Innovation from within corporations.
Innovative ideas can come from everywhere: from the employees inside the corporation or from outside the corporation.
Each source has pros and cons and they can co-exist. As Innovation Leader in a large corporation, I focused on internal innovation. First, because this was part of the original briefing I got from my leadership: “we know that there is a lot of innovation happening across our organization, we need someone to identify those innovations and bring us the most valuable ones”. Second, because of the following 3 selected benefits of internal innovation. I am also adding suggestions on how Innovation Leaders can reap those benefits.
Knowledge
- Compared to external partners/vendors, our own employees usually have a deeper understanding of the brands and related business problems (e.g. the Marketing teams) and have better insights in customer needs (e.g. through the Sales Force or specialized teams such as Medical Affairs).
- Innovation Leaders can help to communicate the priority business problems the corporation wants to address or clarify those elements of the problem that may need a more detailed explanation. Innovation Leaders can also easily, informally connect internal innovators with the problem owners. This way, they can avoid bureaucratic processes like confidentiality agreements and do not need to worry about divulging confidential information.
Resources
- Large corporations have the money, people and time to invest sustainably in experiments and to scale successful innovations. Different departments have (often global) experts who can support innovators and facilitate scaling. Established commercial teams can integrate “new innovations” into their business plans to secure scaling.
- Innovation Leaders can identify innovators across the corporation, develop and leverage internal networks to facilitate collaboration and secure relevant resources.
Structure
- A solid organizational structure can help to rally the whole corporation for innovative solutions that will add value to the business. Experience in collaboration between well established departments (silos) helps to Pilot and scale innovations in a rapid and powerful way.
- Innovation Leaders who know how to work within this strong structure can create a climate that stimulates innovation and can accelerate the scaling of innovations.
Again, this internal innovation approach also has disadvantages, which can then be compensated by external (outside, open) innovation. I covered some of this in an earlier blog.
As Steve Jobs said:
“Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem”
So, as Innovation Leader, I focused mainly on internally originated innovation to address business/customer challenges and regularly complemented this approach with open innovation challenges.
More about this topic: : How internal innovators win the game, by Nicolas Bry
Please share your thoughts on the above!
Click here for more of my blogs on innovation within corporations: Wim Vandenhouweele