No! For Horizon 3 innovations, innovations far from the core business, I believe that a separate, dedicated innovation team is the most appropriate construction. “Separate” meaning operating independently from the current business teams. This team can be compiled with inside and/or outside employees to focus on disruptive innovations, without being distracted and held back by the short term priorities of typical business teams. I described an example of this in an earlier blog. For Horizon 1 and 2 innovations, it’s a bit of a different story: innovators should be as closely linked to the core business teams as possible. Here, I believe that every employee should be invited to come…

Attack on multiple fronts  As discussed in my earlier blog, strong silos don’t have to inhibit internal innovation. Innovation can be facilitated across them. Sometimes, a silo can play the role of a vendor (for free).  How can Innovation Leaders help innovators break through silos? How can they help innovators find collaborators in another silo? How can they help overcome barriers to collaboration across silos? Following are a few of my experiences in stimulating collaboration between the commercial and the manufacturing silos. I’m selecting manufacturing as many innovators in the “commercial silo” wanted to experiment with innovations that included packaging and supply chain elements. Networking. Asking several manufacturing colleagues if…

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…

Fitting within existing corporate frameworks Established corporations often follow trends: Six Sigma, Culture Changes, Digital Transformations, Diversity, Social Media, … These trends may come and go, usually when the corporate champion comes and goes. Corporate antibodies are very effective in rejecting something new. “Innovation” risks to be included in this list.  Innovation Leaders should be mindful to avoid this. One approach is to totally and irreversibly disrupt the whole corporation. Another is to integrate innovation in the existing corporate culture and processes and “conquer from within”. A few examples on how the latter can be applied (certainly for Horizon 1 and 2 level innovations):  Focus. This one is easy. For…

Turning a challenge into an opportunity  It is critical to share learnings between Innovation Leaders in different parts of the corporation: how do others stimulate innovation and support innovators in their area? In the commercial part of the organization, we typically organized Innovation Summits in each geographic region, which included about 10-12 countries. The Regional Innovation Leader organized once a year a 2-3 day meeting for the 10-12 Country Innovation Leaders. As in all corporations, now and then budget constraints didn’t allow for travel. Skipping these meetings risked creating a message that innovation is not important. One region (Latin America) faced that situation and came up with an innovative solution.…