Attack on multiple fronts  As discussed in my earlier blog, strong silos don’t have to inhibit internal innovation. Innovation can be facilitated across them. Sometimes, a silo can play the role of a vendor (for free).  How can Innovation Leaders help innovators break through silos? How can they help innovators find collaborators in another silo? How can they help overcome barriers to collaboration across silos? Following are a few of my experiences in stimulating collaboration between the commercial and the manufacturing silos. I’m selecting manufacturing as many innovators in the “commercial silo” wanted to experiment with innovations that included packaging and supply chain elements. Networking. Asking several manufacturing colleagues if…

When to engage collaborators When should innovators engage with internal collaborators? Too early and the collaborators may hold the innovators back. The collaborators may also waste their time as many early stage innovations fail. Too late and the innovators may have wasted their own time because an expert could have provided critical insights, e.g. in a highly regulated industry, like healthcare, one must engage some functions timely, like Compliance. How can Innovation Leaders facilitate this collaboration and provide guidance to innovators and collaborators at the same time? The way I addressed the question of ideal timing for internal collaboration was twofold: define who may need to be involved in a…

Fitting within existing corporate frameworks Established corporations often follow trends: Six Sigma, Culture Changes, Digital Transformations, Diversity, Social Media, … These trends may come and go, usually when the corporate champion comes and goes. Corporate antibodies are very effective in rejecting something new. “Innovation” risks to be included in this list.  Innovation Leaders should be mindful to avoid this. One approach is to totally and irreversibly disrupt the whole corporation. Another is to integrate innovation in the existing corporate culture and processes and “conquer from within”. A few examples on how the latter can be applied (certainly for Horizon 1 and 2 level innovations):  Focus. This one is easy. For…

Turning a challenge into an opportunity  It is critical to share learnings between Innovation Leaders in different parts of the corporation: how do others stimulate innovation and support innovators in their area? In the commercial part of the organization, we typically organized Innovation Summits in each geographic region, which included about 10-12 countries. The Regional Innovation Leader organized once a year a 2-3 day meeting for the 10-12 Country Innovation Leaders. As in all corporations, now and then budget constraints didn’t allow for travel. Skipping these meetings risked creating a message that innovation is not important. One region (Latin America) faced that situation and came up with an innovative solution.…

Degrees of innovation Innovations can be categorized in many ways. One of the most familiar frameworks is the “3 Horizons” from McKinsey. Horizon 1 innovations are about the “now”: existing business models and core capabilities Horizon 2 innovations extend the core capabilities or reach new customers or markets Horizon 3 innovations typically have a longer term view: create new capabilities to build on (or defend against) disruptive opportunities Corporations likely focus on all 3 in a balanced way. In Merck (MSD outside the US/Canada), different teams, sometimes referred to as “innovation engines”, addressed each of these Horizons for commercial innovations. Note: this is separate from the R&D organization’s inventions: innovative medicines and…

Innovation Leader characteristics Every Innovation Leader has unique skills, capabilities, experiences, mindset, personality, etc. I’m referring here to those Innovation Leaders who are responsible 1. to stimulate innovation in their country or region 2. to support local innovators through their innovation journey. These Innovation Leaders have (mainly Horizon 2) innovation as an additional responsibility to their regular job. There are desired traits that make an Innovation Leader especially effective. Following are some of my observations and examples from a few selected geographies. Passion and Positiveness. Innovation Leaders in Mexico, Australia Spain, Italy, Canada and Turkey, all busy marketers, developed a full blown “innovation marketing campaign” to create awareness in their…

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…