Innovation FAQ

20 Nov 2018 Julija Kaminskaite

, The Innovator Series america, connectivate, EU, idea, ideation, innovation, Innovation FAQ, innovation standard, innovator, integrity, ixlolympics, LATAM, leader, leadership, network, ROI, strategy, success, USA

What innovation processes and tools are key to institutionalize innovation across all parts of your organization?

Volume II, Issue 5 November 20, 2018

What innovation processes and tools are key to institutionalize innovation across all parts of your organization?

A wise man once said, “Every basic story that people tell to make sense of the world has already been told.” Another wise man responded, “That may be true, but what happens to those stories when the world changes?”

IXL Center partners: Ronald Jonash and Hitendra Patel

Choosing the right story to understand the economic world today is especially important when we try to find the best solution to this persistent question in innovation practice: “What innovation processes and tools are key to institutionalize innovation across all parts of your organizations?” The first and unavoidable step to answering this question is: Leadership must make a very visible commitment to innovation and ensure that all innovation efforts are connected to clear business and/or strategic goals.

This truth about innovation will never change for business. Nevertheless, over and over, companies mistakenly skip this necessary step to successful innovation. Why? Executives today are so often distracted by the accelerating marketplace that they can confuse speed with strategy. Because of this, they tell themselves (consciously or sub-consciously) the wrong story about the world: because speed is essential, tools like crowdsourcing or artificial intelligence will solve my company’s strategic problems.[1] This is a nice story, but it’s totally false. It is true that being speedy is important in today’s economy; in fact, one might add that the ability to innovate or change quickly is becoming table stakes for any company playing in the global marketplace. But being speedy means nothing without having a strategic direction in mind.[2]

“On average it takes 4 years for a company to benefit from the ideas that it has invested in” – Dr. Hitendra Patel.

So if we proceed without the fairy tale that speedy tools are a substitute for innovation strategy, we can make better decisions about the processes and tools we need to make that strategy real across all parts of an organization. In today’s economy, this usually means deftly attaching machine processing power (i.e., increasing speed and scope) to strategic thinking (i.e., direction). So, once we’re clear about strategic direction, it would be helpful to keep the next two steps in mind.

1) Gather, Categorize and Share Initial Insights. The first step in this process is generally referred to today as “crowdsourcing.” There are many ways to gather ideas, from in-person case competitions to online systems that connect disparate teams. With all of our online tools and connections, gathering ideas is not a problem. The real problem that arises is the challenge of organizing or “curating” the ideas into meaningful categories. This can be done on a large scale with, for example, natural language processing. These categories can then be more easily aligned with business priorities.

In addition, tagging ideas and innovation with language processing capabilities can be helpful in creating taxonomies that can be used for innovation in the long-term. In addition, taxonomies can allow companies to incorporate data from other sources easily to further inform and enhance findings developed from their own crowdsourcing. Tagging also can perform an important internal function as a means of advertising or sharing ideas that might otherwise remain unnoticed in companies. This is especially helpful for organizations with offices spread throughout the globe.[3]

2) Funnel Ideas into Nuanced Categories of Innovation Efforts. There a many specific tools and approaches, but what is important is that multiple complementary approaches be used. That is because innovation initiatives can (and often do) develop unexpectedly and are targeted towards a business landscape that can often be in flux. Opportunities and emergencies can arise at any moment and priorities can change. Keeping that need for flexibility in mind, there are some reliable questions you can use to understand and prioritize all your innovation efforts:

How big is the opportunity in terms of ROI?

Innovation can make money for you in big ways and small. These are all net positives for your company, but you should try prioritizing opportunities by estimating where the biggest bang for your buck may lie – and what that “bang” is. These could range from greatest investment to revenue ratio to increase in market share to simply pure revenues.

What’s the big opportunity? Innovation Management tool – Business Opportunity Map (IMBOK)

How quickly should you get this done? This is a question to follow an ROI estimate because planning speed to market often depends on other factors. How might you prioritize between a process innovation costing $500k and yielding $2 million in savings in six months and a new service costing $1 million but promising to yield $5 million revenues in three years. If your company is strapped for cash, for instance, the first option may be slightly more important to start than the second.
How will you get this done/get on the right track? Depending on your needs and your capabilities, your company should make an effort to define and plan how to get an innovation project finished, which can include these approaches: 1) “Just Do It” yourself and do it now; 2) Incremental Product or Process Development; 3) Innovation Platform Development; and, 4) Venturing.
How much investment or partnering is needed? Investing your own resources or working with the resources of others should be planned for multiple stages of the innovation process, from ideation to production and finally to launch / rollout activities.

