and
conferences worldwide. He has taught or lectured at
universities in the US, France, Portugal, Taiwan, and
Argentina, including the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et
Chaussées and the Conservatoire National des Arts et
Métiers, Paris, the University of Belgrano, Buenos Aires,
and Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan.

Notes on the Revised Version of Permanent Innovation • 9

 Also by Langdon Morris

Managing the Evolving Corporation

The Knowledge Channel:

Corporate Strategies for the Internet

Fourth Generation R&D:

Managing Knowledge, Technology, and Innovation
(with William L. Miller)

The Innovation Master Plan

The CEO’s Guide to Innovation Management
The Companion to Permanent Innovation

Aerospace Technology Working Group Innovation Series

Co-author and Co-editor

Beyond Earth
The Future of Humans in Space

Living in Space
Cultural and Social Dynamics, Opportunities, and Challenges
in Permanent Space Habitats

Space Commerce
The Inside Story by the People Who Are Making it Happen

Notes on the Revised Version of Permanent Innovation • 10

 The Innovation Master Plan is the companion volume to
Permanent Innovation.

Please visit www.innovationlabs.com for more information.

Notes on the Revised Version of Permanent Innovation • 11