Power from the people Innovative ideas that address a specific business/customer problem and are innovative (not tried before) and that are pursued by a passionate innovator, have the highest likelihood to be successful and to create value. Those ideas can come from anywhere within the corporation and from outside. Crowdsourcing is “the practice of obtaining information or input into a task or project by enlisting the services of a large number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet.” Because I strongly believe in the power of the crowd, I organized at least annually a Innovation Award competition for employees from across the corporation. They were invited to…
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Inspiration
How to find it outside In a company with over 60,000 employees, there is for sure an abundance of innovative solutions for clearly defined business/customer problems. In some cases, innovation sessions can help to generate new ideas by tapping into the collective capacity for innovation. Still, it may not be smart to limit the generation of innovative ideas to our own employees only. After all, many of the smart people in the world do not work for one specific company. It is also important to be open to learn from other companies. A few examples of how we got inspiration from outside the company: Lectures. We invited or visited experts…
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Engage
Championing innovation Innovation in a corporation needs to be driven by strong senior leaders – top down. Innovations are developed by all employees across the organization – bottom up. And then there is this critical group in the middle: managers, directors, VPs, … They have typically been successful within the traditional organization: executing flawlessly, driving efficiencies, managing within the corporate culture. They may be hesitant to stimulate an innovation mindset in their part of the corporation as they may not be familiar and comfortable with innovation. They might ask themselves questions like: “What is it?”, “How does it work?”, “What is my role?”,… Innovation Leaders should play a major role…
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Stealth Innovation
Innovating under the radar One of the most intriguing articles I read when I started in my Innovation Leader role was about Stealth Innovation. The authors describe why and how innovators in large organizations can successfully innovate under the radar. Stealth innovation avoids that new ideas are too quickly reviewed and thus get a “no” by a busy CEO/Leadership. Even if an idea is approved, it may get too much visibility too soon and might get torpedoed by the “corporate antibodies”: it’s easy to find reasons why something new will not work. Stealth innovation works by getting support from a lower level manager: there are more of them and they…
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HOW can it work
Three keys to successful innovation Innovative corporations encourage employees to experiment, especially those employees who have a valuable, innovative solution for a key business/customer problem. How do new-to-innovation corporations get their people to come up with the right ideas and to experiment? Traditional approaches to change management usually mean major organizational efforts: all employees are retrained and “reset”. Innovation is different. Not everyone in a corporation must innovate. But everyone with the right idea should have the opportunity to innovate. And everyone must be open and supportive for innovators. Innovation is stimulated by creating a different mindset in the corporation. It’s important to keep the way innovation is managed as…
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Selecting innovative ideas
Out of hundreds…. Innovative ideas emerge in a corporation in many ways. They can be identified through Innovation Challenges. Sometimes they are generated during innovation workshops. And sometimes they just appear ad hoc. Many of those ideas look exciting. But as Innovation Leader, you do have limited time and resources, so you must make choices. How to choose the ones you should focus on? This is how I selected innovations I wanted to support: evaluating each idea on 3 criteria: Problem focused. Does the innovation address the priority problems the corporation had identified? Innovativeness . Is the idea really innovative, i.e. has it never been done before? Value generation. Does…
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A Simple Framework
Managing a portfolio of innovations Innovation Leaders have to manage multiple innovative initiatives across the corporation. How can a framework be put in place without overcomplicating the process? A case study: I decided to keep this framework as simple as possible and to organize innovations in 3 groups (and one additional group for those successful innovations that were being scaled to multiple countries or brands). The 3 groups were: Focused Ideation Criteria: an new idea that provided a potential solution for a priority business/customer problem End result: a “one-pager“, a short overview of the problem to be solved, the innovative solution and the potential value that would be created Example: the addition of a…
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Breaking barriers
One by one There are many reasons why employees in large corporations do not innovate. One of the tasks of an Innovation Leader is to identify those barriers and come up with ways to break them down. Following are three groups of barriers I often encountered. “I have no time/money to innovate” Having no time was usually an excuse, not a barrier: people who were passionate about their innovation did find the time. Regarding “no money”: in my 5 years as Innovation Leader, I have never seen a promising innovation, i.e. one that addresses an important business challenge, that failed because of lack of budget. On the contrary: I have…
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Right time, right place, right person
How to be successful as innovation leader When my company decided to create the position of Innovation Leader, what profile did they look for? Broad experience in healthcare to deeply understand the key issues. At that time, I had 30 years of experience with this Pharma company in sales, marketing, operations and strategy at country, regional and global level. Networks in the corporation to facilitate collaboration. In my previous jobs, I worked closely with other divisions, like manufacturing (e.g. to plan new product launches and to manage vaccine supply) and IT (e.g. to create a global, automated tender management system). Multicultural experience as the job covered most global geographies. I…
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JD
Once upon a job description There are as many job descriptions for Innovation Leaders as there are Innovation Leaders. How to create one? It doesn’t have to be complicated. Let me share my story. When “my” leadership team decided to create the role I would take on, they had a very clear rationale. When they visited countries around the globe to review local business plans, they noticed that in many countries local employees came up with innovative solutions for important business/customer problems. Although this was encouraging news, the leadership team was concerned, because they were not aware of all the innovations that went on in their organization; they realized that…