While there is a lot of planning and a lot of complexity that goes into choosing the processes and tools of an effective innovation program, one should always remember that the final business concept does not have to be complex at all. Innovation can lead to groundbreaking revenue generation with a simple new product that just hasn’t occurred to anybody or to an attractive, easy-to-use service that finds new ways to generate revenues. Disciplining the use of tools with a clear strategic vision will help illuminate opportunities that are complex and simple, big and small – all of which contribute to the growth of your company.

______________________________________________________________________

[1] Recently, Thomas Davenport observed that because “the hype surrounding artificial intelligence has been especially powerful, […] some organizations have been seduced by it.” See Thomas Davenport and Rajeev Ronanki, “Artificial Intelligence for the Real World,” Harvard Business Review vol 96. 1 (2018): 108-116.

[2] For an enlightening discussion about executives being distracted by the latest technological “shiny objects,” look for our Game Changers innovation podcast with GIMI board member and CEO of IdeaScale, Rob Hoehn, that will be published in December.

[3] These points are also derived from my conversation with Rob Hoehn that will be shared in our upcoming Game Changers podcast.

_________________________________________________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Mark Rennella. Senior Editor at IXL Center

Mark Rennella is a writer, editor and teacher who uses a historical perspective to examine and unpack today’s complex business trends. He has authored popular Harvard Business School cases on a variety of topics as well as a book on leadership, Entrepreneurs, Managers and Leaders, co-written with Nitin Nohria and Anthony Mayo (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Mark’s many books, articles, business case studies, and collaborative writing endeavors have garnered him critical praise from historians, academicians, and business leaders alike. In 2001, Mark earned a PhD in American History at Brandeis University.

Dr. Hitendra Patel. Managing Director of IXL Center

Dr. Hitendra Patel is the Managing Director of the IXL Center and Chair of the Innovation and Growth Program at the Hult International Business School. He has coached new emerging leaders and managers of new and fast growth businesses.Hitendra was a senior leader and co-founder of Monitor Group’s Innovation Practice and was responsible for Asia and Latin America. Prior to Monitor, he was a senior manager at Arthur D. Little. As a management consultant, he has made lasting impact with all types of companies by helping them identify new engines for growth and develop their own capacity to innovate.

Work with 5 MBA and PhD teams to explore new growth opportunities!

EXPLORE

17 Oct 2018 Julija Kaminskaite

, The Innovator Series america, concept, EU, idea, idea fragment, ideation, innovation, Innovation FAQ, innovation standard, innovator, integrity, LATAM, leader, network, strategy, success, USA

How Do You Find the Big Bold Ideas that Matter in the Market and to My Company?: The Need for Focus?

Volume II, Issue 4 October 17, 2018

How Do You Find the Big Bold Ideas that Matter in the Market and to My Company?: The Need for Focus

In previous editions of this The Innovator newsletter, we’ve noted that maintaining energy and productivity around innovation often requires a balance between opposing forces – forces that both spur creativity and can cause friction (with both internal and external stakeholders). The same applies to today’s question, “How do you find the big bold ideas that matter in the market and to my company?” The main balance in this domain of innovation is focusing on a significant unmet need or problem while at the same time being open to unexpected new opportunities or changes of course.

