The case for Learning

Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators

In my series about how an Innovation Leader can help Innovators proceed through their innovation journey, I’ll discuss below how to help innovators learn from each other.

Let me share one example and the steps the innovators and I took.

The problem

• The case: an innovator in South Africa in our company told me that she wanted to evaluate the use of drones to increase the value of her offer to the government vaccine tender. She was currently losing this tender to a competitor based on price (this competitor could offer a lower price because their inferior product had a very low cost structure). She knew it was very expensive for the government to distribute vaccines to remote areas in South Africa: trucks progressed slowly over bad roads and security staff was needed to protect the trucks. She believed that drones could reduce this distribution expense and that including this as a service could tilt the tender value and decision in her favor. She discovered that the local regulations did not yet allow to use drones for delivery of medicines, but she considered this as an opportunity to co-create regulations with the government.

2. The global support needed.

• The case: the South African innovator asked my help to find an appropriate drone company. After reaching out into my network, a manufacturing leader indicated interest in this emerging technology and appointed a “drone project manager”. This person researched the drone companies across the world, interviewed multiple of their CEOs and created an inventory of their drone capabilities, costs, experiences and plans. This inventory helped the South African innovator to select the most appropriate drone company for her specific local needs.

3. More problems.

• The case: shortly after the above initiative kicked off, a Japanese colleague told me he wanted to use drones to provide medicines and vaccines to isolated regions after devastating earthquakes. A Chilean colleague wanted to use drones to reliably deliver medicines to remote areas in the jungle. An Italian colleague wanted to use drones to partner with the government to deliver vaccines to large numbers of Syrian refugees in the immigrant reception center on one of the Mediterranean islands. A manufacturing supply chain innovator wanted to improve hurricane preparedness in Puerto Rico by ensuring access to our medicines and vaccines.

4. More global support needed

• The case: these innovators were learning a lot, fast and parallel. They wanted to learn from each other, without creating a major process management burden. We therefor set up a simple, informal, bi-weekly one hour call during which each of the 6 innovators provided a quick update on their progress, shared learnings on what worked, didn’t work, regulatory approach, IT-data gathering, etc. It was organized by our manufacturing “drone project manager” and we included an IT innovation colleague on the call too.

5. The rest of the story.

• The case: 4 initiatives were abandoned, mainly due to priority changes. The Japanese team experimented with two test flights which proved that the concept worked. The Puerto Rico project went through experimental test flights, regulatory approvals and is now ready for implementation.

Several other sets of experiments emerged, addressing different business challenges using the same technology/solution like QR code, VR, gamification, direct supply, micro financing, etc… To ensure awareness, collaboration and sharing of learnings at scale, we established a very practical database. This database was shared and promoted across the corporation. All innovators and aspiring innovators were asked to enter their innovation into this database and to check in this database if anyone was already working on a similar problem/solution.

As Louisa May Alcott said:

“It takes two flints to make a fire.”

As Innovation Leader, I made sure to stay close to innovators across the global corporation, identified barriers for innovation and develop solutions for prioritized barriers, like the collaborative learning need described above.

More about this topic: “Remote collaboration: it’s not as hard as you think.” By Jessica Thiefels and “Collaboration for innovation: Why technology alone isn’t enough.” By Vicki Huff Eckert, PwC

What is your opinion on this?

Click here for more of my blogs on innovation within corporations: Wim Vandenhouweele