This is not a challenge finance or HR teams face, because their roles are acknowledged as important and their leaders appear at the highest levels within the company. The solution to this problem is to give innovation a similar position at the c-suite level and a clear career path for innovators to follow. When innovation has power and legitimacy, it is easier for innovation teams to build collaborative relationships with their colleagues in the core business. These relationships are important because very few innovations can successfully scale in the market without the support of colleagues from other parts of the company such as legal, compliance, finance, sales and marketing. The nature of these collaborations and the extent to which they are encouraged within the company can mean the success or failure of innovation projects.
the rest of the company that innovation is not a priority. The second mistake is that, when leaders do pay attention, they use the wrong management techniques to drive innovation. Asking for long business cases and measuring success using financial metrics too early can stifle innovation. Leaders need to understand that when it comes to innovation, they cannot pick the winning ideas on day one. Instead, what they can do is provide clear strategic guidance, give teams the time and resources to test various ideas and periodically review the progress those teams are making towards finding something that works. Beyond training, leadership support provides a key signal that innovation is a priority within the organisation. When leaders work to actively remove the obstacles that block the path of innovators, this can be even more helpful. However, senior leaders can only do so much. It is also important to recognise that organisational design impacts the relationships and power dynamics between innovation teams and the rest of the company. Organisational design The primary issue of organisational design concerns the level at which innovation sits on the company’s organisational chart. I have worked with several heads of innovation – people whose title makes it sound like they have more power than they actually have. It is not rare to find that the Head of Innovation reports to a Senior Vice President, who in turn reports to a c-suite executive that then reports to the CEO. This means that the
find value propositions that resonate with customers and profitable business models that can scale. These entrepreneurial skills are new to most people and have to be learned. This is the value of innovation training programmes. These programmes are good in that they not only build innovation skills, but they can also generate enthusiasm and excitement around innovation within the company. While innovation training can create some positive outcomes, the challenge lies in the leadership belief that simply training people to use the right tools is enough to get innovation going within the company. This is where leaders can be wrong. In 2015, I was part of a team that led a training programme at a global publishing company. After the programme, one enthusiastic employee decided to implement what he had learned on a project he was currently working on (i.e., testing the idea before scaling it). This poor guy faced so much resistance from his line manager that he eventually gave up and left the company. From this experience, I learned that innovation training only does half the job. In some situations, innovation training can actually be harmful. This is because it creates a sense of hopeful aspiration among employees, only for that aspiration to be dashed when they are back at work with their managers. As such, when we say that it is the people within a company that innovate, this also refers to the relationships and power dynamics among those people. Beyond training people, we need to be thinking about two other things: leadership support and organisational design. Leadership support There are two main mistakes leaders make that can stifle innovation. The first mistake is that leaders tend to focus predominantly on running the core business and ensuring they meet their quarterly results. Management thinker, Alex Osterwalder, runs a survey during his workshops where he asks people what percentage of time the leadership in their companies spend on innovation. More than 60% of respondents always indicate that their leaders spend less than 10% of their time on innovation. This lack of focus is an indicator to
‘At its very core, innovation is a sociological challenge’
highest level of power that innovation has within the company is three levels below the CEO. When Heads of Innovation have limited power and legitimacy within the company, this limits their ability to remove
obstacles or access key resources. The sociological dynamics that are triggered in this situation results in innovation teams constantly having to justify their right to exist.
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Ambition | BE IN BRILLIANT COMPANY
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