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…

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…

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…

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…

Signaling the importance of innovation What is an Innovation Room? I’m referring to those dedicated spaces in corporate office buildings, typically the size of a mid to large size conference room. They look different than the other offices: often colorful, little or modular furniture, relaxing seats, loaded with innovation-stimulating technologies (3D printers, Amazon Echo’s, VR/AR tools, interactive screens, etc.). The purpose of these Innovation Rooms is to provide a dedicated, innovation inspiring location, where groups can gather to work on innovative solutions. In our company Innovation Rooms have been established in many countries. Those areas are specifically created to allow employees and customers to brainstorm, ideate and experiment with business…