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 presenters).
- Target audience: the country innovation leaders (initially about 40, worldwide), but open to any interested employee.
- Focus: examples of innovations and examples of innovation stimulating activities, from across the corporation.
- Agenda: 3 short talks (10′ ideally), without Q&A.
- Frequency: monthly, one hour max, reasonable for all time zones (7am US = 1pm EU = 7pm Asia).
- Presentations: try not to add workload for the innovator-presenter, ask to focus on talking and to use a minimal number of supporting slides, preferably existing ones.
- Resources: keep it simple, at very low cost, with very few people to organize it.
As the global Innovation Leader, I facilitated the calls and defined the topics for the talks. I mainly identified these through my monthly individual talks with the country innovation leaders/innovators across the globe and based on what I judged of likely interest to the target audience.
From the very beginning, a passionate colleague (based in the UK), volunteered to: set up and organize the calls, manage a list of potential speakers, invite the speakers, get their slides, send meeting reminders, help facilitate the calls and issue an annual survey.
A few learnings:
- Keeping the format very simple made it attractive for the attendees and made it sustainable (5 years). It provided an excellent source of awareness and networking across the corporation.
- After a few calls, we added 1-2 live clarifying questions after each talk. All attendees who had specific questions or wanted more details, were recommended to directly follow up with the speaker.
- The 3×10′ format worked very well. Note that three talks of 10′ each often took nearly the full hour. Despite the 10′ guidance, many passionate presenters needed a few minutes more. The intros, transitions, clarifying questions and conclusions also took some time. Having a time buffer allowed to manage the calls unstressed and absorb now and then a technical problem, inherent to webcasts.
- Based on attendee feedback, we decided to have for each webcast two talks about innovations and one talk about stimulating innovation. The innovators gave the innovations talks, the Innovation Leaders the innovation-stimulation talks.
- The invitation for the monthly calls went out for the full year. Everyone who subscribed got a reminder a week before the webcast, with the topics.
- An annual survey helped us to refine the format and to identify topics of interest.
Starting small created a strong fan base and helped to keep the focus clear (innovations & stimulating innovation). Very soon, others heard about the monthly calls and we noticed a dramatic increase in the number of passionate innovation interested employees from across all parts of the corporation who asked to join. Because of the webcast format, there was no limit to the number of employees that could call in.
We further evolved the webcast concept, especially in whom we invited to give a talk:
- Business leaders: to reinforce the importance of innovation, to get their perspective on good innovations and to discuss which of their business challenges needed innovative solutions.
- Potential collaborators: like IT, Manufacturing, Legal, Compliance, HR,… to share their technologies, capabilities or tools to support Innovation Leaders or innovators.
- Innovation Leaders from other “innovation engines” in the corporation: like the Horizon 3 teams (GHI and HSS) and Animal Health, etc. as inspiration.
- External speakers: like academics, innovation leader organizations, innovation agencies, startups, etc. We grouped those in one session to avoid mixing external speakers with internal ones, who often had confidential information in their talk.
As we progressed, we addressed some challenges:
- For many speakers, it was the first time they talked to this audience. To support them, we created a simple guidance with background about the audience and tips for their talk (10′ long, few slides, how facilitated, etc.). We also recommended them to tell their story within our innovation framework .
- The time of the call was still difficult for some countries, e.g. New Zealand, where is was already midnight at the start of the call. To address this, we recorded the calls and shared them with all, so they could watch them later and even share with others in their part of the corporation. Later on, we stored them on a YouTube like internal site.
- Now and then a speaker had to cancel at the last moment or a technical problem occurred. We made sure to have a back up talk available.
Although there was a lot of mouth to mouth awareness about the calls, I also mentioned the calls in every talk I gave across the corporation. The webcasts became one of the most quoted innovation stimulation initiatives by senior leaders.
As Steven Johnson said:
“If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I made sure to have every month 3 inspiring topics ready for sharing with the innovation community and to promote the calls across the corporation.
More about this topic: Top 10 tips to successful webcasts, by Leigh Clancy
What do you think? Please share below!
More of my blogs on innovation: Wim Vandenhouweele