The truth about transforming corporate innovation culture

Transforming corporate innovation culture can lead to radical improvements in the scale, pace and impact of different thinking. The goal typically relates directly or indirectly to genuine new customer value and resultant shareholder benefits. The results in practice can be diverse, ranging from small increases in efficiency to new service models and spin out enterprise.

Developing successful innovation practice in large organisations today not an easy puzzle to solve.....many fall into the trap of trying to solve ‘innovation’ overnight (read ‘overnight’ in corporate to mean 1-2 years!).

Developing leadership buy in across the board takes time

Everyone understands leadership buy in and sponsorship is critical to success. While you desire to bring everyone with you from the very beginning of the journey…. some will need convincing. Large organisations are highly political and individuals at the top are sensitive to success and failure of initiatives.

Recognise who is critical from day one and build strategies to engage and secure support over the medium term.

Inevitably aspects of senior and operational leadership will struggle to afford mental space to abstract concepts of innovation programmes and the like. They are driven by operational targets and can often be pressed for time. Understand where ‘innovation’ can best support ‘high risk’ and ambitious corporate targets aligned with these individuals responsibilities. Focus on making innovation contextual and relevant to tangible performance targets. Use these ‘opportunities’ to show how structured innovation can enable different approaches and ‘take pain away’.

Maintain focus on building the overall culture and framework

Given profile commitment, the pressure to realise ‘big impactful results’ early is high and you can end up fixing one part of the puzzle, while losing focus on the whole transformation challenge.

Sustained effort in culture works and continuous effort to introduce new skills, thinking is critical. This demonstrates the need to work across the business with innovation championed by different aspects of senior leadership working together.

Targeting low hanging fruit

Its a good idea to start applying new methods of co-design and contemporary open innovation practice to well understood challenges. This enhances early engagement and buy in.

Be aware the success or failure of these early projects, regardless of ideology will practically impact on the broader adoption of new innovation thinking. Given this select challenges with a ‘solve’ flavour and those likely to establish tangible and demonstrable outcomes. You can work on the broader abstract, riskier, super-complex challenges later on as you build active community.

Focus on creating friction-less systems

Slow, complex committee based processes for prioritising agenda’s and selecting supported projects is the norm. There is often reticence to give these up as tight control is a lever for early senior leadership approval/ release of resources.

While dictating focus aligned with key strategic measures is sensible in early stages of culture transformation, helping operational manager prioritise their own challenges and select initiatives within a ‘priority framework’ is more effective.

Friction-less systems are essential to innovators and stakeholders being supported, enabling simplified processes and pace. Needless to say it’s easier said than done ... building confidence in self-regulated, evidence-based innovation pipelines takes time. This can be achieved through introduction of standardised tools for defining priority projects with objectivity and mapping progress.

Buying ‘off the shelf’ systems in NOT job done!

Developing a clear end to end framework for engaging staff, stakeholders and supply chain from ideas management to implementation does not often work out to a magic funnel as pitched to the board on day one.

Innovation flows typically evolve from early plans, the refined formula for streamlining decisions, releasing resources, and managing performance often emerging through ‘learning by doing’.

Using an online tool to create a central point of focus and engagement is not essential but works well in many organisations. Its important to personalise the deployment in line with culture and practical resources to maintain content and inertia. There are a range of tools to choose from and selecting the right platform can be a little overwhelming. They key is not to be persuaded by complexity but look for relevant reference case studies in terms of culture impacts and sustained adoption and commitment.

Avoid adoption and commercialisation fails with foresight

Later stages of the innovation pipeline are often misunderstood...adoption of ideas and progressing ‘projects’ is often misunderstood. For example absorption of new early stage ideas into broader digital transformation projects can mean, distortion, misinterpretation, sidelining and death!

Sustaining commitment to mature ideas into viable solutions is the ‘chasm of death’ in corporate environments….why …because many organisations are constrained by a host of factors:

• Limited ‘innovation’ staff capacity and remit

• No ‘mirrored’ innovation time or resources budget in operational teams

• Misunderstanding - considering front end innovation to be the goal in itself

• Considering ‘handing over ideas’ to operations to be the end of the innovation process

There are a host of mechanisms that can be put in place early to ensure good ideas are realised, not least establishing responsibility and commitments formally for operational management. Beyond this enabling departments and teams to be enterprising and to pitch for resources from both the corporation, advisory community and supply chain.

Collaboration for innovation is NOT ‘business as usual’

In practical terms working with suppliers (both new and existing) is essential. The process of making developments are practical and deploy-able means these parties often have to commit resources to the cause.

In innovation practice, beyond the ‘glamourvation’ of high profile open innovation events, sprints and hacks…practical mechanisms that build focused engagement with shared ambition are essential.

These are diverse and range from simple exploratory R&D projects to scale innovation partnerships . Essential to the mix are the creative SME/ enterprise communities. These are typically seen as hard audiences to engage with by corporations due to associated risks of engagement in supply contracts, especially those which are experimental in nature.

New processes that align with procurement rules but enable co-development of ideas into solutions are essential to de-risking experimentation, creating, co-designing and resourcing applicable solutions.

This does NOT mean ‘innovation competitions’, generalised open innovation calls (scouting), brick and mortar ‘innovation hubs’ or misplaced enterprise incubators.

In practical terms this means redeveloping policies and establishing processes for extended innovation engagement such as discrete innovation programmes with procured community, innovation partnerships and more broadly innovation acceleration in supply chain.

Getting smart with IP and commercialisation stance

Many times over we have seen corporations invest in innovation only to give the results away. While altruistic this is often not born of a formal decision made by leadership.

The existing approach may well be based on limited view of IP (Intellectual Property) value, whether to hold patents and a traditional view based on ‘business purpose’.

Leveraging value from implementation of solutions born in innovation processes, and ‘commercialisation’ of ideas requires serious consideration of existing policy. The ‘products’ of innovation process are often intangible IP such as new processes, combinations of existing products and services and new ways, not necessarily patents or design rights.

The value of these ‘products’ is in leveraging best value from supply chain, forging better contracts for supply and leveraging new relationships and solutions created for customer value. In this context the negotiated value is typically in terms, ownership and rights to exploit forthcoming ideas.

It’s here where a contemporary policy framework, smart IP and commercialisation stance are essential in supporting procurement to both align with modern innovation practice and to reap the rewards for the investor (the corporation).

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About +ADD Strategy

We are an innovation partnering agency focused on building capability and capacity in large and complex organisations. We have established partner clients across the U.K.

The team at +ADD represent a community of experienced innovation professionals working across strategy, process and systems , culture development and training, resourcing and funding. We also support delivery of challenges and projects.

To start with, we can assist you in understanding where you are now ...we offer a cost efficient processes for defining your innovation baseline , supporting understanding of your strengths and barriers to innovation.

The baseline study is helpful in establish a bespoke roadmap to support development of your innovation culture, capacity and ambitions.

Call us on 0191 313 0009 or email warren@addstrategy.co.uk to learn more about how we can help.

Come join the team

Melissa is an innovation project lead and wants to tell the world about the great projects she is working on at +ADD... 

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