The Innovation Generation Has Arrived

Oct 04, 2014 | Anthony Mills

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Once upon a time, in the heyday of the Industrial Age, a young marketing, design, or engineering student would graduate from college and go to work for a large corporation, slowly melding into the steady, rhythmic din of bureaucratically-managed, organizationally-structured execution work in product development.   And they were just peachy keen happy with that.   They got to be a part of the steady execution of the company's slowly evolving product line, happy to help develop and launch the next version of the company's stayed and true products.

But that day has long come and gone, and all that has changed now.   A new wave of product developers are entering the workforce, and these are not your grandfather's lock-step minions.   Today's young marketers, designers, and engineers are very different.   They enter the workforce with an entirely different mindset and a whole new hunger... a real hunger for innovation.   I am encountering them consistently now.   At the bare minimum, these young men and women want to see innovation happening all around them, and more often than not they want to be right in the middle of it!   No longer are they are content to be a part of the mind-numbingly boring old school of trudging through bureaucratic execution models that move at the pace of molasses.   They need something radically new and they need speed.   And while they don't mind being hands-on... being makers if you will, they simply cannot tolerate slow execution of stale product lines.   In the age of Content Marketing and MakerBots, they want to fail fast, learn fast, and get to market fast with awesome new products.   They are, in a nutshell, incredibly more entrepreneurial (or in this case intrapreneurial) than any generation before them.   They have no desire to endure four years of crawling through politics and red tape to commercialize a new product when it would take a startup only one year to develop and launch the same product.   For them, the old way of thinking and working is dead... there is no life left in it.

Why is this?   What has happened to this generation that did not happen before them?   Quite simply, these young men and women have grown up in an age where rapid and constant change is the norm, where innovation isn't a nicety but an absolute necessity, where "global" is their community, and where IoT is the growing modus operandi.   Professionally, they have been exposed to ideas like Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Experiential Learning, and Engagement Marketing.   They are, in effect, the product of an entirely new world of thinking; one both more digital and connected and in some ways more human and pragmatic.   They are the most post-modern of the postmodern (so far).   They are called the Innovation Generation ¹, and they are all grown up now.

And so for companies the call to action is very clear.   They must realize that this new workforce is expecting a very different sort of work experience... one that is more human, open, transparent, and connected than any before.   And regarding the approach to product lifecycle management and new product development, the call to action is also clear.   To truly engage this generation of product developers, companies must significantly change their approach to one focused on rapid learning, rapid execution, and increasing amounts of innovation.   This will mean entirely different thinking around how to organize and run product management, different thinking around risk portfolios and how to manage them, and even different product strategies altogether.   While I don't believe that anyone has all the answers figured out quite yet, the questions are very clear.   And now is the time to take on these questions and act accordingly.   If companies choose to hold on to outmoded structures and approaches they will lose this generation, spiraling ever downwards into increasingly archaic modes of operation, while these young professionals go off and start up new companies to apply their knowledge and energy.   In fact, as the cost of launching startups has become so incredibly small, more than ever before that path has become a real option for this generation (for the HR Managers out there, this represents a frightening new source of competition for the emerging talent pool).   And needless to say, a few of these startups will grow up to become real companies that someday unseat the traditional companies rejected by this generation.

The Innovation Generation welcomes you to their time.

¹ Name credited to Thomas M. Koulopoulos of the Delphi Group (2005), and also used by Jenny Floren for her 2010 book by the same name, as well as a recent initiative of the high schools of Central Ohio.

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