Why Is It So Hard to Innovate? (Hint: There’s a Better Way)

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Hannah Clark: The word ‘innovation’ gets thrown around a lot, especially during annual planning sessions and networking events. But if you look around the room when the word is spoken, you’re likely to see a pretty comical range of reactions—a hopeful-looking sales director, an exasperated software engineer, and a senior product manager with a thousand-yard stare. And that’s because while the idea of innovation sounds inspiring, being ‘innovative’ is kind of like being ‘cool’—we recognize it when we see it, but there’s not really a definition or playbook for what it looks like.

My guest today is Alexander Wennerberg, Founder and CEO of Hives.co. And while Alexander’s organization is built around ideation and idea management, the way he frames innovation very succinctly explains why it eludes so many companies. So, are most organizations just going about it the wrong way? And if so, how should we be approaching innovation? Let’s jump in and find out.

Welcome back to The CPO Club podcast. Alexander, thank you so much for coming on.

Alexander Wennerberg: Thank you very much for having me here.

Hannah Clark: So, let’s start off with a little bit about your background. Do you mind telling us a little bit about how you ended up where you are today at Hives.co?

Alexander Wennerberg: I don’t have any like university degree or similar. So I actually started out with pretty much whatever job I could get when I was 18, 19. So I went into sales for a while, which led me to the technology industry later, which I’ve always been very interested in. So then I moved into consulting and then product management. And then three years ago, we started Hives.co, which is a tool used by organizations to capture and make decisions from valuable insights, ideas, and feedback from their employees and customers out there.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, which feeds into our topic for today, which is innovation, which is a bit of a nebulous term, especially the different ways that different organizations perceive innovation. So how do you define innovation at Hives.co?

Alexander Wennerberg: Funny enough, we tend to actually steer away from the word innovation because even if it is innovation that we are talking about, I think that because we think that innovation is an outcome rather than a way of working, if I could explain it that way. But if I would put some kind of definition to the word innovation, I would probably say that it means creating a new way to solve a problem or take on an opportunity in some kind of way.

And that’s probably how many would define it, I guess. But I would say that since innovation is one of the possible outcomes towards moving forward, we think that progress is a word that helps us better. So we tend to use the word progress rather than innovation and meaning moving us forward in the right direction.

So if we strive to make progress and moving forward as in, as a team or as a product or an organization, most people will probably understand it as long as you base the tasks on some kind of challenges, directions or opportunities. And one of the possible outcomes from working that way could be innovation.

That’s pretty much how we would define it.

Hannah Clark: Do you think that a lot of organizations struggle? Because I know internally a lot of organizations have initiatives towards innovation, so I don’t think it’s commonly seen as an outcome, although I agree, I think that’s a really good way of looking at things. What do you think is kind of the missing piece that’s preventing a lot of organizations from being able to approach innovation or progress effectively?

Alexander Wennerberg: Yeah, because as you say, a lot of organizations are talking about innovation and want to become an innovative company or build innovative products. And I think there are two things that I see many organizations are missing out there. And number one, I would probably go back to the ironic situation that one of the main problem is that they tend to call it innovation, which scares most people away rather than talking about solving challenges or finding new opportunities or making progress with improvements where innovation could be an outcome.

So in my experience, if you want to become a innovative company and organization, you should probably stop talking about innovation in that terminology. I would say that number 2 that I see are missing with a lot of companies out there is that they are pretty much like bypassing too much information that is needed in the decision making progress.

So, what I mean by that is that usually when we are driving change or improving daily operations or making decisions in general, we as decision makers in a company need a certain amount of information or a certain amount of data in order to make a decision. But when we want to make innovation happen, we tend to believe that we can go from pretty much a sticky note mode to decision making straight away, just because we want to be like creative.

And that’s like bypassing the regular process. And I would say that the reason many creative ideas and suggestions don’t get realized is that it ends up in a pile of sticky notes instead of a decision deck or a memo or whatever your decision makers are used to making decisions from. The contradiction there is that the people who are with all of those creative solutions and ideas are not necessarily the best ones to write a decision deck or a memo for that or business case or whatever you tend to call it.

