Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators This is the next topic in my series on how Innovation Leader can help Innovators who have specific challenges. Below, I’m addressing how to help potential Innovators who may think innovations have to be disruptive, radical or breakthrough in nature. “Innovation” often brings to mind images of breakthrough products like the iPhone and disruptive business models like Uber. Employees may feel overwhelmed when they hear the CEO or their leadership state that “we need every employee to innovate”. This is when Innovation Leaders need to act. There are several ways an Innovation Leader in a corporation can guide employees on how drastically to innovate: Organization. Innovation…
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The case for Focus
Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators The next topic in my series “How Innovation Leaders can help Innovators” is about how to focus their innovative energy to impact the corporation. We all know passionate Innovators in our corporations. They come up with innovative ideas and often spend a lot of time trying to convince others in the organization to support them. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they get discouraged and give up. Giving up typically happens if the company has no clear innovation strategy. An innovation strategy starts with a clear definition of what innovation means for the corporation. If this is not done, there are no transparant ways to…
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The case for Time
Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators This is the next topic in my series of how Innovation Leaders can help Innovators who have specific needs. Below are a few ways on how to help Innovators that need time to do their experiment. If one Googles “time to innovate”, most articles that come up discuss the creative (ideation) stage of innovation. In my experience, that is the stage that usually takes the least amount of time. It’s the next stages that are more problematic. I’ll discuss below the 3 stages of innovation (Ideation, Experimentation, Pilot) and how Innovation Leaders can help address Innovators’ time constraints in each stage. Ideation. Coming up with an…
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Is Innovation a science?
Absolutely! Some innovations happened by accident – think penicillin or Post-it Notes. However, those accidents are exceptions: most innovations happen through the scientific method. Why? Look how innovations in corporations typically happen. Someone defines a problem. An innovator comes up with an idea to solve this problem. The innovator has a hypothesis: reasons why that idea might work. The innovator experiments (e.g. with a prototype) to validate the hypothesis. If the experiment fails, the original idea is discarded or adapted. If the experiment succeeds, a larger test (a Pilot) is set up to evaluate the full implementation and value. If the Pilot is considered successful, it is broadly commercialized. This…