Some people might react with skepticism to this question: “If we knew what the big opportunity was, we’d already be insanely rich.” In answer to this, we would certainly confess that we don’t have a crystal ball to predict the future; however, we do have an approach that will increase your chances to find that big idea. This goes hand in hand with having a well-functioning innovation portfolio, which is the mechanism to keep a wealth of ideas flowing so that the market sees that your company is consistently finding new ways to meet unmet needs. In this newsletter, we’re going to drill down into that innovation portfolio and look more closely about how a few ideas – or sometimes just one idea – comes to fruition.[1]

To find big ideas requires following these steps:

1) Have a clear goal, which is the unmet need or problem

2) Have a method – some repeatable method – that will simultaneously

grow the number suggestions and insights about ways to satisfy this need and
find ways to group the suggestions into meaningful categories[2]

3) Test the categories of suggestions and determine what should be done with them

The first and by far the most important step in this process is having a clear goal. We might better understand why this is important if we recall this criticism of Aaron Burr in the recent musical Hamilton: “If you stand for nothing, Burr, what will you fall for?” Essentially, having a clear goal to work towards gives participants in an innovation process parameters and reference points concerning what is germane to satisfying a customer need. Those parameters allow insights to accrete instead of becoming dispersed and incoherent. For example, if the goal for a yogurt company was a vague mandate “to increase sales,” then just about any and everything related to the existing company’s efforts might be included in that goal. Better salespeople? (Sure.) Bigger containers? (It might work.) Lower prices? (Why not?) But if the goal is more specific, like “how can we increase and broaden the ways consumers think about to using yogurt,” then the insights connected to that goal have far more potential to be related and to grow into something like a meaningful idea.

In accomplishing the second step in this process, we don’t advocate any one method over another: it depends on your company and its culture. Whatever the method, you need people or systems (or some combination) that have responsibility for gathering and assessing ideas. A couple of brief examples may help visualize this step.

People-oriented example. A company may task large cross sections to be on the lookout for new ideas and emerging or disruptive trends in the business environment. Teams or individuals are then in place who are specifically accountable for sourcing and managing emerging trends in their fields of endeavor. Eventually, these teams or individuals assess these insights and decide whether or not they should be terminated, undergo more testing, or should enter the pipeline of new offerings or product development.

Systems-oriented example. To start generating insights, you can hold workshops and ideation events, invite online submissions and talk to customers. In processing these new insights, you should cross-reference them with existing and past efforts. By doing this you can avoid reinventing the wheel by eliminating “new” insights that have already been assessed. You can also find current innovation efforts that might be given an extra boost of energy by a connection to a new insight.

The final step is to test your categories (or “bundles of insights”) and come to one of four conclusions about them:

1) The category will not satisfy the unmet need.

2) The category will satisfy the unmet need (maybe with some minor modifications). This is the foundation of the big idea.

3) Testing of this category might yield insights into another way to satisfy the unmet need.

4) Testing of this category reveals a new unmet need – which requires beginning this process again.

This approach represents an efficient way of processing insights. While relatively simple and straightforward, the process is made robust and coherent by being consistently measured by its ability to satisfy a specified unmet need. Meeting that need in a way that leverages different parts of the value chain will likely yield a big bold idea. Almost equally important is to be on the lookout for surprises and new insights that can lead to the discovery of a second unmet need, which was found (somewhat ironically) because of the focus on the first. This brings us back to the first step of the process and the beginning of another potential blockbuster.

We all know that big bold ideas don’t come easy and that innovation (especially for internal stakeholders) is more a marathon than a sprint. Outside stakeholders may marvel at the speed and quantity of business concepts emerging from your company, but insiders know that those new entries into the market represent a fraction the overall effort and insights that their company was investigating and testing over a long period of time. Helping employees to run that innovation marathon is a big challenge. One answer to that challenge is the appointment of a Chief Innovation Officer. Examining the pros and cons of having a CIO is the subject of next month’s newsletter.

[1] We should take one moment here to explain what is meant by the word “idea” in an innovation process. An idea that is worthy of the name in an innovation process usually comes towards the end of that innovation process because it deals with the interlocking parts of the value chain that have to work together to create an innovation that’s successful because it is hard to imitate. Smaller insights or incremental improvements within a link of that value chain are better understood as the younger cousins of a fully-fledged idea: suggestions, insights and hunches. We often call them “idea fragments.” For instance, an R&D researcher at a food processing company might have a hunch that making a richer version of an already existing brand of yogurt might satisfy a segment of their customer base. This incremental step may indeed increase the loyalty of existing customers and perhaps attract a few new ones, but it doesn’t represent the creation of a new business concept that grows from new set of interlocking links on a value chain. In the example above, competitors could imitate the creamier version of this yogurt relatively easily.

