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 typical innovation
- define when each collaborator (function) needs to be involved
I aligned the approach with our Innovation Framework stages:
- Ideation
- Experiment
- Pilot
- Scaling, but as Scaling was so close to “business as usual” and as a specific Center of Excellence was created for innovations in this stage, no direction was needed for this stage
A few examples of guidance:
- IT. Engage IT colleagues in the Ideation stage, when the innovation is based on a new technology. Involve the technology-experimentation IT team as early as possible, if not in the Ideation, then at the latest in the Experiment stage. This ensures specific expertise, avoids using external vendors (expensive) and secures early thinking about possible Scaling needs.
- Manufacturing. Engage manufacturing collaborators also in the Ideation stage, when the innovation includes packaging or supply chain elements. Same rationale as for IT above.
- Medical/Regulatory Affairs: Engage these colleagues best in the Ideation stage if the innovation includes new “medical devices” (e.g. apps). This will help the Medical team to have an early and deep understanding of the problem innovators want to address. The Medical/Regulatory team is typically responsible to secure regulatory approval for new medical devices.
- Compliance: Engage them at the latest in the Experiment stage. This facilitates buy-in from Compliance by having a deeper understanding of the problem to be addressed. It is not critical to have Compliance involved in all Ideation activities to avoid wasting their time because of the high early failure rate. It is valuable to get Compliance input before starting the Experiment stage, so potential compliance issues can be raised and addressed. Waiting to engage Compliance until the Pilot stage, when Compliance approval is typically required, can increase approval risk/time and generate unnecessary resource waste in case approval is not possible.
- Finance: Engage ideally in the Experiment stage. Earlier input is nice, but not critical. In the Feasibility stage, Finance can help identify key assumptions that drive the Reverse Income Statement and can assist with budgets to support a potential Pilot.
- Brand team: at the latest before the Pilot stage. The brand teams typically provide the problem statement for which innovative solutions are needed. Therefore, brand teams will often take part in the Ideation and Feasibility stages. However, Ideation and Feasibility can be done to test key assumptions before engaging the brand teams. But doing a Pilot without brand team engagement risks to reduce their buy-in and thus make scaling of a successful Pilot more challenging.
The above guidance is per definition just directional, not a rule that is applicable in all situations. This guidance also evolves, as we learn from new innovation experiments. While the guidance was being developed, it was of course important to get leadership buy-in from the respective collaboration functional areas and departments. After the guidance is established, communication into the broad organization is important, both top down (via the leadership teams) and bottom up (e.g. via the local Innovation Leaders). And finally, we recognize and celebrate collaboration.
As Phil Jackson said:
“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.”
More about this topic: Collaboration, by Virgin
So, as Innovation Leader, I made sure to identify the specific needs for guidance, to create the guidance on when to get collaborators on board and to broadly communicate the guidance.
What do you think? Please share below!
More of my blogs on innovation: Wim Vandenhouweele