Advancing Innovation. Patrick J. Stroh
the company develop a clear understanding of what innovation means within the context of the company and its industry. The guesswork is removed, so when one person speaks on innovation, everyone else should understand the language and have a shared idea of what the innovation will require.
Even galvanizing the organization for innovation success is only the beginning. You need to constantly monitor and adapt processes and tools to drive innovation value. As with many other strategic initiatives, innovation governance requires solid change management.
Galvanizing the organization can be summarized as effectively structuring, organizing, and encouraging the organization for success. When done effectively, it should serve to accelerate your business strategies.
Enabling
Many business people agree with the old adage that “good ideas can come from anywhere.” The innovation leader often has the duty of providing structure for budding thoughts and innovations. This means managing the submissions of inventive ideas and setting up a protocol for testing and reviewing them. Whether the team is a small group or an entire department, having a structure can encourage more creativity since everyone involved will be seeking results. As discussed in
Part III, enabling your organization is not a “one-channel-works-forall endeavor.” Companies are different. They have different cultures, employees, risk tolerances, and different ways of getting things done. A successful innovation channel in one company may be very different from a successful innovation channel in another company. But basic innovation channels can be tweaked to be successful in just about any business.
Measuring
At the end of the day, businesses can’t and shouldn’t just innovate because it sounds good or because it’s in vogue to have an “innovation center” to show off to visitors. Companies need to produce measureable value creation! Now, not every project and every idea has to produce a positive result—if they do, you aren’t taking enough risk and should likely be stretching for more. You have to be willing to fail and get back in the saddle and try again. But in the end, you need to have generated results and value across your entire body of work as a whole or your innovation is likely for naught.
In all three of these areas—galvanizing, enabling, and measuring—you need to apply two related, but different, skill sets: management and leadership. Here’s how they differ:
Management is a set of processes that can keep a complicated system of people and technology running smoothly.
Leadership is a set of processes that creates organizations in the first place or adapts them to significantly changing circumstances.
Successful transformation is 70%–90% leadership and only 10%–30% management.11
This gives us an interesting starting point on innovation governance. Innovation governance certainly needs to include both management and leadership, but in what proportion, and where should we focus? Of course, the answer is “it depends on the business.” But we can suggest that the appropriate mix is probably the inverse of what is needed in transformation: It’s probably closer to 70% management and 30% leadership. Why? Because you want to ingrain innovation channels, ideation, execution, monitoring, and other activities as deep into the organization as possible, and that takes day-to-day management and execution. Although leadership at the top is critical and should not be taken for granted—because without it, the management and execution may be fruitless—the bias in this equation should be on execution.
CHARACTERISTICS AND ROLES OF THE INNOVATION LEADER
So what exactly should an innovation leader embody? What would I look for in the person I want to lead and drive innovation at my company? The following is a representation of the characteristics and traits that innovation leaders should have and aspire to have:
Strategic Agility—be strategically aware and able to execute tactically in the short term, but also have an eye on long-term strategic planning. I like to call this “Short-term Focus, Long-term View.” Facilitation Skills— believe in the benefits of innovation, but not necessarily be the creative, innovative thinker. In most cases, the innovation leader actually should not be the creative thinker or, at least, should not be the only creative thinker.
Organizational Agility—create an environment that values, allows, and enables innovators to operate and succeed. To facilitate this, be organizationally savvy and understand influence and power relationships within and across functional areas.
Organizational Influence—be a “powerful” executive who can counterbalance the natural biases of business units and functional areas when it comes to change and new innovation ideas.
Consultative —be consultative to innovators and leaders by asking questions that continue to peel back the onion to the layers of value, by setting up innovators for success by recalling historical efforts (wins and losses), and by providing insights on functional relationships and interdependencies, turbulence, or other factors the innovators may not be considering.
Inside/Outside Views—have a watchful eye on internal developments, initiatives, and improvements while keeping an external eye on customer loyalty, retention, satisfaction, and needs. Always be considering new projects, new markets, new partnerships, and alliances to look at value creation and expediency.
Excellent Communication Skills—be able to communicate in many forms and with many constituents both inside and outside the company. That does not mean you need to be a “Master of Creativity or Ideas.” The role of innovation leader includes the above elements as well as being able to communicate effectively. How many people do you know are good at relating to the challenges of front-line employees and can also talk to a Wall Street analyst, a CEO, a key supplier, and so on? It’s a master communicator!
In a McKinsey study, innovation leaders were asked what they do well.12 Across the eight factors, “aspire,” “discover,” and “mobilize” came to the top. Areas that ranked lowest included “choose” and “evolve.” Each of us makes choices and evolves every day in our companies’ various processes (see the interdependencies discussion in Chapter 11). So why do we struggle in these areas in regards to innovation—to choose and evolve? If you apply innovation governance in your company in the way I discuss it in this book, you could improve in these areas.
Others in the field have made similar lists of what an innovation leader should do, such as:
Be adept at using innovation tools.
Create frequent opportunities for blue-sky thinking.
Avoid premature judgments when evaluating new options.
Demonstrate an appetite for unconventional ideas.
Recognize innovators and celebrate “smart failures.”
Personally mentor innovation teams.
Free up time and money for innovation.
Hire and promote for creativity.
Work to eliminate bureaucratic impediments to innovation.
Understand and apply the principles of rapid prototyping and low-cost experimentation.13
The important point is that nowhere on this list or any other list of suggested traits for an innovation leader does it say that he or she should be “the sole ideas person.” It is simply a myth and misconception that the innovation leader should be