Innovation Leaders supporting Innovators
This is the next topic in my series on how Innovation Leader can help Innovators who have specific challenges. Below, I’m addressing how to help potential Innovators who may think innovations have to be disruptive, radical or breakthrough in nature.
“Innovation” often brings to mind images of breakthrough products like the iPhone and disruptive business models like Uber. Employees may feel overwhelmed when they hear the CEO or their leadership state that “we need every employee to innovate”. This is when Innovation Leaders need to act.
There are several ways an Innovation Leader in a corporation can guide employees on how drastically to innovate:
Organization.
- Innovation Leaders should define and secure the appropriate organization structure for the kind of innovation the leadership is looking for: smaller innovations (incremental, sustaining, adjacent, architectural) or larger ones (radical, disruptive, breakthrough, basic). It’s perfectly possible (even advisable) to have different parts of the corporation focus on different types of innovation.
- Example: in one Pharma company, the existing core business teams focused on incremental or adjacent innovation. A separate specialized, independent team focused on radical and breakthrough innovations, experimenting with launching new businesses and investing in external start-ups.
Focus.
- Innovation Leaders should provide direction which problems innovations must solve.
- Example: the core business leadership I worked for had identified and agreed upon the 3 most important, common challenges in their geography (i.e. the lack of access, adherence, customer engagement). By focusing innovation efforts on these 3 issues, Innovators had very specific problems to focus their innovative ideas on. They did not need more explanation about the scope of the needed innovation.
Communication.
- Innovation Leaders should illustrate what ‘good’ innovations looks like. This will clarify if the corporation is looking for smaller, incremental or more large, disruptive innovations.
- Example: I had as part of my “road show” talks a section that I called “20 innovations in 20 minutes”. In this presentation, I talked about examples of innovations that came from across the organization, illustrating how other Innovators in our organization addressed these business/customer challenges and sharing what kind of innovations were recognized by the leadership.
Coaching.
- Innovation Leaders can personally guide new Innovators to ensure that their ideas are addressing the priority issues in a way the leadership teams have defined.
- Example: I created a One-Pager, a simple form that each Innovator needed to fill in at the end of their ideation phase. It took them less than 30′ to fill in. Local Innovation Leaders or me often helped the Innovators to fill this in through an in-depth discussion, call or meeting. We ensured that the starting point (which problem they tried to solve) was the same as the expected outcome (the problem their innovation would solve). This seems obvious, but was not always the case…
Recognition.
- By celebrating the winners of Innovation Challenges, Awards and Hackathons that address the defined business/customer challenges, Innovation Leaders inspire new Innovators and remind them about the kind of problems that the company wants to solve.
- Example: I organized for each Innovation Challenge “final” a company-wide broadcast, which included leadership as the jury and made very clear what the selection criteria (i.e. the business/customer challenge and scope of innovation) were for selecting the winners.
The above are only a few ways how Innovation Leaders can provide guidance about the “scope” of innovations the corporation is looking for. This will also help manage expectations and anticipate disappointments, discouragement, fear, resistance to innovation and confusion.
As Michael Eisner said:
“There’s no good idea that cannot be improved on.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I made sure to guide the potential Innovators on what the leadership was looking for by providing clarity on scope and examples of what good looks like.
More about this topic: “Types of Innovation – The Ultimate Guide with Definitions and Examples” by Julia Kylliäinen
What are your thoughts on this: any other ways to provide guidance to Innovators?
Click here for more of my blogs on innovation within corporations: Wim Vandenhouweele