OPINION
It’s not companies that innovate, IT’S THE PEOPLE IN THEM
When innovation has power and legitimacy, it is easier for innovation teams to build collaborative relationships with their colleagues in the core business, says Tendayi Viki
D uring the Covid-19 crisis, the focus of most companies has been on ensuring survival. However, as the world starts to open up, company attention will start to turn to growth and a big part of creating company growth is innovation. The development of new value propositions and business models is often the best path towards long-term sustainable company growth. As much as we refer to companies when we talk about innovation, and even rank them for it, it is not companies that innovate, it is the people in them. I have spent part of my career developing tools for innovation and helping companies put them in place. What I have learned is that simply having the right tools is not enough. Even the best tools in the world cannot innovate by themselves. It is people that leverage those tools. This is why, at its very core, innovation is a sociological challenge. Building skills In some of my conversations with leaders, they have agreed with me that having the right tools
is not enough. What they want is training for their people. Their argument is that having a great tool is not the same thing as knowing how to use it well. This is a hard proposition to argue against. At one level, leaders who advocate for innovation training are right, but at another level they are wrong. Let’s start with how they are right. Most people that work in established companies have spent their career developing the skills necessary to execute on their company’s existing business model. These skills are often highly valued and rewarded within the company. Given the benefits they create for their careers, these execution skills have become a routinised habit for the individual. It is effectively their go-to move whenever they are facing a business challenge. The problem is that execution skills are not that useful when it comes to innovation. This is because innovation is an exploration challenge. Unlike working in an existing business, most innovation teams are dealing with some level of uncertainty. Their job is to search and
Tendayi Viki is Associate Partner at Strategyzer and a corporate
innovation expert. He is the author of
‘Pirates In The Navy’, and was named on the
Thinkers50 2018 Radar List of emerging management thinkers. Viki holds a PhD in psychology and an MBA from the University of Kent.
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