So, what we need to do here is to strive for a wide participation. And a quantity of ideas from different people, but then qualify the ones with the best potential and then let the right people build on those ones with more information or data. So that’s pretty much what’s going to drive innovation in an organization from my point of view.

Hannah Clark: If I understand correctly, that kind of sounds like you think that working styles and a team structure has a big impact on whether people or whether an organization is able to effectively execute on innovative ideas.

Alexander Wennerberg: There’s so much studies and reports and science, and there are telling us that the best way to find great ideas is to have many ideas.

And you need to have many ideas from different angles and different perspectives and different knowledge and experience and different brains. But sooner or later, we will have to make a decision on those ideas, and if we don’t present the ideas or present the solutions in the same way as we are usually used to make decisions on, you will probably not get a decision from a decision maker and organization.

So, you need to go from, like, a creative mode into a mode where you are building the case or the decision deck or the memo that is giving the decision maker the information or the data that they need in order to make a decision sooner or later.

Hannah Clark: Switching gears a little bit. I’d like to talk a little bit about feature requests and some of the innovative opportunities or some opportunities for progress that tend to present in that context. So how can a product team take advantage of some of the creative opportunities or opportunities to make progress in the future?

Alexander Wennerberg: I think that feature request is a pretty interesting topic and area to discuss because there are so many different opinions out there on whether you should keep those open or how you should handle them if and if you should make it available at all.

One thing that I have learned is that a general feature request is rarely the best way to solve a problem that’s behind, like, to solve the problem that’s behind the feature request itself. So what we usually tend to do is that we bring in the feature requests, but what we then do after we capture the feature request is that we are taking a look at those rather from a perspective that they are telling us something about what problems the users have or what they strive to achieve with that rather than just going with that feature requests like it was the perfect solution from the start.

And when we have framed that information, we can certainly ask both the whole team internally, as well as the customers, how we could solve the problem in the best way, or what different opportunities there will be to achieve what’s wanted to be achieved. But I would say that in my point of view, feature requests are rather a signal that we have a new problem to solve or something new that needs to be achieved for the customers.

Hannah Clark: So this is not the first time I’ve heard that approach, thinking about feature requests as more of a symptom of an issue rather than an outright request for something that’s fully realized. Do you have a anecdote or a story that you could tell about a situation in which maybe a client or enterprise customer requested a feature, and that was really a symptom of something else that needed to be resolved and it kind of how the outcome looked?

Alexander Wennerberg: I don’t know if I have a very practical example to give you just top of mind, but I would say that, you know, one thing that’s very interesting that has occurred the, let’s say for the last year or so, with the rise of AI. You could say that in our case, we’ve been working a lot with the challenge that we need to find a way that’s very easy for people to participate and engage and share their ideas and feedback and insights and thoughts.

But, as I mentioned before, in the end, someone will need to make a decision, right? And if you don’t get the information or the data in in a format that’s possible to make a decision on, you would probably start looking for how could we force the users to provide information in a format that’s easier for us to read, but that will also compromise the ease of use on the end user side at that case.

Hannah Clark: So when we think about feature requests as a symptom of an issue, what are some of the tells that you might be looking for that a feature request has come from an enterprise client or any kind of customer might be indicative of a larger problem that needs solving? And how do you approach that process?

Alexander Wennerberg: We usually approach it by looking at more clients. I would still go back to the situation where if we’re getting a feature requests or feedback on, like, we need this button or we need this feature or we need this to work in that part of the application. If we bring that home to the team and try to frame that as, all right, so what do they want to achieve?

And then start talking, because you can’t really steer away from talking to the customers in the end. You need to talk to the people using your product. So if we frame that and then start talking to more customers and users and say, all right, so are you having this challenge? Or would this be a problem that’s urgent or important or desired for you to solve?

