Align

Focus innovation on business priorities

Innovation is not an objective. It’s a way to reach an objective. This objective can vary from specific, short term business and customer needs to broad, visionary strategic goals.

Within large corporations, it is relatively easy to define the short term, tactical challenges. The operational business teams and leaders surely have a list ready. This is where innovation leaders can generate quick results by simply issuing innovation challenges. Throughout the organization or even externally, individuals or small teams can come up with innovative ideas. Selected ideas are then quickly tested. Note: it’s critical that the business team provides a very specific problem statement or a lot of time will be spend on sifting through a wide range of proposals. 

• Example: how can a sales representative spend more time with customers (ideas can include webcasts)
• Example: how to ensure more customers can afford our products (ideas can include micro-finance)

At the other end of the spectrum are the more strategic challenges. These should be provided and sponsored by senior leadership. Innovative solutions will typically require more significant resources and engage diverse teams to collaborate, often involving external partners. They can be more disruptive. 

• Example: how to provide customers with a total disease (or health) solution, from prevention to management, rather than just one piece of managing the disease, like a medicine

Success of innovations is directly related to how well they potentially solve the stated business or customer problem. An innovation can be very exciting and create a lot of value, but if not aligned with the operational or strategic needs of the corporation, the innovator will unlikely receive sustainable resources to experiment. Even if the experiment succeeds, the innovation may not be scaled across the company.

• Example: a technological application addressed a major customer pain point, however, there was no direct impact on the corporate brands. Ultimately, the only value generation came from out licensing the IP.  

As Caterina Fake said:

“So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard”

So, as Innovation Leader, I first ensured there was a very specific and agreed upon problem statement. Then I communicated this clearly and broadly into the organization. Then I ensured innovative solutions were measured against how well they addressed the stated problem. And then I secured resources and recognition for the innovators.  

More reading on this: How to align innovation with your corporate strategy 

What are your thoughts? Please comment below!
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