The Innovation Generation Has Arrived
The Industrial Era — A Bygone
Once upon a time, in the heyday of the Industrial Era, 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 business' stayed and true products.
But that day has come and gone, and everything has changed now.
The Entrepreneurial Era — A New Day
Today, a new wave of product developers have entered into the workplace, and they are not your grandfather's lock-step minions.
Today's young marketers, designers, and engineers are quite different indeed. They enter the workforce with an entirely different mindset and a whole new hunger… a hunger for real innovation. We are consistently encountering them 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 other 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 only take a startup one year to do the same. For them, the old way of thinking and working is absolutely dead… there is no life left in it.
A Generation Recalibrated
Why is this? What has happened to this generation that never happened 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 internet-of-everything is the modus operandi — in short, a very fast and connected world.
Professionally, they've been exposed to concepts like Experiential Learning, Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Engagement Marketing — all incredibly more ‘immersive’ experiences. 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 postmodern of the postmodern — so far.
They are the Innovation Generation¹, and they're all grown up now.
The Implication for Employers
The call to action for employers is very clear then. They must realize that this new workforce is expecting a very different sort of work experience… one that is far more human, open, transparent, and connected than ever before.
And regarding the organization's approach to product management and new product development, the call to action is also extremely clear. To truly engage this generation of product developers, business organizations must significantly change their approach to become one that's truly 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 we don't believe that anyone has all of the answers quite figured out yet, the questions are undoubtedly very clear. Now is the time to take on these questions and act accordingly. If organizations choose to hold on to outdated, outmoded structures and approaches, then they will lose this generation, and will spiral ever downwards into increasingly archaic ways of operating, while these young professionals go off and start up their own new businesses to apply their knowledge and energy.
In fact, as the cost of launching new startups has become so incredibly small, more than ever before that path has become a very real option for this generation. For the HR Leaders out there, this fact represents a frightening new source of competition for the emerging talent pool. And needless to say, a few of those startups will in fact grow up to become real businesses someday — in some cases ones that unseat the traditional organizations this generation rejected.
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 an initiative of the high schools of Central Ohio.
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