When to innovate the way, you innovate
Your organization uses an innovation process to govern new value creation. At its introduction, it was a unique and exciting way to approach new products, services, technologies, teamwork, decision-making, and generally, any initiative that was ‘new’. It stretched the capabilities of all disciplines using it, especially senior leaders. Most importantly, it worked.
It worked, but only for a few years. Gradually, through a series of small changes, the process morphed. Today, you are not sure that it is making an impact. Worse, you worry it could be hindering performance.
Is the process the culprit, or is it something else? Perhaps you are facing more competition than ever before. Maybe your customers are changing? Most certainly, technology is changing. Is regulation increasing? Are employees less experienced? Are senior leaders less engaged than they used to be? Or, has the pull of complacency and mediocrity reached your innovation process? Whether the process was incorrectly changed or everything else around it has changed, you have a problem on your hands. Let’s fix that.
When should you innovate the way you innovate?
Every organization is a live entity operating in an external live environment, serving a live market. Change is not only inevitable; it is the only constant! External factors, such as the economy, regulation, new technology, and new competition, are continually tugging at your organization. Additionally, several factors continuously influence the organization’s internal landscape, such as maturing capability, turnover, new leaders, availability of capital, and the introduction of new business processes/software. Internal and external landscapes are changing all the time. Should your innovation process be a reliable constant? Or should it evolve constantly? Or should it be a balance of both?
Successful leaders have relied on three criteria to determine when it is time to change their innovation process(es):
1. Business results.
Your process no longer delivers desired business results reliably. It is not enabling a profitable return on your innovation investment dollars. It is not creating a new, difficult-to-copy competitive advantage. It is not creating real value or satisfaction for key customers/accounts. If you are not measuring these metrics, your process design was never complete in the first place.
Bottom line – your innovation process guides the execution of projects that contribute to achieving your business goals. You want your process purpose-built to deliver predictable results against its desired role. If your business goals change, your process should change accordingly, even if ever so slightly.
For example, your organization shifts its focus from top-line revenue growth to profitability. To many, this type of change wouldn’t even register. However, your process should reflect the expectations, governance, team activities, decision support and criteria that, when applied to projects, will produce a portfolio of highly profitable innovations. This subtle but important direction should ripple through the innovation process, influencing everyone’s actions, behaviors and decisions.
2. Strategy.
Your process does not deliver the types of products or innovations needed to advance the business strategy. A business strategy mirrors the degree of change and opportunity observed in the market(s) you serve or want to serve. Recall what former CEO and Chairman of GE, Jack Welch, once said, “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”
Bottom line – your innovation process is your vehicle for realizing the business strategy, especially if it calls for doing business differently. You want your innovation process purpose-built to surface, experiment, accelerate, and launch the types of projects critical to advancing the strategy. You want your process to realize a pipeline of projects that will move the organization from its current state to the desired state. When your business strategy changes and the role and emphasis of innovation along with it (e.g., the markets, technologies, and innovations that are important to pursue), your innovation process should evolve with it.
Additional business strategies that can be supported and advanced through the innovation process: Sustainability, Partner Networks, Diversification, Digitization, Customer Experience Leadership, Next Generation Platforms, the Lean Enterprise, etc. The more sophisticated or challenging the organization’s strategy, the more it needs to rely on a robust innovation process to drive its execution.
For example, your organization shifts strategic focus from domestic markets to new foreign markets in pursuit of growth. This strategy is risky if your organization has no prior experience doing this. The role of the innovation process is to provide the roadmap to guide teams through the essential activities, and decision-makers through new criteria to support success. If you evolve the process to support the business strategy, you will have effectively de-risked the strategy for the organization. What leadership team wouldn’t want that?
3. Organization.
Business lines, people, roles, processes, structures, metrics, technologies and priorities within your organization change and evolve. Some organizations live in a perpetual state of internal change that is constantly testing the equilibrium of the innovation process:
- Skills once outsourced are now new internal departments discovering how to fit in and add value.
- Functions that have improved their capability at a faster rate than others may inadvertently impact cross-functional collaboration and cadence.
- New hires navigating their new role, organization and process may keep their older, more familiar ways of working if onboarding is poor.
- Seasoned innovators may demand more flexibility and process personalization to manage increasing workloads.
- New work-from-home or hybrid models that rely heavily on technology to connect people, share projects, and make decisions.
- Software implementations that simultaneously impact other business processes, information and inputs.
- New leaders under pressure to produce results introduce new cultural concepts and improvements.
Bottom line – your innovation process must excel at navigating your organization’s current environment. You want your process purpose-built to leverage your organizational strengths, navigate quickly and encounter little friction. Additionally, top-performing innovators build their unique, hard-to-copy competitive advantage into every new innovation. Their innovation process removes the guesswork and provides a roadmap to deliver success consistently and repeatedly.
Should you innovate the way, you innovate?
Of the three criteria described above, which one(s) resonates most with you? Why? Perhaps your organization is ready to innovate the way it innovates.
Unfortunately, too many organizations simply get the innovation process wrong. They view it too simply – copied right out of a book, a checklist, some forms, a rubber stamp or a mobile app to get project approval. Or they make it far too complex – big software, invites to everyone for every decision, meetings to prepare for meetings, scripts, and templates for everything – covering all aspects of potential failure. Once written, the process is carved into stone and fails to evolve or keep pace with the changing world around it.
You want your innovation process to reflect the organization’s acquired experience and learnings from previous projects, successes and failures. This is what keeps you one step ahead of your competitors – your ability to codify your learnings into a process that can scale innovation. You want it to absorb other organizations’ learnings, even organizations from other industries. Good management practices are transferrable, and there is no shame in standing on the shoulders of the giants before you!
Pioneers in Innovation Process
Our company founders, Dr Robert G. Cooper and Dr Scott J. Edgett, are the pioneers of innovation process. It started with a first-of-its-kind innovation benchmarking study and, what eventually became a continuous, 45-year fact-finding mission, has repeatedly surfaced the most important practices and drivers of in-market business success from innovation. Over the years, some practices and drivers have remained central to success, while others have not stood the test of time. Today, we continue this mission to stay on top of innovation management for you so you can focus on what matters most to your organization and your customers – delivering high-impact innovation!
Connect with us to discuss whether it’s time for you to innovate the way you innovate.
