Keeping innovation lean
Large corporations excel at creating efficiencies and managing risk. This is accomplished through established processes, like repetitive project reviews and engagement of experts, including finance, legal and compliance teams. Obviously, this approach may limit internally generated innovation, as innovation is characterized by a limited process (“agile”, “lean”) and taking risks (risk of failure and risk inherent to “boldly go where no one has gone before”).
Innovators in corporations usually have to experiment with their ideas on top of their full-time, regular job. They may be discouraged by the time it takes to follow rigid processes, like filling in multiple forms, preparing for in depth project reviews and managing a large project team. As an innovation is per definition something that has never been done before, innovators often do not have detailed answers yet to financial (ROI), legal and compliance questions. All of this is especially relevant in the early innovation stages, when the idea is not yet fully fleshed out.
To manage these concerns, Innovation Leaders have developed a lean innovation framework. This framework helps innovators to develop their ideas in steps, helping them learn fast (or fail fast) and limiting financial and compliance risks. However, to provide innovators with specific, complementary expertise, colleagues from other functional areas may be required.
The approach I took was to engage collaborators in a lean way: limit their number to a minimum and have them join as late as reasonable. Following are the collaborators I typically suggested at each stage and why:
Ideation stage
- Innovation Leader only: to help the innovators frame their idea, using the One-Pager (short description of the problem, the idea, the expected win-win-win).
Experimentation stage
- Experts: to help build a prototype. Often, an expert from IT, finance or manufacturing needed to be part of this stage, as the innovator might not have the detailed expertise to create a prototype or select the most appropriate technology to integrate in the experiment.
- Manager: to secure the innovator could dedicate time on the experiment. In many cases, the manager was already aware and supportive of one of his team members working on innovation.
- Compliance: to address potential compliance concerns during the experiment. When I judged that the risk was significant, I ensured innovation minded compliance, legal or regulatory affairs colleagues were asked for advice (see example).
Pilot stage
- Business: to ensure the innovation was (still) focused on addressing the right business challenge, to help define the metrics and often to secure resources to perform the Pilot.
- Project team: to implement the Pilot. The size of this team depended on the innovation. I haven’t seen an example where the innovator could perform the Pilot alone. Sometimes a small, sometimes a larger team was needed with expertise in market research, customer relations, compliance, IT, etc.
Each innovation was unique, so there were many variations in the need and timing for collaborators. The general approach was to avoid burdensome, unnecessary processes and limit the size of the team.
As Eric Ries said:
“Lethargy and bureaucracy are not the inevitable fate of companies as they achieve maturity.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I guided the innovators through the innovation framework, removing as many as possible barriers, including time-wasting ones like complex processes and large teams.
More about this topic: “Bigger isn’t better: Smaller engineering teams are the key to innovation“, by Torben Friehe
Please share any thoughts about the above approach?
Click here for more of my blogs on innovation within corporations: Wim Vandenhouweele