[2] Categories could represent groupings of idea fragments that meet an unmet need. If an unmet need for yogurt consumers was finding more ways to integrate the health benefits of yogurt with other foods, the categories of suggestions could range from seeking ways to partner with other food companies and restaurants to educating consumers on how to use yogurt in a variety of foods and meals. Because the categories are related to a goal, they can sometimes be combined in a final idea.

_________________________________________________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Mark Rennella. Senior Editor at IXL Center

Dr. Hitendra Patel. Managing Director of IXL Center

4 Sep 2018 Julija Kaminskaite

, The Innovator Series Asia, Brazil, EU, innovation, Innovation FAQ, innovation standard, innovator, integrity, LATAM, leader, network, strategy, success, USA

How do you involve all units within your organization and partners & networks to assist with driving innovation from idea to market?

Volume II, Issue 3 September 4, 2018

How do you involve all units within your organization and partners & networks to assist with driving innovation from idea to market?

For Successful Innovation in the Long Term, Find Ways to Integrate New Initiatives with Existing Systems

Companies need innovation because they all need new products, new business models and new value propositions – which offer novel opportunities for growth as well as some unanticipated challenges. Innovation does require change and because of that innovation initiatives are similar to change initiatives within a company.

At the same time, if any company is going to remain a company (i.e., remain largely intact for some number of years), there are long-standing systems and relationships it has to maintain in a stable manner. Internally, the executives and employees and the company culture they form can’t be completely changed and overturned every time a new business concept might be pursued. Externally, there are partners and suppliers whose skills, resources and good will are often needed to be available in a predictable and steady manner. This need to balance between the new and the old means that, while change is inevitable, repeated revolutionary upheaval is impractical and unsustainable.

Diverse innovation team. IXL Center, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Align Innovative Initiatives with the Existing Organization and Existing Partnerships

The way to strike this balance between change and continuity is to effectively integrate innovation with already existing business processes internally as well as with external partners (while attempting to make changes to existing systems only when they become a consistent impediment to innovation). That means paying attention to communication between innovation leaders with all company stakeholders at the beginning, middle and end stages of nurturing an innovation from an idea to a fully-fledged business concept. Without this clear process of finding buy-in across the value chain, innovation initiatives often devolve into a battle between process leaders within an organization, resulting in dissention, chaos and inaction. With it, you can leverage the energy and efficiency of existing systems and cultures to lift innovation initiatives.

The three stages we will look at are innovation processes and procedures that occur at upstream, midstream, and downstream stages of innovation development. As an example of integrating these stages with existing systems, you might think of aligning innovation initiatives with these different parts of the organization:

1) Innovation insights with marketing and strategy
2) Innovation resource allocation and manufacturing arrangements with strategy and financial planning
3) Commercial launch of the innovation with sales

Upstream Stage

At this stage you want to encourage as many ideas as possible (as we suggested in the last newsletter concerning an innovation pipeline). To ensure that all sorts of stakeholders buy into an innovation initiative, you need to solicit ideas from all parts of your value chain – from the most conservative to the most audacious teams and organizations whom you’ll need to work with. In addition to getting buy-in to your project, you will also maximize your efforts by leveraging existing systems. All of these sources of ideas and resources potentially all have something to contribute to your efforts. In addition, by welcoming and valuing their input, you may encourage them to think even more creatively and contribute to the ideation process.

Communication is key to coordinating efforts at every stage. At this early point, leaders should articulate how different stakeholders will contribute to the overall innovation effort. This has the added value of demonstrating leadership commitment. And if innovation leaders hope that all stakeholders will truly share all their insights – including those that might challenge the innovation initiative itself – leadership must support healthy debates. People should know that it’s not impolite to challenge others’ ideas; instead, it should be considered to be the best way for all to improve ideas and to contribute to success.

Innovation Portfolio as a generic pipeline process. Created by Alice Chung, Senior Manager at Genentech Business Operation.

Midstream Stage

Once the innovation initiative gets started beyond the early ideation stage, it needs to coordinate with strategy and planning and seriously factor in future uncertainty and potential risks. Those running the innovation initiative should go out of their way to understand priorities, concerns and address challenges of all stakeholders, especially those in the more traditional or conservative parts of the value chain because they may get cold feet once the challenges of the initiative become clear. (In that case, get them excited about all the new opportunities they may encounter, too!)

