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Achieving a Transformation Vision for a Better Future

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Achieving a Transformation Vision for a Better Future

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

A major challenge that most large enterprises face is the lack of a true transformation vision.

Most organizations have a basic vision for growth: to serve the maximum number of people, to sell the maximum amount of product, to grow different segments, or to expand in new areas. But in most large enterprises I’ve worked with, that vision is usually about doing more of the same. They optimize what they already have, expand what they already do, update the way that they’re currently selling to very similar customer groups, and interact with their customers in a way very similar to their current operations.

For most organizations to be successful as the world changes around them, they need to change and adapt more profoundly than that. During times of change, driving growth within an organization using tactics similar to current ones don’t often work well. The most common technique I see leaders of large enterprises using to drive growth is to go to each individual area and tell them to continue driving growth in their area. For example, product groups get, “Make new products.”; channel groups get, “Find new channels.”; and the sales group gets, “Sell more stuff!” If you multiply all the effect of these different areas of growth together, you get something that looks like pretty good growth for the organization overall.

Imagine a caterpillar trying to figure out become a butterfly, and having every part of its body come up with its own strategies and methods to contribute. A segmented approach can work when you’re just trying to multiply the scale of what you’re already achieving, with little to no optimization in the different areas.

But there’s a problem with this method. Imagine a caterpillar trying to figure out become a butterfly, and having every part of its body come up with its own strategies and methods to contribute. A segmented approach can work when you’re just trying to multiply the scale of what you’re already achieving, with little to no optimization in the different areas. But it doesn’t work when you’re trying to transform an entire organization, and entire transformation is what we need to do to keep up with the quickly changing digital world. A vision for the whole transformation is what’s going to truly coordinate your entire organization.

You are probably familiar with Lana Turner, movie star from the ’40s and the famous story of her discovery that made her Hollywood starlet. The story goes: Around 1934, 16-year-old Judy Turner (her real name), is skipping school and having a Coke at the Schwab’s Pharmacy counter in Hollywood. She’s spotted by a famous movie director who says, “You’re beautiful and have a wholesome look. You’d be great in a movie. I’m going to take you in for a screen test.” He brings her to the back lot, does the screen test, and it’s fantastic. He puts her in a movie, and she becomes one of the top stars in Hollywood. The rest is history!

There are two problems with this story. First, it’s not actually true. The whole story is fiction, dreamed up by 1930’s Hollywood PR teams. But even if it happened to be true, it would be an extreme outlier. Transformation doesn’t just happen by accident or good luck. It doesn’t even happen because it’s deserved, or because of inherent merit. The other day, I was listening to Howard Stern interviewing Jennifer Hudson about her success. He asked her if, when she was a child and sang in church, everyone knew that she was going to be a star. She said, “No, because there were a lot of kids in my church who could sing like that, and there were a lot of people in my family who could sing like that.” The difference was that, besides the talent, she also had the drive, determination, and the vision to succeed.

This idea of needing vision to succeed isn’t new. The great poet and three times Pulitzer Prize Winner, Carl Sandburg, said, “Nothing happens unless first a dream.” American inventor George Washington Carver, said, “Where there is no vision, there is no hope.” And Helen Keller said, “The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.”

What is this transformation vision that you need to create? What are its components?

There are two parts to a transformation vision. The first is a vision of how the world is changing. How are your customers going to be changing over the next few years? How is technology going to change, and what do you think your competitors, old or new, might do with the changing landscape?

The second component is to determine what new products and services you can bring to market. How can you take advantage of these changes in environment and your customers, and how will you compete with what your competitors are doing? How does your business model need to change, based on new technology capabilities, or new customer behaviors? How will your operations, cost structure, and ultimately, interaction with our customers, change? Will we be delivering on different channels, serving and supporting them in different ways, or will we be dealing with an entirely new set of customers?

It might seem like you need to be able to see into the future to answer these questions, and I think that’s a major reason why many enterprises don’t have a true transformational vision. They may have a five-year plan, but it isn’t really a vision for transformation — more of just a hopeful projection of growth based on where they are now. They believe they can’t see far enough into the future for it to be practical to have a vision of the future. But here’s the thing: you can foretell the future. I’ll do it right now: It’s about 4:30pm here in New York. I think that in the next couple hours, many people in my area will be having dinner. I’m heading to the airport shortly, for a flight to London, and I predict that there will be lines at the TSA checkpoints that I’ll have to take into account to get on my flight on time. The truth is, we can see into the future to some degree, based on previous experience. We might not always be right, but there’s a lot of information we can use to get a reasonable hypothesis of what the future is going to look like.

Was the iPhone that much of a shock, after the Blackberry Treo and other smartphones that came before? True, it had aspects that we might not have anticipated, and the precise timing might not have been predictable by someone who wasn’t in on Apple’s plans, but its existence on the market was relatively predictable.

To get into the business of predicting the future, we have to get over the fear of being wrong. As Seth Golden said, “The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.” I believe this is absolutely true.

Here’s one last thought about creating transformation visions: It’s important to be able to think in terms of transformation time. Sometimes our focus is so much in the next quarter or the things that we have to get done right now. And that is the reality of the world of the large enterprise, especially if it’s a public company. But in order to be successful long-term, you have to be able to think in terms of transformation time, to think a few years ahead. Why? Because the transformations that you need are often going to take a few years. Products and solutions that burst onto the market, like the iPhone, are in development for years before they ever see the light of day. So many of the things that we see as overnight successes are really the result of long-term visioning, planning, R&D efforts and product development, and there are products that don’t succeed that went through those processes, too. Risk tolerance is important for transformation vision since you have to be ready for a number of potential futures. Those that are successful will be those that define the future of the company.

