Is the value of innovation overrated?

Over the previous weeks’class room discussions and the slide presentations, it  emerged that innovation is the most probable answer to deal with the social challenges. Deep down I too was convinced till I came across the article,” Innovation is not the Holy Grail” by Christian Saleelos and Johanna Mair. This article was a product of their study, Christian and Johanna undertook for Rockfeller foundation. It attempts to explore what drives the innovation continuously in the social sector organization that operates at efficient scale and finally concludes by highlighting a risk of overrating the value of innovation.

According to Christian and Johanna, if organization have identified their workable model in required situation, know how to make best use of their resources and be mindful of their limitation, have proven to give much better results as opposed to what new innovations or set of new knowledge or new activities would have yielded. They substantiated their claim with the case study of Aravind Hospital. It began with 11 beds in 1976 in Madurai, India with one focus, ‘Eradicate cataract’.  Instead of scaling up to full fledge ophthalomologic hospital, it focused on its  specialization and keeping it cost effective so as to make the service available to economically disadvantaged community.  Till Aravind hospital had not experiment with new organizational models, it had a track record of each doctor performing 2,000 cataract surgeries every year and 6 hospitals performing 300,000 surgeries annually.  The authors of this article owe this terrific success to the workable model developed based on routine, improving practices continuously based on meticulously screening what works and what dont, and investing profit to build additional capacity.

However in 2005, driven by enthusiasm to meet goal of reaching over a million eye surgeries per year by 2015, Aravind toyed with the new organizational models wherein existing or new hospital were collaborated with, to use Aravind’s best practices. Unfortunately, this new changes was done away with after five years. The best practice could neither be fully transferred and nor could be continuously improved because of different in organizational structure and contexts. This example brings attention to a possibility that may be many of the social challenges especially related to meeting the basic need require committed long time engagement with steady progress and not innovative solutions.  As authors in their words say,

“environments of widespread poverty where innovation is not triggered by changes in customer wants, new technological advances, or harsh competition, progress and impact may come more from dedication and routine work.”

http://www.ssireview.org

This article got me to ponder, “How do we know that when do we need innovation and when do we simply need perseverance?