Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators
One of my roles as Innovation Leader, was to identify promising innovations across the corporation. Part of this role was helping innovators as they went through their innovation journey. As Innovators had very different needs, I’ll discuss one “need” at a time in several of my upcoming blogs.
Below, I’ll analyse the innovator’s need to find resources for a Pilot. Let me share one example and the steps the innovator and I took.
1. The problem. The innovator first identified a priority business issue.
- The case: in many developing countries, vaccines were not (easily) available when doctors recommended them to their patients: after a prescription, the patient first needed to buy the vaccine in a pharmacy and then had to come back to the doctor to get it administered. Many patients didn’t bother to follow this 2-step process.
2. The innovation. The innovator came up with an innovative solution for that business issue.
- The case: an innovator in the IT organization came up with the idea of a “smart refrigerator”. This refrigerator would store vaccines at the right temperature and would be located in the physician’s office. This way step 1 of the above process was eliminated and the patient only had to go once to the doctor to get the vaccine prescribed and administered. The refrigerator was connected to the cloud to minimize the need for additional administration for the physician. The cloud connection helped tracking usage and then: a. issued an automatic message to a distributor to refill the refrigerator when the remaining vaccines in the refrigerator went below a defined level; b. only charged the doctor once a vaccine was taken out of the refrigerator, i.e. at the same time the doctor got payment from the patient. The innovator also pursued IP protection for his innovation.
3. The One-Pager. The innovator created this one-slide summary (of the problem, the innovation and the created value) and shared it with me.
- The case: in this One-Pager, the innovator briefly restated the problem (see above 1.), described the innovative idea (see above 2.) and defined the value for the key stakeholders (for the patient: convenient protection from disease; for the vaccinators: effectively protecting patients with vaccines; for the Pharma company: facilitate access to patients for the vaccine)
4. The experiment. The innovator now wanted to do an experiment to quickly validate (or disprove) key assumptions, i.e. why he believed the innovation could work.
- The case: the innovator created 2 prototypes of the refrigerator and tested them with one doctor in Indonesia and one in the Philippines. The experiment was very successful and generated several practical learnings regarding the operation of the refrigerator.
5. The Pilot. The innovator now wanted to do a full-country pilot to demonstrate the ROI. However, there was a high upfront cost, especially for the production of a large number of smart refrigerators.
- The case: I discussed this with several of the most senior members in my innovation network. A senior manufacturing leader was looking for supply chain innovations and the concept of the smart refrigerator fit in his vision. He agreed to sponsor the Pilot and committed a significant budget.
6. The rest of the story.
- The case: several large scale business opportunities for a Pilot were identified (one for adult vaccines in Korea and one for a tender for pediatric vaccines in Iraq). However, the commercial leadership ultimately decided that this innovation was too far removed from our core business. We were asked to evaluate licensing the IP externally, to companies that had the manufacturing and commercialization expertise to market smart refrigerators.
This senior manufacturing leader was one example of someone interested in sponsoring a passionate innovator with a great idea to solve a business challenge. There were several other colleagues that were ready to sponsor innovators:
- in most cases the sponsor was the manager of the innovator or the business manager close to the innovator, as the innovator was likely to focus on a business challenge that was relevant for these managers and the needed resources were modest
- if more substantial budgets were needed, often the global marketing team was interested in sponsoring the innovator. Their rationale was that the innovation, if successful, would likely also be of value for other countries, beyond the one where the the Pilot took place
- I have even seen an example of “internal crowdsourcing”: innovators in 2 different countries were pursuing the same innovative idea at the same time; they decided to combine their resources, they got some additional money from other interested countries in their region and then did a single Pilot, benefitting all of them
- if everything else failed, my leadership was always ready to sponsor innovations that met our preset criteria
In my five years as Innovation Leader, I have never seen an innovation that addressed a major business problem fail because of lack of resources!
As Norman Vincent Peale said:
“Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I made sure to create a broad network across all levels and functional areas of the corporation. I connected the relevant ones at the appropriate time with innovators, to create a win-win.
More about this topic: The Innovator’s Rosetta Stone For The C-Suite by INNOV8RS Team
What is your opinion on this?
Click here for more of my blogs on innovation within corporations: Wim Vandenhouweele