The Innovation Process Owner - Chief Champion of Change
By Michelle Jones, Executive Vice President

Stage-Gate Benchmarker TM Evaluate your product innovation program for the critical elements of successful performance: Innovation Strategy Idea-To-Launch Process Portfolio Management Leadership and Quality Execution. The analysis covers 114 critical variables including: the Innovation Diamond™, Ideation, resource allocation, metrics and project execution.

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The truth of the matter is that your innovation process should look different today than it did 1, 2 and especially 5 years ago. Why? The purpose of the innovation process is to serve the organization’s strategic business goals. It is the roadmap that will accelerate alignment and collaboration across the numerous stakeholders that partake in the complex business of driving ideas from inception to launch effectively and efficiently. Therefore, at minimum, your process should keep pace with changing business strategies and goals. As one executive once confided in me, “It didn’t occur to me at the time that a shift in our business strategy to pursue fewer, bigger, better product/service solutions could have been executed more smoothly had we evolved our process BEFORE pursuing these types of projects. We spent years perfecting our process to yield product improvements at dizzying speeds and were very proud – it differentiated us in the marketplace. Unfortunately, this process did not translate well for the big unique solutions. We now have a 5-Stage process to handle big product/service solutions and a 3-Stage process for fast improvements. We now also examine our innovation process capabilities during our annual strategic planning process!”

The innovation process should also evolve to keep pace with the people using it – executives, gatekeepers, project leaders, team members and those external to your organization such as suppliers and co-development partners. The more often people use the process, the better they become at it. They move along the learning curve and develop experience, capability and ideas. Many companies fail to take the opportunity to effect two important changes when this happens: 1) retain the tacit knowledge by building it back into their process for the entire organization to benefit, and 2) raise expectations for better performance.

Conversely, as new people join the organization, they bring with them new experiences, expertise, skills and ideas. Ideally, you want to benefit from this as soon as possible. This is especially true when a new executive joins the organization. Yes, of course you want to avoid making quick, knee-jerk design changes to your process. Companies invest serious time, money and effort to design and implement an innovation process that, for many, contributes significant value straight to the top line – new growth. The last thing you want to do is destroy precious value-creating practices and processes because someone new to the organization did not fully immerse themselves into understanding the process well enough to add value to it instead of simply changing it for the sake of change. I’ve seen this sad story unfold more times than I care to admit. However, it is also my personal observation that many process owners fail to effectively introduce new executives to the innovation process. It is important to accelerate the executives’ understanding and buy-in of the current process AND seek their input and ideas for ways to improve the process.

Lastly, we must not forget that new benchmarks, technologies, practices and ideas are surfacing on a regular basis by the thousands of companies of all sizes, spanning all industries around the globe who are pursuing product innovation excellence. We can learn from those that have implemented improvements before us. I believe every process owner should pay heed to the phrase Jack Welch coined when he was Chairman at General Electric: “If the rate of change inside an organization is less than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight.” An organization’s innovation process is not immune.

What matters most is not that you can pinpoint the drivers of change that are pertinent to your organization with certainty and precision. Rather, that, as process owners, we learn to recognize when a process improvement opportunity presents itself and jump on it. Often, the first signs of improvement opportunities arrive in the form of complaints. Unfortunately it is common for process owners to mistake complaints as a personal attack on their performance. It is important to note that most complaints simply serve as a trigger point that indicates it might be time to evolve the process.

Five Tips for Process Owners to Effectively Champion Innovation Change

1. Ensure your process is designed for the types of projects that are important to the business. For some organizations, you may have multiple innovation processes – each process is designed to drive a specific type of project (i.e. Technology Development Process, New Product Process, Low Risk Product Improvement Process, etc.). An easy way to stay on top of this is to examine your pipeline of projects periodically. List all of your projects and categorize each project by risk level (High, Medium, Low) or by project type (New Technology, New Product, New Service, Improvement). If the mix is changing or about to change due to a shift in business strategy, prepare to evolve the process (or introduce a new process) that can effectively drive these new projects to success.
   
   
2. Survey people using the innovation process to confirm it is enabling their success.
   Listen carefully to all stakeholders and seek to understand. Sometimes the problem isn’t always the problem. Probe more deeply when conflicting complaints are presented so you can differentiate between process improvements that can lead to better performance versus complaints that may be indicative of isolated cases of resistance to change. Don’t hesitate to call upon a neutral external party to survey and interview stakeholders if confidentiality is an issue, it can have a positive impact on participation rate or if it can accelerate results.
   
   
3. Stay on top of innovation best practices and benchmarks.
   Knowledge is confidence and for process owners, confidence translates into continuous improvement. When process owners are well equipped with facts, answers and solutions, they report that it becomes easier to communicate, justify and effect change on a more regular basis. It is important to note however that not all change is equal – a change to an innovation process that does not ultimately lead to improved performance is a poor use of resources. Be sure to validate and justify expected performance results before implementing any improvement.
   
   
4. Be disciplined in executing Post Launch Reviews (PLR).
   Encouraging teams to temporarily pause after each major project experience (whether the product is launched or is killed part way through the process), to reflect on their experience – the good, the bad and yes, the ugly - is referred to many process owners I work with as ‘a no-brainer’, yet it is rarely properly executed. The process owner can play a significant role in ensuring these reviews occur and produce meaningful improvement recommendations. The most effective way to conduct a PLR is to arrange an objective, seasoned facilitator to run the event (i.e. someone from human resources - definitely not the project leader) and keep the discussion focused on key questions that the team has access to in advance of the meeting.
   
   
5. Fix innovation process conflict immediately.
   Driving a new product from inception to launch is a complex business involving numerous decision-makers and a wide range of professionals solving some of your clients’ toughest problems within serious time constraints – it is only natural that some level of conflict will occur within projects. However, when conflict occurs because key stakeholders across the organization can not align themselves on how best to approach the product innovation process, we have a bigger problem. This type of conflict is serious in that it destroys productivity AND the collaborative culture that is so necessary to be successful in product innovation. This type of conflict should be managed immediately. The most effective way to approach this type of a situation is to leverage ‘facts’. Evaluate your innovation process against industry or global benchmarks and lay out these facts – the strengths and the weaknesses - for everyone to review, digest and discuss. Ultimately, most people will not risk their professional reputations to argue against facts, especially if they become the minority concern. More often resistors are simply seeking to understand before they give you their whole-hearted buy-in.

About the Author
Michelle Jones is the Executive Vice President of Stage-Gate International and is speaker, author and consultant on the topic of product innovation. She leads the commercialization of some of the world’s best practice research on product innovation into state-of-the-art products and services for companies striving to achieve innovation excellence. Her portfolio includes strategic partnerships, product management and marketing and R&D.

Michelle has worked with an impressive portfolio of companies and has over 20 years of experience across several industries including Aerospace, Automotive, Chemical, Consumer Packaged Goods, Defense, Electronics, Energy, Food, Financial, Medical and Pharmaceutical. She has led numerous large-scale and complex Product Innovation Transformation Programs, spanning from Discovery and Stage-Gate Systems to Strategic Portfolio Management, to success.

Michelle holds a Masters of International Business Administration degree from the University of Western Ontario, a Bachelors of Business Administration degree and Specialist Certificate in Project Management from McGill University and is a certified New Product Development Professional (NPDP) with the PDMA. Prior to joining Stage-Gate International, Michelle was Senior Manager of Business Transformation Consulting Services at KPMG (now BearingPoint) where she specialized in implementing complex, organization-wide change projects including product innovation programs, post merger integration and mission-critical business process improvements.

Contact Michelle Jones at michelle.jones@stage-gate.com.