Innovation Leaders helping Innovators I explored earlier what the role can be of a corporate Innovation Leader: to identify/remove barriers for innovation and to manage an innovation portfolio. Below, I selected 10 examples of typical barriers innovators are struggling with and a way how Innovation Leaders (IL) can address each of those barriers (I embedded some references to my earlier blogs). I am afraid of failure IL: Ask leadership to publicly share examples of “good” failure and what was learned from these failures. I am not sure what innovation means (e.g. when the corporation asks “everyone should innovate”) IL: Communicate what problems the corporation wants innovative solutions for and share…

Innovating for better with less When I started in my role as Innovation Leader in a large Pharma company, I was intrigued by Navi Radjou’s book “Jugaad Innovation“. The term Jugaad means a non-conventional, frugal innovation, an innovative fix or a simple work-around. This kind of innovation was especially relevant for the emerging markets geography I was working in at that time: while resources were limited, innovations were desperately needed. I recently attended a webcast, organized by Innov8rs in which Navi Radjou discussed his new book “How To Thrive In The New Frugal Economy“. His inspiring talk was very relevant for the current economic environment where corporations in all geographies…

Webcasts and Newsletters for corporate Innovation Leaders Because most of us are working from home, I want to share the following excellent organizations that aim to inspire Innovation Leaders with newsletters and live webcasts, in many cases for free. I highly recommended to subscribe to each organization and newsletter to get alerts of upcoming events! In alphabetical order: Disruptor League Offers: newsletter, podcast, blog. Newsletter: Disruptor Digest Weekly – announces upcoming “Disruptor Connection” virtual events and a “Digest” of 6 recent innovation articles. HQ: Cincinnati, Ohio (USA). Lead: Shawn Nason, Lead Disruptor (also CEO, Chief of Eco-System Disruptor of MOFI). My take: Used to be called “Innovation Excellence”; acquired by…

Innovation Leaders helping Innovators Failure is a part of innovation. True. However, there is “good” failure and “bad” failure. A “good failure” example is validating a fair assumption and quickly/cheaply coming to the conclusion that assumption was wrong. The Innovator learned something new and can then adapt or discard the innovation. But not all failure is “good”, acceptable or makes sense. Innovation Leaders should help the corporation to avoid these “bad failures”. A few examples: Compliance A critical failure to avoid is one related to unethical or dangerous experiments. For instance: healthcare Innovators should never undertake experiments that put a patient’s safety or privacy in jeopardy. To anticipate unethical behavior,…

Innovation Leaders helping Innovators The next topic in my series on how Innovation Leaders can help Innovators who have specific challenges, is how to coach potential Innovators to evaluate their ideas. When Innovators come up with their first idea, they usually are not familiar with the Innovation method and how to evaluate success in each innovation phase. This is where corporate Innovation Leaders can assist, e.g. by creating simple, supportive tools. Below are 2 examples of how I guided Innovators with “metrics” as they went through the front end of their innovation journey. 1. Ideation phase What is an innovative idea? It is an innovative solution that has the potential…

Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators This is the next topic in my series on how Innovation Leader can help Innovators who have specific challenges. Below, I’m addressing how to help potential Innovators who may think innovations have to be disruptive, radical or breakthrough in nature. “Innovation” often brings to mind images of breakthrough products like the iPhone and disruptive business models like Uber. Employees may feel overwhelmed when they hear the CEO or their leadership state that “we need every employee to innovate”. This is when Innovation Leaders need to act. There are several ways an Innovation Leader in a corporation can guide employees on how drastically to innovate: Organization. Innovation…

Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators The next topic in my series “How Innovation Leaders can help Innovators” is about how to focus their innovative energy to impact the corporation. We all know passionate Innovators in our corporations. They come up with innovative ideas and often spend a lot of time trying to convince others in the organization to support them. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they get discouraged and give up. Giving up typically happens if the company has no clear innovation strategy. An innovation strategy starts with a clear definition of what innovation means for the corporation. If this is not done, there are no transparant ways to…

Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators This is the next topic in my series of how Innovation Leaders can help Innovators who have specific needs. Below are a few ways on how to help Innovators that need time to do their experiment. If one Googles “time to innovate”, most articles that come up discuss the creative (ideation) stage of innovation. In my experience, that is the stage that usually takes the least amount of time. It’s the next stages that are more problematic. I’ll discuss below the 3 stages of innovation (Ideation, Experimentation, Pilot) and how Innovation Leaders can help address Innovators’ time constraints in each stage. Ideation. Coming up with an…

Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators This is the fourth blog in my series about how an Innovation Leader can help Innovators struggling with specific needs during their innovation journey. Below, I’ll describe the need to innovate “within compliance” in a heavy regulated industry like healthcare. Let me share one example and the steps the innovators and I took. 1. The problem. The innovator first identified a priority business issue. The case: a marketer in Africa needed a solution for young women who often forgot to take their daily contraceptive pill and thus became pregnant. She wanted the solution to be low cost and discreet (as most young women didn’t want others…

Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators In my series about how an Innovation Leader can help Innovators proceed through their innovation journey, I’ll discuss below how to help innovators learn from each other. Let me share one example and the steps the innovators and I took. The problem The case: an innovator in South Africa in our company told me that she wanted to evaluate the use of drones to increase the value of her offer to the government vaccine tender. She was currently losing this tender to a competitor based on price (this competitor could offer a lower price because their inferior product had a very low cost structure). She knew…