Because innovation requires internal and external stakeholders to do something new, it’s probably wise to over-communicate to partners and networks. Because they are often significantly removed from the centers of decision-making in the central group running the innovation initiative, they can easily feel left out or shunned if the details of the innovation initiative become murky. To stop these awkward moments before they happen, innovation leaders should request a “point person” for every contributing group or significant team. That person can both meet regularly with other group leaders to share information and have the responsibility to be responsive to questions from outside.

Downstream Stage

Toward the end of the innovation process clear triage points of innovation initiatives should help to focus efforts and resources. Priorities should be determined and initiatives should be assigned to different tracks: high, medium and low priority tracks with appropriate funding and personnel allocations. This should also be the time to determine which innovation projects should be definitively shut down.

One factor that can keep these various business functions coordinated and confident that they’re pursuing the right path is innovation metrics. While we will discuss this issue in more detail in a subsequent newsletter, it’s important to recognize that establishing metrics are crucial because the big payoff of innovation is usually in the future and its processes (involving creativity and emerging intellectual property) can often be less tangible than the incremental improvement made by conventional R&D. Metrics help teams understand where to direct their efforts; metrics also help disparate teams communicate across the value chain because they allow the work of individual teams to be understood more easily by outsiders.

It’s one thing, of course, to create processes to ensure buy-in within an innovation process. It’s another to make sure that those processes are truly valuable. How do you find the big bold ideas that matter in the market and to your company? Answering that question will be the topic of the next edition of The Innovator.

We’d like to thank Alice Chung for her contribution to this edition of The Innovator.

_________________________________________________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Mark Rennella. Senior Editor at IXL Center

Dr. Hitendra Patel. Managing Director of IXL Center

1 Aug 2018 Julija Kaminskaite

, The Innovator Series innovation, Innovation FAQ, innovation portfolio, innovation standard, strategy, success

Why is a good innovation portfolio important and what does it look like for a company?

Volume II, Issue 2 August 1, 2018

Why is a good innovation portfolio important and what does it look like for a company?

An innovation portfolio maintains the delicate balance required for companies to remain viable years into the future by creating change today. While survival through adaptation / innovation has always been the law of the economic jungle, corporate cultures (and many of the C-level executives who shape those cultures) often prefer (through choice or inertia) to put off change and the news that might prompt change for as long as possible. If your company has chosen to adopt an innovation portfolio, it’s made the adjustment to this fact of modern business life: today’s timelines and dizzying market churn are moving too quickly to allow innovation to bubble up by chance or to be put off until some smart person in the C-suite has an inspiration. The way to plan for innovation is to develop an innovation portfolio.

Dr. Hitendra Patel at the IXL Center, Miami.

Why is Innovation Portfolio Important?

Having an innovation portfolio means that you’re being realistic about planning for a prosperous future. This portfolio has both short-term and long-term implications for business concepts and processes. For products or business concepts in the short-term, the portfolio allows companies to entertain many experiments at once, moving them towards a stage-gate process or other form of evaluation system that anticipates inevitable failures in experimentation. In the long term, an innovation portfolio allows companies to sustain energy over time by planning years in advance to maintain customer loyalty and interest in the company. New, innovative business concepts from the portfolio are staggered over time because imitations and substitutes to your new offering can emerge quickly. In short, your innovation portfolio helps you to sustain energy in the marketplace through changing times.

That energy and dynamism also can be spread internally through innovation efforts. Successful innovation efforts can encourage good business habits/processes that keep the company open to using the latest effective tools and approaches to all of their work. If the operations department conducts successful experiments using artificial intelligence, for example, this innovative approach should generate new values such as increasing efficiency, looking for deeper insights to support decision-making processes, and getting new offerings more quickly to the market. Benefits to the company of these new processes can be measured and implemented at scale much faster than before.

All of this energy is channeled to productive ends by making sure that innovation efforts large and small are somehow aligned with an important strategic goal. This scrutiny is not meant to straightjacket innovation too narrowly or to make potential innovators wary of breaking a company rule. Instead, imagine this alignment like a sail on a boat catching the strategic wind just right.

