Securing leadership sponsorship
When a leadership team decides that their employees should innovate (more), an Innovation Leader is assigned. Then what?
As Innovation Leaders we are thus made responsible to stimulate innovation in a corporation. This is mostly a bottom up exercise, reinforced with a regular top down nudge. Consequently, we must not only engage potential innovators, collaborators and catalysts, but also secure continued strong sponsorship, engagement and support from the leadership.
There are several ways to help our leadership in this nudging:
- Focus. Leadership is about setting direction and making choices. As Innovation Leaders, we should make sure leadership choses a few key business issues innovations should be generated for. Nothing is more confusing and frustrating for innovators and middle management (and Innovation Leaders) than feeling innovation is a bit of everything and all over the place. I recall one region where a decision was made to focus all innovation efforts on 3 specific topics and this worked very well: many specific innovations were generated. It was clear what was in and out of focus, confidence grew dramatically with leaders and innovators and more innovators emerged.
- Education. Innovation Leaders are innovation specialists. We can help leadership by ensuring they dedicate time to innovation: time = interest. This will allow to regularly discuss key innovation concepts like open innovation, Horizons, differences with business-as-usual, barriers to innovation, metrics and failure. Then, informed and focused decisions can be made about which concepts to pursue and which not. It might be a good idea to give leadership a “feel” of what a good innovator goes through in each of the innovation stages. I once held a hands-on session with a regional leadership team on how to go through the innovation framework (from problem definition, ideation, experimentation till the “approval” of a pilot), using a real existing innovation example.
- Communication. We are in a perfect position to provide messages, topics, innovation successes that our leadership can integrate in their speeches, their staff meetings, their investor meetings, their business reviews, etc. It may help to include the public affairs/communication team in this. I recall a commercial leader who asked me every year what 3 questions I wanted him to pose during each of his business reviews. Providing leadership with concrete, personalized examples helps to spread messages with impact and consistency. This can include one or two inspirational slides with the “best” innovations in the company. I also typically provided leadership with a few “innovation” talking points or questions when they visited a country business team: on how to acknowledge the local Innovation Leader, on an ongoing innovation experiment or on a local innovation stimulating event.
As John F. Kennedy said:
“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I secured that leadership regularly reinforced the focus of and recognition for innovation into the organization.
Do you have other ideas that work? Please share below!
More about this topic: Getting Leadership on Board with Corporate Innovation”, by Brant Cooper of Moves the Needle
More of my blogs on innovation: Wim Vandenhouweele