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…

It works! What now? The Back End of Innovation (BEI) is about implementing successful innovations. A unique benefit of large corporations is that innovations that reach success in one part of the organization, e.g. in one country can be copied, adapted and executed across the rest of the organization. There are many barriers to overcome of course, especially the “not invented here” syndrome: “this will not work here, as our country, customer, environment is very different”. I learned, after a couple of failures, how those barriers can be addressed. A business team in Asia had developed an innovative solution to help patients take their diabetes medication appropriately and consistently. They…

Why Commercial Innovation in a Corporation? Business is going well. Profits are growing. The stock price is increasing. Why innovate now? There are many books written about this. Here is my experience with the value of innovation and different “corporate innovation engines”. Innovative Pharma companies’ growth is fueled by R&D. As patents in practice only last for about a decade, the researchers must invent and develop major new medicines frequently. Or the company dissapears. There is a very appealing case for commercial innovation in addition to the R&D invention. Let’s start with the core business: “the pill”. One example: even the best medicines are not being used by everyone who…

Should we measure innovation? An innovation is something that has never been done before. How do you measure something you don’t know yet? On the other hand, it’s unlikely that corporate leaders would pay us if we don’t accomplish anything. I decided to put innovation metrics in place, but wanted to avoid measuring too much and rather invest most of my time in stimulating innovation. So I needed to find something in the middle. The logical way was to go back to the two specific goals I got when I started in my Innovation Leader role: Across the organization, identify commercial innovations appropriate for global scaling Stimulate an innovation mindset,…

How to identify bright innovation stars in the corporation Of course, they are everywhere! But how to find those stars within the corporation? I believe there are 3 simple steps to approach this: Problem awareness. The potential innovators need to be aware of what problem the organization is trying to solve. The Innovation Leader can play an important role by creating awareness across the organization of the problem the leadership wants to focus on. It takes never ending time and effort to make sure that every employee has a deep insight in the business and customer challenges that need an innovative solution. Ceativity. Creative colleagues need to be identified, supported…