Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators One of my roles as Innovation Leader, was to identify promising innovations across the corporation. Part of this role was helping innovators as they went through their innovation journey. As Innovators had very different needs, I’ll discuss one “need” at a time in several of my upcoming blogs. Below, I’ll analyse the innovator’s need to find resources for a Pilot. Let me share one example and the steps the innovator and I took. 1. The problem. The innovator first identified a priority business issue. The case: in many developing countries, vaccines were not (easily) available when doctors recommended them to their patients: after a prescription, the…

Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators One of my roles as Innovation Leader, was to identify promising innovations across the corporation. Part of this role was helping innovators as they went through their innovation journey. As Innovators had very different needs, I’ll discuss one “need” in several of my upcoming blogs. Below, I’ll describe the innovator’s need to find experts to collaborate on an experiment. Let me share one example and let’s follow the steps that innovator and I took. 1. The problem. The innovator first identified a priority business issue. The case: specific patients in Brazil needed vaccines for the prevention of pneumonia. These vaccines were available for free in dedicated…

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…

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…

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…

One by one There are many reasons why employees in large corporations do not innovate. One of the tasks of an Innovation Leader is to identify those barriers and come up with ways to break them down. Following are three groups of barriers I often encountered.  “I have no time/money to innovate” Having no time was usually an excuse, not a barrier: people who were passionate about their innovation did find the time. Regarding “no money”: in my 5 years as Innovation Leader, I have never seen a promising innovation, i.e. one that addresses an important business challenge, that failed because of lack of budget. On the contrary: I have…

How to initiate an innovation program in a large corporation You just got the green light: you’re assigned as the first global Innovation Leader ever in your company. Congratulations! What now? Three recommendations, based on my learnings.  Focus on a problem.  DO. Make sure your leadership provides you with a clear objective: one (or a few) very specific challenges for which they need innovative solutions. The more specific the challenge, the better; the fewer the number of challenges, the better. Make sure all leaders and middle managers buy-in into this objective. Certainly limit the number of problems you focus on in the beginning of your journey as Innovation Leader: when…

For me, now! There are specific vaccines available for distinct groups of people. How to innovatively and effectively reach, inform and activate these people? Case 1: cervical cancer in young women (18-26 years) can be prevented by vaccination. Case2: pneumonia in elderly people (65+) can be prevented by vaccination. Interestingly, about the same time, a team in Switzerland and a team in Brazil came up with innovative solutions, both inspired by related technologies. The Swiss team learned that most young women frequented local cafes to have a relaxing chat with their friends. And that they all had their smartphones with them. In a quick experiment, the innovator put up a…

Inspiring and Connecting Innovation Leaders How do good innovations across the corporation look like? Any bright ideas on how I can best stimulate innovation in my country? These are questions I often got from colleague corporate Innovation Leaders across the globe, because these business Innovation Leaders were responsible for stimulating innovation as well as for identifying/supporting innovators in their geography. Their questions generated the idea to create a monthly webcast, inspired by the “TED talks” concept. We kicked off these Innovation webcasts with a few guiding principles: Objective: to inspire and to network (not to generate in depth discussions: those could be done as follow up between interested listeners and…

Securing leadership sponsorship When a leadership team decides that their employees should innovate (more), an Innovation Leader is assigned. Then what? As Innovation Leaders we are thus made responsible to stimulate innovation in a corporation. This is mostly a bottom up exercise, reinforced with a regular top down nudge. Consequently, we must not only engage potential innovators, collaborators and catalysts, but also secure continued strong sponsorship, engagement and support from the leadership. There are several ways to help our leadership in this nudging: Focus. Leadership is about setting direction and making choices. As Innovation Leaders, we should make sure leadership choses a few key business issues innovations should be generated…