Making Innovation Real: Strategy, Capacity and Discipline. IXL Center Model.

Organizational Considerations in Getting the Innovation Portfolio Started

In keeping an innovation portfolio robust and productive, a balance has to be maintained in channels of communication and allocations of responsibility between upper management and the rank-and-file. The portfolio has to be shaped primarily by management who should develop criteria for funding of initial innovation efforts with some seed money (efforts that are aligned, of course, with the company’s strategic priorities).

While the overall character of an innovation portfolio should be shaped from the top-down, the fielding of ideas should happen from the bottom-up, or from “the grassroots.” There are two major reasons for this. First, there are too many changes in the marketplace for upper management to know everything that’s important to their company; therefore, there must be some delegation of innovation initiation and implementation to the middle and lower tiers of the company. Second, this arrangement allows for further penetration of entrepreneurial spirits at the front line, which gives energy for more sustainable change in the long-term.

There are a few ways one might encourage and sustain the gathering of ideas for an innovation portfolio. One might be careful to make sure ideation is multi-sourced – from internal and external partners. (The earlier this process starts, the better, to ensure that partners can start thinking about execution as ideation begins.) Internal partners could be cultivated through, for example, an online system for the input of ideas and concepts. This online system could communicate ideas that apply across the organization while also unearthing valuable ideas that sometimes have trouble emerging from an originating group.

To ensure that employees actually participate wholeheartedly in these kinds of ideation projects, management has to make sure that employees trust that these efforts are sincere and not just charades to make management look like it’s interested in employee input. To build this trust, companies need to create a transparent and credible review process that makes ideators feel that their suggestions are being taken seriously. This means that their ideas are reviewed critically and evaluations are adequately explained and eventually delivered in a timely fashion. The end result of this process should be that some of these grassroots ideas are actually taken up in some form by management or entrepreneurial units.

What Should an Innovation Portfolio Look Like?

While every company has organizational and cultural peculiarities that may shape their innovation pipelines in unique ways, there are some general approaches that can be applicable for most companies.

• A good innovation portfolio looks like a “drug pipeline.” After qualifying each idea as worthy of some company resources, each idea can advance, start, or stop when appropriate. (These decisions are usually determined by feasibility, market demand and alignment with a company’s strategic vision.)
• This portfolio is very fluid in nature and should not be too rigid in the early stages of ideation. At the same time, innovation initiatives and activities should all have clearly defined stages with a strong endpoint to measure success before advancing to the next stage.
• As in a pharmaceutical pipeline, the goal in cultivating the innovation portfolio is overall success for the company, not the individual success of any particular project. One way to cultivate this cooperative ethos is to have employees working on more than one major innovation project at any given time. If they are focused on just one project, they may hide flaws or shortcomings they may discover in that project because they could risk losing their jobs.

Innovation Portfolio as a generic pipeline process. Created by Alice Chung, Senior Manager at Genentech Business Operation.

The Serious Fun of Maintaining an Innovation Portfolio

Coaches of high-performing sports teams understand that winning consistently requires that the athletes feel motivated not by pressure but by the love of the game. To win a championship requires effort, of course, that might be measured in many ways – a number of miles run during a soccer game or rebounds gathered on a basketball court. But the effort truly pays off when a well-practiced team is able to execute on-the-fly with open minds and optimistic spirits.

Likewise, for companies seeking to win through maintaining an innovation portfolio, executives need to teach the rules of the game and the details of execution while allowing their employees freedom to express their individual talents in their own ways. This translates into complementary responsibilities for management and employees in maintaining an innovation portfolio. On one hand, management must ensure that the innovation portfolio align with strategic goals without being too stringent, which could discourage creativity. On the other hand, employees should feel free to think “out of the box,” but should know that their efforts are only worthwhile if they eventually help to grow the company in some way. Both management and employees may find the greatest freedom can be actualized within some defined set of rules so that individual teams working within an innovation portfolio find that their work meshes strategically and does not end up working at cross-purposes.

While the content of this edition of The Innovator newsletter focuses on important general principles that help to keep an innovation portfolio robust, the next edition will focus a little more on the practical considerations in executing on any particular innovation. While we have extolled the virtues of gathering ideas from internal and external sources, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: How do you involve all units within your organization and partners & networks to assist with driving innovation from idea to market? We’ll find out next month!

