To maintain innovation momentum
When leadership decides to stimulate internal innovations, the typical first step is to assign an Innovation Leader. Then, a lot of activity and excitement follows, ideas are generated and experiments are initiated. Some experiments fail, some need multiple iterations, many take a long time – often years – to demonstrate they work. Sometimes, this chain reaction happens: leadership interest wanes, the employees no longer feel the urgency to innovate and the corporation moves on to “other priorities”.
Innovation Leaders manage expectations, communicate continuously, provide status updates while innovations mature. But leadership teams are used to see results – fast. So it helps to generate some quick wins. This will generate impact, maintain innovation momentum in the corporation and most importantly, will give the innovation pipeline time to mature.
The way I tried to manage this:
- I quickly organized an Innovation Award competition, soliciting “any” innovations from across the corporation. This competition provided over 80 nominations.
- There was of course a huge variation in the “innovativeness” of the nominations and in the stages of those innovations. Some innovations were new for the innovator, but business as usual for other parts of the corporation. Some innovations uniquely addressed a local customer challenge, but were not relevant for other geographies. Some nominations were very innovative, but in a very early stage, so had not yet proven impact.
- I initially focused on a few of the nominations that were maybe less innovative, more incremental, but were broadly applicable and had demonstrated impact. One of them ended up being selected by the Leadership for an Innovation Award.
- The team that had created this innovation developed a scaling plan for this innovation. Leadership agreed to broadly scale it and to create a center of excellence to support this. An immediate impact was created.
- Most importantly, there was now some time to let exciting, early stage innovations grow! When there was more time needed, another “incremental” innovation was available to bridge the time gap.
Innovations constantly fail or move in different directions or accelerate. A varied portfolio helps as well to address leadership’s need for quick continued results, as well to give the innovation efforts a chance to develop. This provides time for the innovation portfolio to develop and to generate increasing impact.
As Victor Hugo said:
”There is only one thing stronger than all the armies of the world: and that is an idea whose time has come.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I made sure to have a portfolio of about 15 innovations in multiple stages. There were some in the low-risk-short-term stage and some in the high-risk-long-term stage – and many in between.
More about this topic: McKinsey’s Three Horizons of Growth Can Help You to Innovate and McKinsey’s Three Horizons Model Defined Innovation for Years. Here’s Why It No Longer Applies.
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More of my blogs on innovation: Wim Vandenhouweele