Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators This is the fourth blog in my series about how an Innovation Leader can help Innovators struggling with specific needs during their innovation journey. Below, I’ll describe the need to innovate “within compliance” in a heavy regulated industry like healthcare. Let me share one example and the steps the innovators and I took. 1. The problem. The innovator first identified a priority business issue. The case: a marketer in Africa needed a solution for young women who often forgot to take their daily contraceptive pill and thus became pregnant. She wanted the solution to be low cost and discreet (as most young women didn’t want others…
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The case for Learning
Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators In my series about how an Innovation Leader can help Innovators proceed through their innovation journey, I’ll discuss below how to help innovators learn from each other. Let me share one example and the steps the innovators and I took. The problem The case: an innovator in South Africa in our company told me that she wanted to evaluate the use of drones to increase the value of her offer to the government vaccine tender. She was currently losing this tender to a competitor based on price (this competitor could offer a lower price because their inferior product had a very low cost structure). She knew…
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The case of Resources
Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators One of my roles as Innovation Leader, was to identify promising innovations across the corporation. Part of this role was helping innovators as they went through their innovation journey. As Innovators had very different needs, I’ll discuss one “need” at a time in several of my upcoming blogs. Below, I’ll analyse the innovator’s need to find resources for a Pilot. Let me share one example and the steps the innovator and I took. 1. The problem. The innovator first identified a priority business issue. The case: in many developing countries, vaccines were not (easily) available when doctors recommended them to their patients: after a prescription, the…
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The case of Expertise
Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators One of my roles as Innovation Leader, was to identify promising innovations across the corporation. Part of this role was helping innovators as they went through their innovation journey. As Innovators had very different needs, I’ll discuss one “need” in several of my upcoming blogs. Below, I’ll describe the innovator’s need to find experts to collaborate on an experiment. Let me share one example and let’s follow the steps that innovator and I took. 1. The problem. The innovator first identified a priority business issue. The case: specific patients in Brazil needed vaccines for the prevention of pneumonia. These vaccines were available for free in dedicated…
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Innovators or Innovation Leaders?
Musing about who innovates… I often read articles that imply that the Innovation Leaders are also the Innovators. In my opinion, there is a simple definition and a simple difference between the two. Innovation Leaders, as I discussed/defined in another blog, focus on stimulating an innovation mindset in the corporation and on managing a portfolio of innovation experiments (i.e. guiding Innovators). Sometimes they are also responsible to scale successful innovations across their corporation. Innovators are the ones that create innovations: they come up with an Idea, they Experiment, they do a Pilot. If their innovation is successful, they may also lead its scaling across the corporation. There can be some…