We’d like to thank Alice Chung and Alessandro Rimassa for their contributions to this edition of The Innovator.

_________________________________________________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Mark Rennella. Senior Editor at IXL Center

Dr. Hitendra Patel. Managing Director of IXL Center

5 Jul 2018 Julija Kaminskaite

, The Innovator Series innovation, Innovation FAQ, innovator, investment, leadership, strategy

How Do You Get Senior Leadership to Support and Commit to Innovation?

Volume II, Issue 1 July 5, 2018

How Do You Get Senior Leadership to Support and Commit to Innovation?

Before you can get leadership to commit to innovation, it has to be clear to them that it’s worth the effort, worth the investment, worth the time – and promises more for the corporation than business-as-usual. It also has to made clear that innovation is a means to an end – business growth – and not an end in itself. Once leadership understands the reasons why the company should pursue innovation, they also have to be assured that “how” innovation is conducted will be feasible and efficient.

A. Getting Initial Support for Innovation

Why Standing Still Is not an Option

If they don’t know it yet, your company’s leadership needs to understand that change is happening and can’t be held back. And they might also need to know that the pace of change is only increasing. Even if their company has weathered a recent storm that required some major changes, that’s only the first set of changes of many more to come. One sure result of ignoring change is the “growth gap” – the distance between the ROI investors expect and what your company can deliver. In other words, you need to demonstrate to senior leadership that the state of the business will be worse off without innovation (or a particular innovation effort) and that maintaining the present course without innovation will be much less profitable.

These are the “fear factors” that may motivate leadership to take notice of the need to innovate. But there are also the “eX factors,” the motivating influence of the emotion of excitement – the excitement of discovery, or success, or of working in a dynamic team, or of going farther than had been imagined before. This can happen if you cultivate an innovation mindset rather than seeing innovation just as a stopgap used in difficult times. Innovation should be seen as one of the most powerful engines of growth the company has ever known. While it is true that in recent years investing in innovation costs more than ever, what businesses can receive from innovation is still much more valuable.

Many of the most compelling reasons for committing to innovation have been described in Ron Jonash’s book The Innovation Premium. Companies that practice innovation well produce a virtuous cycle of success: better business concepts, brands (internal and external), bigger growth, which bring higher valuation / stock process. All of these premiums attract better employees and more motivated stakeholders that in turn produce… better business concepts. If you do innovation right, your company can turn into a kind of perpetual motion machine of creativity and productivity.

Embracing innovation means turning some of our accounting habits upside-down from the way companies have measured efficiency in the past. Innovation, and its parent R&D, have been seen more like a cost than an investment. Show leadership that this calculation has to be flipped: maintaining the same course for too long is now the cost that will drag down revenues and profits in the long run while the ability to change through innovation is the principal company asset of the future.

How to Be Specific about Innovation

While innovation is exciting, your pitch to leadership needs to include realistic approaches to innovation practices that demonstrate that business innovation is not just “brainstorming”; it also includes a heavy dose of discipline, ensuring that openness to change and creativity will result in capturing value. This part of your pitch will also be important in helping leadership to make good choices about setting up the systems and processes that will maximize the chances that innovation will lead to profit.

One of the most important steps in this journey of innovation is to define innovation clearly. We believe that our definition, “creating and capturing new value in new ways,” is the most useful because of the emphasis on capturing value – which creates “growth,” the ultimate goal of most business activity. Whatever your definition, agreeing on some definition within your company and among your partners is crucial in starting the process of using the same terms and approaches to innovation so that consistent coordination is possible.

Here are two common innovation “traps” to avoid when describing innovation:

Calling all improvements “innovations.” Innovation is not about incremental improvements of existing processes, partnerships, or business concepts. If innovation encompasses any and all sorts of improvement, then it loses its importance and potential because it becomes confused with too many other business activities.

Overselling innovation. While innovations can sometimes lead to huge success (like Uber’s business model), they result more often in more modest successes. That’s ok, so long as the value you’re deriving from an innovation far exceeds the investment you put in. So while innovation always carries the promise of huge success, it’s not wise to make leadership expect that innovations are always “blockbusters” or “disruptive.” Keep expectations realistic … while you’re shooting for the stars.

