Musing about who innovates… I often read articles that imply that the Innovation Leaders are also the Innovators. In my opinion, there is a simple definition and a simple difference between the two. Innovation Leaders, as I discussed/defined in another blog, focus on stimulating an innovation mindset in the corporation and on managing a portfolio of innovation experiments (i.e. guiding Innovators). Sometimes they are also responsible to scale successful innovations across their corporation. Innovators are the ones that create innovations: they come up with an Idea, they Experiment, they do a Pilot. If their innovation is successful, they may also lead its scaling across the corporation. There can be some…
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Going viral
Time for innovation One pandemic, the Plague of Justinian, helped to bring down an empire (the Byzantine), because of inappropriate responses. Another pandemic, the Black Death, created a society (Europe) that dominated the world for hundreds of years by triggering innovation, pulling millions of people out of poverty and boosting literacy. The current COVID-19 pandemic poses a critical challenge for many corporations. Innovation Leaders in those corporations have the capabilities and mindset to make a difference: they are experts in addressing the most pressing issues their corporation faces. As always, it’s important for Innovation Leaders to align with their Leadership what specific issues should be focused on. This will also…
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Speed
Preventing forever experiments All of us Innovation Leaders know examples of experiments that keep going on and on. Sometimes for years. Passionate innovators in our corporation might have a great idea and the best of intentions, but occasionally they just do not come to a conclusion. There are many reasons for those delays: no time due to other priorities set by their management, the replacement of a critical collaborator, etc. As Innovation Leaders, we then help innovators to overcome those barriers, by talking to their management, by connecting them with experts, etc. There is an approach that helps to anticipate delays. It is based on securing management sponsorship and on…
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It’s so easy
Just provide focus “As of today, everybody in the company must be innovative!” After an order like this from a CEO, a lot of things can happen. Someone may indeed come up with an amazing innovation which will create value for the corporation. However, most employees will have no idea what that CEO means with “innovation” and they might come up with ideas that are all over the place or they become frustrated. In order to avoid this, it is critical for a CEO to explain what innovation means to him/her. The guidance certainly needs to indicate that it is about creating “something new”. Then, most importantly, the CEO should…
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Crowdsourcing
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…