Tradition Meets Discovery: Strategic Innovation for Manufacturers with Bruce Vojak

In this thought-provoking episode, Lisa Ryan welcomes Bruce Vojak, a leading authority on strategic innovation with a unique combination of deep and broad experience. As a business advisor, board member, senior fellow with The Conference Board, and author of two highly regarded books on innovation published by Stanford University Press, Bruce helps mature companies in mature industries survive and thrive in an increasingly volatile, complex, and ambiguous world.

Bruce shares his journey from engineer and techie to innovation strategist, sparked by his fascination with remarkable innovators—not their processes or cultures, but the people themselves. This curiosity led him to decades of research exploring the question: "How do they know what to do?" His work focuses specifically on mature manufacturing companies, making his insights particularly relevant for today's industrial leaders.

What Is Innovation?

Bruce clarifies a common misconception: innovation isn't just creativity or something new—it must have financial impact and marketplace value. While many manufacturers focus on lean implementations, Six Sigma, or equipment upgrades, true innovation changes the basis of competition in an industry. It creates advantages or protects against disadvantages in transformative ways.

He illustrates this with compelling examples:

1. The Carrot Evolution: From knife peeling to safety peelers, then to Oxo's ergonomic design and finally pre-peeled baby carrots that increased overall consumption
2. Moneyball: How the Oakland Athletics revolutionized baseball team optimization using sabermetrics instead of gut feelings

The lesson? Innovation exists in every industry, you just need to start looking for it by asking questions you didn't think you needed to ask.

The Greatest Risk: Not Innovating

For manufacturers at the maturity stage of their lifecycle, the biggest danger is retreating to familiar ways of doing things without questioning unarticulated assumptions. Bruce emphasizes that the real risk isn't making big innovation investments—it's failing to ask the right questions at all.

He frames innovation investment through two financial lenses:

1. Insurance: Protection against being blindsided by market changes
2. Options: Opportunities for future growth beyond the "bond-like" steady returns of optimized manufacturing operations

Both require relatively small initial investments, often just time and attention, but provide critical protection and opportunity.

Navigating Rapid Technological Change

With AI and other technologies transforming business at lightning speed, Bruce advises companies to focus on three critical elements:

1. Internal Alignment: Both strategic and tactical
2. Strategic: Are we really going to invest in innovation?
3. Tactical: What about this specific idea or problem?
4. Alignment failures can derail innovation even at individual contributor levels
5. Simple Processes: Especially for small and mid-sized companies
6. Don't need elaborate systems