Why to define the innovation target well. Horizon 1 & 2 innovations build on the core business. Therefore, obviously, the problems that innovations aim to solve should be related to the core business. If the problem statement is too vague or too broad, innovative ideas to address these problems may not be targeted enough either. How can aspiring innovators across the corporation know the core business problems well enough to come up with a relevant innovative idea? And how can Innovation Leaders play an important role in this? Let’s take a few examples, for different brands. A diabetes brand. The business objective was to increase market share. However, that’s too…

Innovation can even happen with limited budgets What are barriers for innovation? Limited budgets is often mentioned. I beg to differ. I believe this argument is often used as an excuse to stick with business as usual. As Innovation Leader, focused on Horizon 2 commercial innovation, I have guided innovators accross the globe for 5 years and have not observed one failure due to the lack of budget. Let’s have a look at each of the 3 innovation stages and how Innovation Leaders can be catalysts. Ideation. In this stage, the Innovation Leader can help the innovators to clearly define what they want to solve (the problem), how they plan…

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…

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…

To maintain innovation momentum When leadership decides to stimulate internal innovations, the typical first step is to assign an Innovation Leader. Then, a lot of activity and excitement follows, ideas are generated and experiments are initiated. Some experiments fail, some need multiple iterations, many take a long time – often years – to demonstrate they work. Sometimes, this chain reaction happens: leadership interest wanes, the employees no longer feel the urgency to innovate and the corporation moves on to “other priorities”. Innovation Leaders manage expectations, communicate continuously, provide status updates while innovations mature. But leadership teams are used to see results – fast. So it helps to generate some quick…

Not all innovations should be technology driven Innovation is often treated as a synonym for technology or even digitalization. Technology certainly can solve business and customer problems in innovative ways. Digital technology can facilitate rapid prototyping, cheap iterating and quick scaling of successful innovations. However, it is unnecessary to limit innovation to technology/digital solutions only. The objective of innovation should be to solve problems and if a digital solution is the best one, go for it. If not, don’t. A few examples of non-digital innovations to address specific problems: Affordability – Problem: some Hepatitis C patients in India do not have the cash flow to immediately pay in full for…

What I found out… Innovation is about solving specific problems, addressing needs for improvement, generate changes for the better by experimenting, learning, adapting. Innovation leadership can sometimes be a little bit like this too. Last year, Scott Kirsner from InnovationLeader interviewed me on the topic “What did you wish you had known before you started as Innovation Leader?”. Although I believe I did most of what’s needed to stimulate innovation in a large organization, there were a few practices I would have doubled down on, knowing now the critical value of: … a specific definition. If innovation is not really well defined, there will be different interpretations, making it very…

Recommended innovation resources I’m often asked which innovation congresses, books, blogs I like. It’s impossible to appropriately cover all kinds of innovation in a few media outlets: open innovation, lean innovation, reverse innovation, disruptive innovation, … And like innovation itself, media change constantly. Following are sources I really valued, based on my role as corporate innovation leader. I selected 2 for each category. I have no financial benefit in any of these. Books The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton Christensen. This is the classic everyone working on innovation must read. Inspirational, clear examples of good companies in different industries that failed when disruptive…

Innovation is not the objective One of the questions we as Innovation Leaders in a large corporation get is “what is Innovation?”. Often, our internal stakeholders assume they need to come up with disruptive, exciting, company-changing initiatives. This can create discouragement and cause innovators to give up trying. My answer is simple: (commercial) innovation is about solving our business and customer challenges in ways never tried before. For example: at a certain time, the global leadership asked me to focus innovation on 3 key business challenges: patients do not adhere to medicines, patients lack access to medicines (availability, affordability) and how we can increase engagement with customers. Once this kind…

Innovating from less to more developed markets In multinational corporations, marketers in emerging markets typically have much more limited resources than their colleagues in the more developed markets. They are forced to solve their challenges more innovatively and experiment with new, unique customer and business solutions. As teams in emerging countries are much smaller than those in large western countries, marketers meet more frequently with other employees and innovators to ideate and to share learnings fast. Small markets also offer an excellent testbed for innovations, as failures have limited impact on the overall organization. There are numerous types of small markets and very diverse combinations of talent. Experimentation is also…