Your Toolkit for Innovation Success
Innovation is ultimately about generating value for stakeholders but deciding what to do about innovation is one of the most difficult decisions to take.
The following pages will address three key areas that organizations must align to successfully innovate:
Environment
Mindset
Tools and skills
With the right mindset, tools, and skills and in a context that fosters it, innovation can start at full speed. But optimizing these three areas requires time, dedication, and starts with baby steps.
Innovation comes in many shapes and forms, and ultimately having clear innovation goals requires people to go beyond just working harder and pushing the boundaries of what an organization can do.
If you are looking to achieve sustainable innovation, for example, spend time refining your customer problem and analyzing the experience you are delivering so far. Your goals should be not too broad, nor too specific. They should enable everyone to follow a common direction and work out new ways of achieving success.
TOO WIDE
TOO NARROW
GOOD EXAMPLE
How might we improve customer experience?
How might we make the ‘buy’ button easier to find?
How might we improve customer drop-off processes?
How might we improve our business offering?
How can we increase traffic to our pension offering webpage for 18-35 year olds?
How can we make our pension offering more appealing to 13-35-year-olds?
How can we increase profits?
How can we save money on the labor costs of our factory production line?
How can we improve operational efficiency of our production line to drive savings?
Does my idea align with the strategy of my organization?
What am I trying to achieve and what are the success criteria?
Does my goal answer the problem I’m looking to solve?
What are the barriers to innovation, and can I overcome them?
What are the boundaries of my innovation project?
What is the timeline?
Are there processes in place to implement the idea? Who’s responsible for this?
Where did the need for innovation stem?
Does this idea fit the organization’s business strategy?
Is innovation defined in the organization and does this include clear goals and vision?
Is this idea completely new? Are the right processes in place to avoid re-invention?
When it comes to innovation, is there a "common language" that everyone can understand and follow?
What are the barriers to innovation and what is the organisation’s or department’s role in helping overcome these?
Once you have aligned your business and innovation goals, you will need to communicate these clearly, which will foster a culture of innovation to develop. This is what we want to examine next and why building the right mindset for you and others in your organization is the second element for successful innovation.
As you launch programs internally and start building an innovative culture, it’s crucial to embrace and encourage experiments, even if they are not successful. Ideas should be tried and tested, and key learnings applied to the next initiative. Make sure you are creating a space where everyone can collaborate and put forward their ideas.
A culture of innovation is not built overnight, it takes the right leader(s) to help foster and cultivate. Particularly in large organizations, politics are considered the biggest barrier to innovation and they can intervene at every level. Leadership needs to remove the barriers for employees to innovate, by encouraging the right mindset and displaying the key characteristics needed to innovate, such as creativity and risk-taking.
A successful innovation leader will be persuasive, excelling in stretch goals, and being fast and decisive. Ideas, experiments, and prototypes can come and go quickly, so you must be able to learn fast from both successful and unsuccessful experiments.
Lastly, be the example of how you want your employees to act. Fostering this culture of innovation means having the right passion for projects and their fruition to spread inspiration through action.
Use positive language: this will help to keep your team motivated; encourage "experiments" and don’t refer to your innovation initiatives as "failures" when these don’t have the outcome desired.
Stay loyal to doing what’s right for the organization and those involved in your innovation program (staff, customers, partners, etc.).
Give yourself and others time and space to engage in innovation: this might involve disconnecting from the multitasking work style. Skip checking LinkedIn, emails, etc. in favor of pursuing creative ideas.
Be highly accessible and ensure colleagues know they have your support when it comes to celebrating success, but also when ideas don’t go to plan.
Start small, review often: this will provide you with the initial wins you need and the opportunity to improve and scale your ideas fast; setting recurring meetings can help keep everyone committed to achieving your innovation program goals.
Recognise employees for their contribution, but also for their commitment and provide honest and constructive feedback.
Regularly ask for feedback from all your stakeholders.
The final element is putting the right tools and skills together. Innovation may start with one person, but it doesn’t just happen by having a few strategic people locked away on their own. Having the right network of people and systems in place that support your idea is critical to success. Everyone should be involved as a best practice and exercise upward and downward communication.
Once all the key stakeholders have been brought together you will want to consider developing a process understood and easily applicable by all. Next, discuss what technology will support your programs going forward.
Put together a multidisciplinary team: innovation should not be assigned to only one department. You will need people from across the board - from employees to strategic management and senior leadership.
Each person will approach an idea from a different angle and with a different set of skills, which means you will end up with a more holistic outlook.
Involve employees from around the world: this will also give your program a broader view with regional expertise
Give innovation programs a name and keep everyone in the know by promoting this through internal marketing channels such as newsletters, town halls, or portals.
Decide whether you will use a platform to connect the dots and the various stakeholders particularly if some of these are based remotely.
Idea Management platform
In-person meetings or workshops
Emails or internal communication channels
No process in place
Other