B. Getting Commitment for Innovation over the Long Haul

Convincing the board and senior executives to listen to some compelling reasons for the long-term potential of innovation is a first important step, but it has to be followed by realism and specificity. You need to start off by visualizing the innovation as much as you can: what it looks like and how it’s created. Bring as much good data as you can gather, or at least informed estimates of the impact of the innovation on costs and the bottom line. Add qualitative gains that will be attained, too, including new lessons to be learned and new options for the future. Also try to describe how this innovation work or project would affect the responsibilities and activities of senior leadership. This kind of granular information will help leaders in your company to start visualizing how your innovation ideas might actually be feasible and to avoid seeing them as more wishful thinking.

Then, show the value that can be captured with the innovation, which will be described in a commercialization plan with detailed descriptions of its implementation. On the other side of this coin of what might be gained, you may get more attention from senior leadership by describing the market situation if a competitor pursued the same idea. Not only potential monetary gains could be lost, but the company brand could be a little less lustrous in the shadow of a competitor who could (and probably would eventually) exploit that innovation in the marketplace.

At the same time you’re using these specific measures of innovation activity, make sure resources designated for business innovation aren’t simultaneously being spent on activities that some employees call “innovative,” but don’t have a clear business value. One instance could be a project in IT that is called an “innovative solution,” but which amounts to tinkering in the company systems in ways that don’t bring an obvious benefit to the company. This brings down the reputation of real innovation work.

Because the uncertain work of innovation often takes time, effort and some patience, you need to find ways to keep people enthusiastic along the way:

Showcase small wins you’re making during a bigger innovation project. For instance, if you’re employing a new analytics program to innovate in customer service, share some of your experiences with that program that can be applied to other parts of the business.

Turn failure into success. If what you’ve learned from an unsuccessful experiment can be turned into valuable lessons for the rest of your company, “celebrate” that failure and teach others what you’ve learned. Accepting the failure of some cost-effective experiments should be normal in an innovation-oriented organization that uses experimentation to probe yet-to-be-proven business concepts.

Another way to persuade senior leadership to commit to innovation is to get them directly involved in the work of innovation. One example is to suggest ways they collaborate with other senior executives on major projects. If, for instance, your company is part of a larger economic ecosystem (as ecosystems become more dominant in the world economy), develop a group of innovators drawn from senior leadership from several companies in that ecosystem. The potential for exciting ideas to be generated from that group could fuel innovation efforts for years to come and lock in leadership into an innovation mindset.

C. Looking Ahead – Confronting Uncertainty by Developing Multiple Options

Innovation is exciting but “in flux” – and you can’t have excitement without some uncertainty. We can approach innovation very systematically and measure it in sophisticated ways, but it may take us to places we haven’t expected and make us all confront problems that challenge our skills. Innovation efforts may even require leaders occasionally to take a leap (an informed leap) of faith. Another way to accept the uncertainty involved in innovation is to understand that a lack of innovation activity will certainly lead the business to failure.

Innovation also takes us sometimes to uncomfortable places, for instance, where we “celebrate” failure. But if you look closely at a disciplined approach to innovation, it’s really celebrating reliable information on internal processes and market realities. Innovation is the canary in the coal mine, exploring possibilities in the churning marketplace and reporting back in time for companies to advance confidently on a certain path, or to retreat and recalibrate. What better tool could management use to help them navigate the inevitable changes and challenges their company will meet in the marketplace?

Another response to a marketplace in flux is to have multiple options planned for the future. This promises both more robust returns on innovation effort in the future while also avoiding the danger of hinging all of one’s hopes on a single big idea. A big idea may have big possibilities, but just one idea on its own does not have the energy or scope to carry a big business or corporation years into the future. That’s one reason why developing an innovation portfolio is so important – which is the topic of our next newsletter.

Special thanks to Alice Chung, Alessandro Rimassa and Bob Schultz for their thoughtful contributions to this edition of The Innovator.

___________________________________________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Mark Rennella. Senior Editor at IXL Center

Dr. Hitendra Patel. Managing Director of IXL Center