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Establishing An Innovation Culture Roadmap

QUICK SUMMARY

Ophelia Chiu, VP of Strategic Innovation at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, shared a practical framework called “Kite” for cultivating innovation culture programs based on her team’s experiences. The framework consists of four pillars: Knowledge, Inspiration, Translation, and Engagement, designed to meet people where they are in terms of content, format, and tone. Despite facing organizational barriers, Chiu’s team pivoted to start small with an eight-week pilot course on human-centered design, demonstrating that culture change doesn’t require a mandate but can begin by sowing seeds that, with proper care, can drive lasting impact and transformation.

KEY QUOTES

  • “Innovation culture is no longer optional. It’s actually essential.”
  • “This program was something that I did not know that I needed.”
  • “Culture change doesn’t require a mandate. You can start by sowing a few seeds and then if you take care of them and the environment ends up being right, your seeds will thrive.”

FULL SESSION SUMMARY

Introduction and Context

Ophelia Chiu, Vice President of Strategic Innovation at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), opened her presentation by highlighting the value of the FEI conference in bringing together innovators across different industries. She introduced MSK as the world’s oldest and largest private cancer center with a singular mission to end cancer through excellence in patient care, research, and education. With 20,000 staff members across 20 physical locations in the New York Tri-State area, MSK handles over 700,000 outpatient visits annually. Chu’s strategic innovation team reports directly to the Chief Strategy Officer and consists of design strategy and innovation implementation specialists using a human-centered design approach.

The Need for Innovation Culture

Chiu emphasized that healthcare is experiencing significant disruption with increasing competition, new entrants, a broken business model, and rising costs. These challenges make innovation culture essential rather than optional for healthcare organizations to evolve and avoid falling behind. In 2023, leadership changes at MSK prompted the team to reconsider their purpose, leading them to expand beyond direct project work to shaping the organization’s innovation culture.

Core Principles for Innovation Culture

The team defined three core principles for cultivating innovation culture:

  1. Community, People, and Ideas: Sparking a movement to empower and nurture the internal innovation ecosystem
  2. Think Like an Entrepreneur: Enriching internal commercializable ideas and creating more entrepreneurial thinking
  3. Everyone is an Innovator: Fueling the core value of innovation with lasting impact throughout the organization

Understanding the Audience

Recognizing that MSK’s diverse staff includes surgeons, patient care technicians, office assistants, researchers, and corporate functions, the team conducted discovery research to understand their audience. They explored six key areas: familiarity with innovation processes, specific innovation interests, willingness to engage, problems they’re trying to solve, level of openness and curiosity, and challenges in innovation. This research led to the identification of nine innovation personas based on four traits: experience/knowledge with innovation, preferred role in innovation efforts, support needs, and focus on internal or external value creation.

The Kite Framework

Based on their research, Chiu’s team created the “Kite” framework with four pillars:

  1. Knowledge: Providing learning opportunities at all levels with a mix of formats (asynchronous, synchronous, one-off, immersive) to create accessible entry points and mechanisms for skill-building
  2. Inspiration: Sparking imagination and curiosity through experiences that offer excitement and respite from daily routines, such as immersive workshops, TED Talks, innovation days, or hackathons
  3. Translation: Supporting real-world application of innovation skills by providing consultative guidance to teams doing innovation project work and enabling learning through doing
  4. Engagement: Sustaining innovation culture by building a community of innovators, fostering belonging and competency, increasing transparency about innovation activities across the organization, reducing silos, celebrating innovation projects, and creating peer support and mentorship

Organizational Levers

Chiu acknowledged that innovation doesn’t exist in isolation and identified organizational levers that can either activate or create barriers to innovation culture:

Activators:

  • Clear alignment with strategy and core values
  • Innovation connected to incentives, rewards, or evaluation
  • Innovation tied to expected leadership behaviors
  • Innovation champions at all levels
  • Growth mindset in organizational culture

Barriers:

  • Conflicting or siloed goals
  • Culture of risk aversion or fear of failure
  • Fixed mindsets
  • Lack of innovation knowledge or awareness

Measuring Impact

Measuring the impact of innovation culture is challenging since outcomes are often intangible, long-term, or cultural. Chiu recommended first defining what success looks like and then considering both reach and resonance. Metrics should include both countable elements (participation rates, innovation activity, conversion rates from idea to implementation, training and capacity building) and meaningful elements (mindset shifts, stories of tool usage, anecdotal wins).

