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Expanding the central innovation team without increasing bureaucracy

As I advocated in my earlier blogs, I strongly believe in a small central innovation team. This team should support passionate local innovation leaders across the globe and should track exciting innovations. One of the reasons I want to limit the size of the central innovation team is to limit the number of innovation-stifling processes typically created by large teams. However, small can be too small.

I faced a bandwidth challenge when more and more countries (up to 80) created the position of local innovation leader. They created these positions because they saw the results from the early adopting countries (about 30). This was a great signal of the success of stimulating innovation within the corporation of course, but it became impossible for me to provide these new local innovation leaders with enough attention, support and guidance.

The way I tried to address this challenge, while avoiding generating more processes, was to create the role of “Regional Innovation Leader” (Regional IL). There were 5, based on the geographic areas we supported: Large European countries, Other European counties, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Mid East Africa. Each Regional IL was assigned by the Regional President and was mainly selected based on passion for innovation. The Regional IL added the innovation responsibility to his/her current role (e.g. a Commercial role, Business role, IT role).

Critically, we avoided creating an additional layer by positioning the Regional IL as a partner of the global innovation leader (Global IL), not as an additional management layer between the Global IL and the local (country) innovation leaders.

In practice, this meant that each Regional IL played the same role as the Global IL: support the country innovation leaders (in their region of course) and tracking exciting innovations (in their region). We assigned the country innovation leaders amongst the Regional IL and the Global IL. The only “added process” was a monthly call between the Global IL and Regional IL to share innovations and to better help local innovation leaders stimulate innovation in their country.

Over time, it became clear that there were several additional benefits of this approach:

• The Regional ILs created increased access to the Regional Presidents, generating additional sponsorship and focus on innovations that supported specific regional business challenges.
• The Regional ILs increased engagement with other regional functions, like business, IT, HR, Legal, thus expanding networks and creating new innovation champions.
• Innovation stimulating initiatives that were created by one Regional IL were adopted by other Regional ILs, like Open Innovation Challenges and engaging with key universities.
• We organized twice per year an Innovation Week with all RILs, each time in a different region. The objective was to connect with and learn from innovative companies in that region, deep dive into regional innovation initiatives, connect with the Regional Leadership and identify common challenges that needed to be addressed jointly.

Although this approach did work, the creation of part-time Regional ILs had it’s challenges. There were different expectations and levels of engagement in different regions, turnover of Regional ILs (mainly linked to their non-innovation roles) and conflicts with their non-innovation priorities.

My conclusion: as the workload of successful Regional ILs grows, it might be worth to assign full time, dedicated Regional ILs.

As Stephen Jay Gould said:

“Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.”

So, as Innovation Leader, I fully engaged with the Regional ILs, gradually transferring more responsibilities to them, as they became more experienced. I also made sure to continue to stay engaged with selected country innovation leaders that were “in the field”, to understand their evolving needs for support. And I started considering to transition the role of Regional IL into a dedicated, full time one.

More reading: How big are innovation teams at the largest companies?

More blogs? Click here: Wim Vandenhouweele

Please share your thoughts, experiences below!