Is this something that you bump into? What’s the problems when you bump into this problem? If you could achieve what you want to achieve with this, what would that give you? What kind of situation would that put you in, and so on? Or what results would that give you? I think it actually comes, I don’t think there’s any silver bullet to this.

I think that you need to gather requests, feedback, feature, like thoughts about features from the customers and users. In my opinion, that’s a must have for any kind of software company, but you shouldn’t just act on it straight away. Just like grabbing a feature and put it in the backlog and start planning for it. You should probably more use as you mentioned, like as a symptom for something that needs to be solved and then start talking to other customers about it. I think that’s probably our approach to it.

Hannah Clark: Kind of coming back to this decision making based on data and that kind of thing that we’d mentioned before.

So once you’ve acquired enough insights, you feel like you’ve got a good sample size of data to make a decision. What is the decision making process look like at your organization and how can we kind of replicate some of those best practices?

Alexander Wennerberg: We’re a pretty small team, so we tend to have pretty fast decision making processes in that sense.

So I don’t think that we are the perfect example of how a general organization would be doing that, but there’s plenty of experience from our customers, if I could take them as examples, where I would say that going back to the situation where the people with the great or most creative ideas and solutions are not probably the best ones on building the business case around that.

And as I mentioned before, we need to strive for like a quantity of valuable insights from different perspectives, but a decision making progress, I would say that the best way to make sure that we are going from creative idea into a complete decision on whether we should approach this or do this or not would probably involve a number of different stakeholders. So it might be that one person is coming up with a great and really creative idea or solution. And then you need to send this to sales to take a look at how desired is this, is this thing that we’re talking about, and then maybe you want to involve legal to see is this achievable depending on what kind of legislations we have around managing the data in this case and so on and so on.

So I would definitely for any organization, no matter if you’re like a 5% team or a company with thousands of employees, I would definitely start with end anyhow, because if you start with the end, meaning that you discover what and try to structure what kind of information does a decision maker in our organization usually need in order to make a decision.

And then you work backwards from there. If we’re going to capture feature requests or ideas or solutions or insights, no matter if it’s from customers or employees, going from a creative idea, which is pretty much like a post it or a sticky note in that sense. Going from there until we have a complete decision deck, what kind of stages do we need to move through, and which different stakeholders do we need to engage in this process. Because the most common reason that most creative ideas don’t happen is that somewhere along that way, it will slip in between different stakeholders because we don’t have the end in mind.

Hannah Clark: That makes sense. It’s hard to make a call who’s the final decision maker sometimes with some of these things.

So let’s talk a little bit about tools. So what are some of the ways that the right tools can help and more the idea generation, ideation, and let’s say progress processes.

Alexander Wennerberg: There are many tools that can be useful to these processes.

You can certainly use Hives.co, our platform, which all the customers that we have are using to, to manage ideation and innovation. I would also say that even though workshops can be great, if it’s facilitated by an expert or experienced person, what I see is that a lot of organizations out there are starting to have a little bit of a workshop fatigue.

Meaning that I think that if you want to be successful, or if you want to succeed in ideation or idea management, you need to stop spending so much time on coordinating workshops and instead start to see if there’s anything or any way that you could gather and gather and engage people in sharing insights and ideas in a more asynchronous way.

So when it comes to practical tools, there are a lot of different like tools in the form of processes or methodologies that you can use. I guess most of the people listening to this have been working or have heard of design thinking. I think that’s a brilliant way starting with empathizing with the end user in mind and starting with defining the problem and the challenge that we need to solve and then move on to the idea stage.

When it comes to practical like products to use, you could use digital whiteboards. If you’re in a posted mode, you could use tools like Hives.co if you want to have like a process and a workflow to manage the ideas all the way through and so on.

Hannah Clark: So when we think about the idea management process, once we’ve got our tools in place, what kind of approaches would you recommend folks use to sift through ideas and organize them in a way that it’s easier to make decisions based on that data that you’ve collected?

