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 here. Engaging this group in the middle is not going to work by sending out an email or video and hope innovation will happen. The global Innovation Leader needs to personally engage with many colleagues in this group, like by
- talking to them, preferably in 1-1 discussions, to identify their needs and how to help them
- following up with a regular call, once a month, once a quarter, once a year,…
- convincing them to identify a local innovation leader to help stimulate innovation and support innovators in their part of the corporation
- familiarizing them with innovation concepts and tools, like learning/failing fast and the One-pager
- sharing examples of successful and failed innovations from across the corporation, as inspiration and to generate discussion and commitment
In my experience, virtually all these colleagues were eager to learn how innovation could help their business and they were extremely interested in experiences from others. These interactions generated some of the most gratifying and educational moments. Some of these colleagues were a real inspiration. I learned a lot from their “real life” situation and how they overcame barriers to innovation.
- Example: one of the country Managing Directors was a non-stop innovation stimulator. He organized monthly interactions between his (Pharma) team and people from a local electric car start up company to create an innovation mindset. He established a separate innovation budget by dedicating a part of the annual budget of his business units to innovation. The business units then needed to come up with innovation experiments that addressed key business problems. During one call, I told him some colleagues were struggling with an experiment with drones: his team completed a drones experiment a few months later.
This is just one story out of many…
As John Quincy Adams said:
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I connected personally with as many as possible middle managers in the corporation, e.g. through 1-1 calls and lectures/discussions at their staff meetings.
More about this topic: Getting Leadership on Board with Your Corporate Innovation Program by Brant Cooper
Please share your thoughts!
More of my blogs on innovation: Wim Vandenhouweele