Inspiring and Connecting Innovation Leaders How do good innovations across the corporation look like? Any bright ideas on how I can best stimulate innovation in my country? These are questions I often got from colleague corporate Innovation Leaders across the globe, because these business Innovation Leaders were responsible for stimulating innovation as well as for identifying/supporting innovators in their geography. Their questions generated the idea to create a monthly webcast, inspired by the “TED talks” concept. We kicked off these Innovation webcasts with a few guiding principles: Objective: to inspire and to network (not to generate in depth discussions: those could be done as follow up between interested listeners and…
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Watch the horizon
Degrees of innovation Innovations can be categorized in many ways. One of the most familiar frameworks is the “3 Horizons” from McKinsey. Horizon 1 innovations are about the “now”: existing business models and core capabilities Horizon 2 innovations extend the core capabilities or reach new customers or markets Horizon 3 innovations typically have a longer term view: create new capabilities to build on (or defend against) disruptive opportunities Corporations likely focus on all 3 in a balanced way. In Merck (MSD outside the US/Canada), different teams, sometimes referred to as “innovation engines”, addressed each of these Horizons for commercial innovations. Note: this is separate from the R&D organization’s inventions: innovative medicines and…
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Never done before
Is Innovation a synonym for Marketing? Is Innovation just a different label for Marketing? Another trend in Marketing? Marketing tactics have always aimed at solving business and customer problems, at creating value and at differentiating brands from competition. Just like Innovations. The above goals are indeed common between Marketing and Innovation, especially for those of us who focus on Horizon 2 level innovation. Having worked in marketing for 30 years and in innovation for 5 years, I believe the key characteristic for innovative solutions is simply “New“. So I agree with Webster’s definition of innovation: “the introduction of something new”. Traditional marketing typically uses best practices, trying to improve those…
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Top down
Securing leadership sponsorship When a leadership team decides that their employees should innovate (more), an Innovation Leader is assigned. Then what? As Innovation Leaders we are thus made responsible to stimulate innovation in a corporation. This is mostly a bottom up exercise, reinforced with a regular top down nudge. Consequently, we must not only engage potential innovators, collaborators and catalysts, but also secure continued strong sponsorship, engagement and support from the leadership. There are several ways to help our leadership in this nudging: Focus. Leadership is about setting direction and making choices. As Innovation Leaders, we should make sure leadership choses a few key business issues innovations should be generated…
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Best of the Best
Innovation Leader characteristics Every Innovation Leader has unique skills, capabilities, experiences, mindset, personality, etc. I’m referring here to those Innovation Leaders who are responsible 1. to stimulate innovation in their country or region 2. to support local innovators through their innovation journey. These Innovation Leaders have (mainly Horizon 2) innovation as an additional responsibility to their regular job. There are desired traits that make an Innovation Leader especially effective. Following are some of my observations and examples from a few selected geographies. Passion and Positiveness. Innovation Leaders in Mexico, Australia Spain, Italy, Canada and Turkey, all busy marketers, developed a full blown “innovation marketing campaign” to create awareness in their…
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Constraints
Innovation driven by limitation More money = more innovation? Wrong! Based on my experience, I believe it’s often just the other way around. Large corporations typically have many resources to drive business objectives. In many cases, business goals are met by doing more (or more efficient) of what worked in the past. Why take a risk with something new, uncertain, especially when senior leaders have limited expertise with it and you may be blamed for a potential failure? I recall the launch of a new, very good medicine where the marketing team benchmarked the best launches of recent brands. Then they increased each of the activities those brands used with…
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Mindset
Measuring it… How innovative are we? Where are we on the innovation continuum? How is the pace of our progress? What are the gaps? A key role of an Innovation Leader is to stimulate innovation, including creating an innovation mindset. This can range from encouraging employees to experiment with innovative ideas to ensuring corporate leaders publicly celebrate innovations and recognize innovators. Measuring all of this can be daunting. The easiest part is likely assessing corporate leadership behavior. It’s per definition qualitative: Innovation Leaders can directly observe how often corporate leaders mention “Innovation” in their speeches, support innovations, allocate resources, etc. It’s more of a challenge to measure the mindset of…
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Innovation Leader summits
What’s on the agenda? I mentioned in an earlier blog that we established local Innovation Leaders in about 50 key countries. Each of these Innovation Leaders were responsible to: stimulate an innovation mindset in their country identify innovations and support the innovators. At least once a year, we invited the local Innovation Leaders for 2-3 day summits to jointly take innovation to the next level. This occurred in groups of about 10 Innovation Leaders per region: Latin America, EU, Asia Pacific, Mid East Africa. We covered both innovation responsibilities. Some topics of discussion: … on stimulating an innovation mindset: Information. What is new from a global (HQ) perspective? Examples: the…
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Storytelling
Or “the one-pager” Innovators often have difficulty to convince business teams/leaders of the potential value of their innovative idea, because they “don’t speak the right language”. This is especially an issue if the innovator is in a non-commercial role like IT, finance or manufacturing, as these colleagues may not be familiar with the priority business challenges and strategies. Sometimes innovators create a long story with lack of focus and lose the interest of the busy marketing sponsor. Excellent solutions can be unnecessarily missed this way. Many vendors have developed programs and tools to help innovators with telling a convincing story. Training all employees in these techniques is a challenge and…
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Skills
Does everyone need innovation training? Yes, because innovation is different than business as usual. Ideally all of us, the thousands of employees with the corporation, should be trained on the key innovation concepts and skills, so we can be at our best to successfully innovate. This includes understanding the innovation framework (ideation, experimentation, pilot), how to learn fast (fail fast, iterate), how and when to engage which stakeholders (customers, compliance, legal, finance, management), learning to use support tools (reverse income statement), etc. That would indeed be ideal, but can be expensive in time and cost. It may also be wasteful, as not all employees will want to innovate and use…