Alexander Wennerberg: We believe and have seen it working in most organizations that you should manage ideas based on different challenges or opportunities or questions that you want to overcome or achieve.

Very common problem with many organizations is that they’re going out to the organization and start to say things like, let’s think outside of the box and things like that. And I guess that the funny thing is that most people hearing that could probably not even explain what box we’re talking about. And the creativity is not really like built that way.

It’s a little bit like gathering people to a workshop and giving them a white paper and a pen and give them the task to draw something nice. But most people would just like freeze because they don’t even know where to start. So in order to spark creativity, we need somewhere to start. That doesn’t need to be complicated at all.

I would say that the approach to just getting started is that just list the three most prioritized challenges to solve in your area right now and ask a wider range of people in your organization what insights and ideas they might have to solve those. And if you haven’t done that yet, that’s a perfect place to start without just saying, Hey, let’s come up with our best and most innovative ideas about anything.

Hannah Clark: I think there’s a saying about that, how constraints breed creativity or something like that, just setting some framework.

Alexander Wennerberg: And it’s so true because we need a direction and we need some kind of framing in order to spark creativity. Many people are saying like, we want to start from a blank paper and just see where this goes. And 9 out of 10 would be completely frozen in that situation.

Hannah Clark: I agree. I did an innovation workshop some time ago that had some really interesting techniques of think of the problem that you’re trying to solve, and then think of just a totally random object like a banana and how that could be related.

The exercise was interesting because it just gets your brain firing these connections of you know, they’re not related things, but it gets you thinking in creative ways and create some semblance of constraint, so.

Alexander Wennerberg: Yeah, definitely.

Hannah Clark: So what are the, some of the ways that you evaluate the feasibility of new ideas once you’ve kind of got a few to choose from and there’s some real creative ones on the sticky notes?

Alexander Wennerberg: If it comes to specifically to product development, I would say that of course, our technological ability and our knowledge would of course be two important criterias to rank on, meaning that like, do we have the right technological preconditions to do this?

And do we have the right knowledge to make this happen? And if we don’t have that, of course, we need to specify what more would be needed from like external resources to make this happen, or if we still want it to happen. But one thing I wouldn’t forget as well is to do this in combination with those two ones.

And that is to rank the ideas based on how well it solves the user problem as well, and how desired it is from the users point of view. Because you could definitely start these kinds of creative processes from two ways. You could start it from a challenge or an opportunity or a problem base, but some ideas could definitely be started from a technologies base as well.

Meaning that we could start with some cool technology and then see what opportunities we have with that technology. But in 9 out of 10 situations or cases, sooner or later, you still need to connect that to some kind of user problem or user desire just to solve.

Hannah Clark: And what processes should product teams have in place once an idea has been executed? How do we measure the success of an, let’s say, innovative product or feature in order to make decisions about future iterations?

Alexander Wennerberg: First and most important, I think that if we are working in this kind of way, all product teams or all companies should have a way to involve more people than just the product team to get insights and ideas, not just customers, but other employees at the company, as well as partners, if you have any. You need more perspective into the creative process.

But when you’ve implemented or built some of the ideas and to measure it afterwards, I usually like to look back and see how many problems and how well we’ve succeeded in solving the problems for our users and customers. Because in the end, as I mentioned before, the number of problems solved and how well the problems are solved will be one of the main factors behind how successful a product is in an organization and how much it’s used.

It really doesn’t have to be rocket science. It’s pretty much like striving to solve a problem. And sometimes it might be improvements and from time to time, it will be completely new innovations as well.

Hannah Clark: So Alexander, where can people find you online?

Alexander Wennerberg: I’m very easy to find on, on LinkedIn. If anyone want to connect there, you can just search for my name there and you will find me and if you want to learn more about us, you can just go to our website, it’s hives.co.

Hannah Clark: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Alexander Wennerberg: Yeah. Thank you very much.

Hannah Clark: Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how-to guides, and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at theproductmanager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to The CPO Club, wherever you get your podcasts.