**2.4 The road back**

Finally, from a first-principles perspective, is the 'failing to find the Road Back' part of the innovation challenge. Solving a customer contradiction might offer innovators their 'Reward' solution, but having a solution is invention not innovation. In Campbell's terms, the innovation team is still in the 'Special World' limbo space between the old and intended new s-curves. Innovation means successfully transitioning out of that Special World back into the real ('Ordinary') world. And, as shown in **Figure 2**, that transition involves a 'Death & Resurrection' stage in the innovator's Journey. What this should effectively say to the innovator is that – fundamentally – something needs to 'die'. This generally means one of three things: 1) the innovator needs to remove themselves from the equation (especially relevant in academic-lead university spin-outs), 2) the service provider needs to 'unlearn' a previous way of doing things, or, most difficult to engineer, and therefore, usually the most challenging, 3) the customer needs to 'unlearn' one or more of their previous habits or behaviours. In being the more challenging of the three, the third option, perhaps not surprisingly, tends to be the one most likely to give the biggest breakthrough. Call that a meta-contradiction.

## **3. Systematic e-service innovation**

Revealing the 'DNA' of the 2% successful e-service innovation attempts offers a step closer to a systematic innovation capability, but a knowledge of How, is not the same as understanding the What of the innovation process itself. Making that transition demands an understanding of the different stages and types of challenge that an innovation project is likely to encounter. The critical factor, here, concerns the levels of complexity present at different stages of a project.

**Figure 5** presents a simplified outline of what the archetypal innovator's Journey looks like when plotted onto a Complexity Landscape Model (CLM) [16]. The CLM

#### *Systematic e-Service Innovation DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96463*

**Figure 5.** *Complexity landscape model and discontinuous change.*

requires innovators to define two complexity states – one relating to their system, and the other to the surrounding environment. On each dimension, there are four distinctly different levels of complexity: Simple, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic. Each of the four demands different ways of making progress. Hence, by plotting a typical Hero's Journey s-curve transition onto the Landscape – as seen in the 1-to-5 stages included in the Figure – will demand multiple different ways and means of progressing from one stage to the next. Importantly, when a project is in Campbell's 'Special World' (Stage 4), almost inevitably there will be a period of Chaos. There are several reasons why this phenomenon is 'inevitable', but from an e-service perspective, the most pertinent is that organisational change only really occurs in the presence of Chaos. Prior to chaos, the human mind tends to continue applying existing rules and protocols. Only when chaos arrives does it become clear that those rules and protocols no longer apply. Innovation in this sense is about breaking rules. Something that the last forty years of Operational Excellence has taught successive generations of business leader to avoid. Operational excellence, in other words, has been about getting to Stage 3 by making sure employees follow ever more rigorous, ever simpler rules in order to maximise efficiency. Here's another example of 'best practice' leading to unexpected organisational fragility, and, thus another meta-contradiction.

In reality, the 1–5 loop is an 'idealised' road map. In that, given the fact that the majority of the time, a project is likely to be progressed in and environment that is Complex or Chaotic, there can be no such thing as the 'right' answer, and more likely than not, so such thing as the 'right' problem either. Which is to say that the only effective means of making progress involves use of cyclical processes. Processes that, in effect, mean that a project will likely take several circuits around the 1–5 loop.

If this is beginning to sound rather vague and un-systematic, hopefully the next section will demonstrate that, by utilising a process built around the first-principles introduced in the previous section, it is possible to accommodate enormous amounts of uncertainty and variation and nevertheless still be confident that a project will fundamentally continue to advance in the right direction.
