The Tip of the Innovation Iceberg
One factor that comes into play is the need for leadership support and stakeholder engagement when developing an innovation strategy. Some in the community have referred to this as having an “innovation champion” within the corporate hierarchy that supports the innovation efforts. Or, perhaps it could be engaging with multiple executives within different departments.
“First, you must have the top-down support that you wanted. Then you must ensure that you have teams of people or share of mind that’s going to focus on the future versus the day to day,” advises Miranda Helmer, Vice President, Product Development & Regulatory at Albertson’s.
“Without those two factors, you’re not giving it the right space and importance in order to get the innovation output,” says Helmer. “I’d say it’s like the tip of the iceberg because you must have those things. And then the people working on the innovation must have the right behaviors and skill sets. That’s where the rogue mindset starts to come into play. Do I have the right people that are curious or people that could develop the curiosity? Do I have resilient people that are going to push the boundaries? Typically, that’s the waterfall approach that I like to follow, and then you have the right innovation process. This is where AI is starting to be a disruptor as it causes us to innovate on innovation.”
Taking Responsibility for the Innovation Journey
Typically, critical thinking of the end-to-end innovation process, from idea generation to product development and delivery, is also a key component for innovation strategy to be enabled. This is also a team sport as one cannot deal with this type of corporate complexity alone, yet one also must take responsibility for the framework and the process as it moves along the pipeline. To be sure, innovation strategy is a complex undertaking.
“Imagine a case where a company’s growth depends on an innovation involving complex cross-disciplinary technologies, and perhaps even a new business model. The innovation ball game suddenly becomes exponentially perplexing. Additionally, if success is measured by time to market and the subsequent commercial success, the level of rigor, diligence, and acceptance of what is ready to move from an innovation stage to product development exponentially increases,” observes Milan Ivosevic, Global VP of R&D and Innovation, CooperSurgical.
He continues, “Arguably, our likelihood for success drastically improves when the assigned teams and leaders have accountability for the entire end-to-end journey (idea to successful product). Partial assignments for just a front end of innovation, discovery, or technology development while expecting to pass a baton for someone else to carry it over the finish line, leaves too many vulnerabilities and decreases our chances to get it right the first time. This is particularly applicable when aiming to deliver transformational results in a complex large-scale enterprise environment involving sophisticated cross-disciplinary technologies under an aggressive time to market pressure.”
Critical thinking throughout the process, then, becomes a significant key to the innovation strategy and further steps, as noted by Ivosevic in his “Innovation Principles” series for All Things Innovation.
He further writes, “The key notion is that concepts and principles have a holistic and timeless character. They do not necessarily provide instant answers but rather stimulate critical thinking around fundamental trade-offs. When such conceptual principles are organized in a logical, pragmatic, and interrelated manner, they help raise the right questions at the right stage of a solution inception. Even though no one can guarantee victory in a novel, innovative entrepreneurial pursuit, systematically and iteratively answering such questions could maximize our chances for success and help discover potential flaws before significant time and resources are spent.”
Cross-Disciplinary Teamwork
Ultimately, in terms of communication and engagement when it comes to innovation strategy, the philosophy known as the democratization of innovation becomes a primary concern in corporations. In other words, the days of a silo mentality in an isolated innovation lab are not as conducive to innovation as they once were in the past.
“I’ve worked at a lot of companies that had separate innovation labs, and the innovation strategy, therefore, was not known by everyone. The innovation strategy was much more of a let’s throw it against the wall, see what sticks, and run with that,” says Leslie Grandy, Lead Executive in Residence, University of Washington – Michael G. Foster School of Business. “And so, consequently, it had been sort of set up to fail as a result because the people who actually bring it to market were the people who weren’t aware of the innovation strategy. They weren’t in the lab. They’re the ones that that are perceived as the doers.”
She continues, “If they have a creative contribution to make to it when it jumps out of the lab into the mainstream, it’s often perceived as being detrimental to the innovation idea because it may morph the idea in some way. Then the innovation lab feels it is not what we said we should do. And then the executives get all excited about the thing the lab said we should do. Now you’ve got the whole organization kind of caught in that chasm of reality of what it takes to do the project. To me, innovation strategy that is run through an innovation lab is not really an innovation strategy.”
This is where, perhaps, a more holistic approach that engages teams in the organization becomes a significant driver of the innovation strategy.
Grandy adds, “Unless everyone in the organization understands where the innovation focuses on, what the goal of the innovation is, then you’re unlikely to succeed. Typically, those things go hand in hand. You don’t know the strategy if it’s all kept in the lab. The other part of it too is that there must be a belief in the organization that they have capacity to innovate outside of what might be considered a product or a new service. Some of the best innovations I had were with legal and finance teams, with people who figured out how to create a new business model and get disruptive. The real innovation was that we had a business we could grow through all of that. We had people who could actually innovate around our product innovation.”
Focusing on Team Inclusivity
As many in the innovation community agree, Grandy feels that a more diverse, cross-collaborative team can get the job done more effectively.
“That’s why I feel like the innovation strategy should be so inclusive,” says Grandy. “When I think of diversity, inclusion and innovation, I think of it completely differently than the way we’ve usually talked about it. I was an assistant director in the film industry, for example. Fortunately, I found somebody who appreciated what that meant, and that’s launched my career. I had a woman who was my head of program management, who actually was a child advocate in juvenile court. Those things really show a personal value system, but also a diversity of thought for innovation to happen. It’s the mindset that you get from those untraditional pathways of employees that gives you diverse solutions.”
She adds, “The inclusiveness is to get that solution from anywhere. Get it from your accounting person. Get it from your finance leader. Get it from your lawyer. Whatever person it is, they are in the mix, and they bring something to the mix and get more excited if they’re part of the innovation development and strategy.”
Certainly, not everybody has confidence in their creative capacity to solve problems in an innovative or inventive way.
“They might not know they can or they haven’t exercised that muscle, so they don’t really believe they can,” says Grandy. “You must expand their self-view to believe they can contribute. You must give them the opportunity to practice that muscle and not always get it right, but believe they’re in the conversation. You must get people more proactively to join the conversation by building up creative confidence within the organization.”
Video courtesy of GetSmarter
