Investing effectively in innovation
Innovation needs resources: time, people, passion … and budgets. Many innovators do not need large amounts of money. Certainly not in the early stages, when ideas are run by a few customers and key assumptions are checked. In my experience, budgets for these early stage experiments were easily provided by local (operational, country) management.
In some cases, local management didn’t have the resources, or didn’t want to invest in the innovation. This could be because the the innovation was not addressing a priority issue for their part of the organization. However, some of those innovations did have potential value for the broader corporation. In that case, we sponsored the innovator from the HQ budget. In order to maximize the impact of this investment, we made sure to agree on the next steps.
Take the example of a Dubai based innovator who wanted to experiment with robots to educate oncology patients while they were immobilized in the infusion center – where they didn’t have immediate access to their doctor or busy nurses. The idea was that if those patients had questions about their disease or treatment, they could engage with a robot. This robot would be programmed to answer most of their questions or to initiate a Skype call with their doctor through a build-in iPad.
We agreed in advance with
- the manager/leadership of the innovator on their support (in the example: agree on doing the experiment, on the amount of time the innovator could dedicate to this and on sponsoring collaboration with the local brand and IT support teams)
- the innovator on following the innovation framework: a quick, qualitative assessment, before engaging in a more expensive quantitative pilot (in our example: first create an MVP of the robot and demo it to a doctor and a few nurses to test some of the assumptions, e.g. can the robot be present in the infusion area. Only then, after positive validation of the key assumptions, initiate a full experiment)
- the innovator on key milestones with timelines and metrics for each stage (in the example: spend X% of the budget to create the “MVP robot” by week 3, complete the qualitative assessment by week 4, make a go/fail fast decision for the quantitative pilot in week 5)
We also committed to provide the innovator with
- of course, the budget, based on the milestones (in our example, the budget was part of an internal innovation award competition)
- our time, e.g. for a regular call (in the example, we committed to a weekly call in the first 2 months, then monthly and ad hoc ones)
- expert support from across the corporation (in the example: UX experts to understand oncology patient needs while in the infusion center, IT experts to integrate AI into the robot, compliance experts to anticipate potential ethical concerns)
All of the above strings may seem like a lot of process, but we tried to make the approach as lean and informal as possible. We were ready to fail fast if the assumptions wouldn’t be validated or to accelerate the experiment when we saw the innovator was on to something.
As Bill Gates said:
”I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.”
So, as Innovation a Leader, I made sure to identify those innovative ideas that addressed business and customer challenges with global potential. Then I secured commitment from, support for and follow-up with the local innovator.
More about this topic: Investing in innovation? Here’s how to make the biggest impact. By Vicky Huff Eckert
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