Some organizations develop lots of ideas—but far too few take flight and make a material impact on performance. Often the issue is a lack of both speed and rigor in idea validation, incubation, and acceleration.
Companies pursue mediocre ideas for too long, misallocate resources, and are unable to see and therefore fund the good ideas that could actually scale.
Adopting elements of agile ways of working and culture can help. Leading innovators empower cross-functional teams with shared goals to discover and pursue customer-centered growth opportunities—and then work in sprints to create, launch, and learn from minimum viable products MVPs in the real world.
By failing, failing again, and winning , they empower teams to learn through real-world experiments and maximize for outcomes, not output.
Of course, companies using agile methods also need to channel the chaos by defining clear guardrails and high-level direction—and give teams the freedom to create within those limits. Such alignment unleashes the power of autonomy. Agile puts a priority on speed to market. Teams are free to test MVPs, watch them fail, learn, and move on quickly.
In what was once the domain of digital startups, today even traditional manufacturing companies use market-driven product development and launch processes that operate in short phases—which allows them to reprioritize and iterate quickly, based on market-validated KPIs.
To solve for rigor, even large tech companies such as Amazon and Google that are known for their innovative cultures use a guiding structure of governance and process. Both companies encourage risk taking, but they also have stringent capital controls, resource-allocation mechanisms, and clear processes in place to guide projects or kill them.
Past performance does not guarantee future results. This is nowhere as true as in innovation. As is well-known, large and successful entities are often very effective at starving their emergent offspring. To get around this pitfall, top companies lead the transition from the old to the new by managing innovation programs transparently and with discipline, regularly assessing progress and moving quickly to dismantle internal impediments to promising ideas. And they build to scale , by investing in the capabilities needed to support the rapid ramping up of new innovations that have demonstrated a strong product-market fit.
The brewer Carlsberg regularly rebalances its product development portfolio to ensure a healthy mix of projects within as well as outside the core, and management regularly shifts capital toward the most high-potential and disruptive projects.
Leading innovators in markets with short, technology-driven product cycles recognize that the future depends on their continued ability to develop new products and businesses.
Cisco trains its executives in the key elements of product development through an intensive week course that focuses on collaboration and product management. The program has gained significant status in the organization, and aspiring leaders vie to participate. In fact, we can safely predict that in the future, more C-level executives will have a strong track record in successful product management.
Leading companies see innovation as a journey that needs to be managed systematically, on multiple dimensions, to drive excellence and impact. See Exhibit 2. From external experts to stakeholders, universities, customers and online visitors, you can collect valuable ideas and feedback and improve your products and services.
Incorporating innovation strategy into the overall business strategy is an important step in achieving long-term success and we can see that it is still a huge issue for organizations to connect and align them properly.
Innovation strategy needs to provide clear guidelines for the execution of innovation activities as well as its connection with the overall company product portfolio. Only when strategic alignment is achieved, companies will be able to innovate in the long and predictable term. Dissatisfaction with innovation performance is a clear indicator that companies have a lack of innovation strategy, management, processes, tools and metrics.
Considering the fact that the market is becoming more and more customer-focused, customer engagement and contribution is becoming the most valuable element of innovation within any industry. Customers are becoming the driving force of innovation and any customer-focused organization should create ways to easily connect with their customer base and take advantage of this huge innovation potential.
Of course, engagement works both ways. According to this statistic, organizations have to pay more attention to maximizing the return on investments. To do this properly you have to have a clear structure and more measured approach to understand the impact on the bottom line.
We can freely conclude that strong innovators have already digitized their innovation process. The transformation of the innovation process, on the one hand, requires changes in strategy, operations and overall organization, and on another, simplifies the execution of innovation processes.
Embracing digital solutions for innovation management will open up new opportunities and possibilities. And 64 percent say this problem is restricting their ability to innovate a challenge that has increased over time, up from 56 percent in The employees are considered to be the most crucial element to innovation success, yet skill gaps continue to be the top concern among businesses.
Finding and retaining the right talent and skillsets is equally important as investing in employees to gain new knowledge and skills.
Conversely, HR, Legal, and Manufacturing are most likely to be considered slow to adapt to technological change. It is no surprise that the departments with more creative and flexible jobs are more likely to succeed in adapting to technological change. Implementing technological solutions will improve your processes and operational efficiency. Therefore to make your investment pay off, make sure to educate your employees to use the tool, before implementing such a solution.
Technology-driven disruption is not new and we are witnessing that over the last two decades new technologies have emerged and fundamentally changed the way we work. However, disruption will not take place in a vacuum. To see and understand the impact of the technology-driven disruption, organizations have to have the appropriate structure, knowledge-transfer and policies in place. Both roles require high education and experience yet corporations mature in innovation require a results-oriented professional background before reaching a level where roles are allocated towards leadership.
Corporate innovation leaders definitely have a long way to climb corporate ladders. Leadership positions are reserved for those able to acquire their position through knowledge, experience and great leadership skills. They need to know the business, their employees and to have the credibility to obtain needed resources from executives.
This statistic shows that the trend to launch a product to the market as quickly as possible does not exist anymore, even with the option of delivering an imperfect and incomplete product or service and improving it along the way.
About the author Jesse Nieminen is the Co-founder and Chairman at Viima , the best way to collect and develop ideas. Ideascale T February 6th, Categories: Strategies Tags: amazon , apple , Best Practices , bottom-up innovation , education , idea management , in-depth article , innovation champion , Innovation Management , innovation metrics , innovation performance , Innovation Strategy , innovation success , innovative people , learning , persistence , resource allocation , resources , strategy , top-down innovation , value creation.
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