Real-World Implementation

Despite their comprehensive planning, Chiu’s team encountered mixed support and understanding about innovation and the need for innovation culture at MSK. They found that “innovation” meant different things to different leaders across the organization, varying in importance and priority. Instead of implementing their comprehensive program, they pivoted to start small by finding innovation-minded leaders and inviting their team members to participate in an eight-week pilot course on human-centered design. This pilot validated interest, refined their personas, and evolved their roadmap.

Chiu concluded by sharing a roadmap for cultivating innovation culture:

  1. Know your people (needs, motivators, barriers)
  2. Use a framework like Kite to thoughtfully design your program
  3. Identify organizational levers that help or hinder innovation
  4. Develop strategies to stimulate or mitigate these levers
  5. Define what success looks like (both countable and meaningful)

She emphasized that culture change doesn’t require a mandate—it can start with sowing a few seeds that, with proper care and the right environment, can drive lasting impact and transformation.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  1. Innovation culture is essential, not optional, especially in industries facing disruption like healthcare.
  2. Understanding your audience through research and persona development is crucial for designing effective innovation programs.
  3. The Kite framework (Knowledge, Inspiration, Translation, Engagement) provides a holistic approach to building innovation culture.
  4. Organizational levers can either activate or create barriers to innovation culture and must be identified and addressed.
  5. When facing resistance, start small with pilot programs to validate interest and refine your approach.
  6. Measuring innovation culture requires both countable metrics and meaningful indicators of cultural change.
  7. Culture change can begin by sowing seeds with innovation-minded leaders rather than requiring an organizational mandate.

DELIVERY ON EVENT FOCUS: Aligning Innovation with Business Strategy

Chiu’s presentation directly addressed aligning innovation with business strategy by emphasizing:

  • The importance of connecting innovation efforts to organizational strategy and core values
  • Identifying how innovation can address business challenges like increasing competition and rising costs
  • Creating innovation programs that meet the specific needs of different roles within the organization
  • Ensuring innovation activities translate into real-world applications that deliver business value
  • Measuring innovation outcomes in ways that demonstrate strategic impact
  • Finding innovation-minded leaders who can champion alignment between innovation and business goals

DELIVERY ON EVENT THEME: Harvesting Innovation and Sowing the Seeds of Future Growth

The presentation embodied the event theme through:

  • The metaphor of “sowing seeds” of innovation culture that can grow with proper care
  • Emphasizing that small, targeted efforts can lead to lasting transformation
  • Creating a framework (Kite) that nurtures innovation capabilities throughout the organization
  • Building community and engagement to sustain innovation over time
  • Identifying and developing innovation champions at all levels
  • Measuring both immediate outcomes and long-term cultural shifts
  • Adapting to organizational realities while maintaining a vision for future growth

ACTION ITEMS FOR INNOVATION EXPERTS & CORPORATE CHANGEMAKERS

  1. Conduct audience research: Map your organization’s innovation personas to understand needs, motivators, and barriers.
  2. Develop a tailored framework: Create a structured approach like Kite that addresses knowledge, inspiration, translation, and engagement.
  3. Identify organizational levers: Assess what factors in your organization will help or hinder innovation culture.
  4. Start small and strategic: Find innovation-minded leaders and implement pilot programs to demonstrate value.
  5. Design meaningful metrics: Define what success looks like with both countable and meaningful indicators.
  6. Build community: Create mechanisms for sharing innovation stories, celebrating wins, and fostering peer support.
  7. Provide accessible entry points: Develop innovation learning opportunities at various levels of depth and commitment.
  8. Connect to strategy: Ensure innovation efforts clearly align with organizational strategy and address business challenges.
  9. Cultivate champions: Identify and support innovation advocates at all levels of the organization.
  10. Be resilient: Prepare to pivot and persist when facing organizational barriers or resistance.