When to engage collaborators When should innovators engage with internal collaborators? Too early and the collaborators may hold the innovators back. The collaborators may also waste their time as many early stage innovations fail. Too late and the innovators may have wasted their own time because an expert could have provided critical insights, e.g. in a highly regulated industry, like healthcare, one must engage some functions timely, like Compliance. How can Innovation Leaders facilitate this collaboration and provide guidance to innovators and collaborators at the same time? The way I addressed the question of ideal timing for internal collaboration was twofold: define who may need to be involved in a…
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Innovation on demand
For me, now! There are specific vaccines available for distinct groups of people. How to innovatively and effectively reach, inform and activate these people? Case 1: cervical cancer in young women (18-26 years) can be prevented by vaccination. Case2: pneumonia in elderly people (65+) can be prevented by vaccination. Interestingly, about the same time, a team in Switzerland and a team in Brazil came up with innovative solutions, both inspired by related technologies. The Swiss team learned that most young women frequented local cafes to have a relaxing chat with their friends. And that they all had their smartphones with them. In a quick experiment, the innovator put up a…
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Specificity
Why to define the innovation target well. Horizon 1 & 2 innovations build on the core business. Therefore, obviously, the problems that innovations aim to solve should be related to the core business. If the problem statement is too vague or too broad, innovative ideas to address these problems may not be targeted enough either. How can aspiring innovators across the corporation know the core business problems well enough to come up with a relevant innovative idea? And how can Innovation Leaders play an important role in this? Let’s take a few examples, for different brands. A diabetes brand. The business objective was to increase market share. However, that’s too…
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Innovation in context
Fitting within existing corporate frameworks Established corporations often follow trends: Six Sigma, Culture Changes, Digital Transformations, Diversity, Social Media, … These trends may come and go, usually when the corporate champion comes and goes. Corporate antibodies are very effective in rejecting something new. “Innovation” risks to be included in this list. Innovation Leaders should be mindful to avoid this. One approach is to totally and irreversibly disrupt the whole corporation. Another is to integrate innovation in the existing corporate culture and processes and “conquer from within”. A few examples on how the latter can be applied (certainly for Horizon 1 and 2 level innovations): Focus. This one is easy. For…