To recap, take the time to predict the future and be willing to be wrong. Track the changes in the world, and engage yourself in ongoing research, both to initially develop your long-term transformation vision and then to continue to see whether your predictions appear to be coming true. Is the timeframe you initially anticipated changing? If so, adjust your transformation vision to align with what is actually happening. Most importantly, be willing to get it wrong. Second, look at the fundamental value proposition your company brings to your customers. How would that value proposition be best delivered in this future that you envision? If you built a new company today that was going to launch three years from now, how would we build that for where we think the world will be in a few years? You can use that exercise as a way of defining what your transformation vision should potentially be. Take bets, consider and prepare for different possible futures, so you can be prepared for the actual future when it arrives.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credit: Pixabay

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What Company Do You See in the Mirror?

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What Company Do You See in the Mirror?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

There are many types of companies, and it can be difficult to categorize them. And even within the company itself, there is disagreement about the company’s character. And one of the main sources of disagreement is born from our desire to classify our company as the type we want it to be rather than as the type that it is.

Here’s a process that may bring consensus to your company.

For all the people on the payroll, assign a job type and tally them up for the various types. If most of your people work in finance, you work for a finance company. If most work in manufacturing, you work for a manufacturing company. The same goes for sales, engineering, customer service, consulting. Write your answer here __________.

For all the company’s profits, assign a type and roll up the totals. If most of the profit is generated through the sale of services, you work for a service company. If most of the profit is generated by the sale of software, you work for a software company. If hardware generates profits, you work for a hardware company. If licensing of technology generates profits, you work at a technology company. Which one fits your company best? Write your answer here _________.

For all the people on the payroll, decide if they work to extend and defend the core offerings (the things that you sell today) or create new offerings in new markets that are sold to new customers. If most of the people work on the core offerings, you work for a low-growth company. If most of the people work to create new offerings (non-core), you work for a high-growth company. Which fits you best – extend and defined the core / low-growth or new offerings / high growth? Write your answer here __________ / ___________.

Now, circle your answers below.

We are a (finance, manufacturing, sales, engineering, customer service, consulting) company that generates most of its profits through the sale of (services, hardware, software, technology). And because most of our people work to (extend and defend the core, create new offerings), we are a (low, high) growth company.

To learn what type of company you work for, read the sentences out loud.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Shared Values Key to Achieving the Most Radical Visions

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Shared Values Key to Achieving the Most Radical Visions

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

With the political season heating up, an increasingly frequent topic of discussion is how radical candidates should be. Some say that the optimal strategy is to be mainstream and court the middle. Others argue that it is better to more extreme and rile up the passions of your most active supporters.

Yet as I explain in Cascades that’s a false choice. The truth is that once seemingly radical positions, such as voting rights for women, civil rights for disenfranchised racial groups and same-sex marriage are now considered mainstream. To win those battles, however, activists needed to appeal to shared values.

What’s key isn’t any particular policy, but whether you can appeal to common values and mobilize supporters to influence institutions that will determine whether you can bring change about. You don’t do that through enforcing ideological purity or demonizing your opposition, but by putting forward an affirmative vision for a better future.

Change Starts With Passionate Grievance

As a young man, Nelson Mandela was angry. “I was sympathetic to the ultra-revolutionary stream of African nationalism,” he would later write. “I was angry at the white man, not at racism. While I was not prepared to hurl the white man into the sea, I would have been perfectly happy if he climbed aboard his steamships and left the continent of his own volition.”

After the National Party won elections in 1948 on a white supremacist platform, things got worse for native blacks , Indians and coloureds (mixed race). Mixed marriages were outlawed and it was mandated that races would live in segregated areas. This policy of Apartheid would only become more extreme over the next half century.

Mandela and his comrades stepped up their efforts as well. Rather than just merely protesting, the African National Congress (ANC) adopted a program of direct action, including boycotts, stay-at-homes, strikes and other tactics designed to undermine the Apartheid regime. Whatever hopes for working within the system that had remained were now gone for good.

Yet while Mandela’s actions intensified, his views tempered somewhat. Originally skeptical of building links with other racial groups, he began to see the value of collaboration. That’s what set the stage dealing the first blow to Apartheid, The Freedom Charter.

Searching Out Common Values

In June 1955, the Congress of The People, a gathering that included blacks, Coloureds, Indians and liberal whites convened to draft and adopt the Freedom Charter, much like the Continental Congress gathered to produce the Declaration of Independence in America. The idea was to come up with a common and inclusive vision.

However, the Freedom Charter was anything but moderate. It was a “revolutionary document precisely because the changes it envisioned could not be achieved without radically altering the economic and political structure of South Africa… In South Africa, to merely achieve fairness, one had to destroy apartheid itself, for it was the very embodiment of injustice.”

Yet despite its radical aims, the Freedom Charter spoke to common values, such as equal rights and equal protection under the law—not just among the signatories, but for anyone living in a free society. It didn’t seem so at the time—and the struggle would go on for decades—but the Freedom Charter ended up being the first major blow to Apartheid.

In later years, when Mandela was accused of being a communist, an anarchist and worse, he would point out that nobody had to guess what he believed, because it had been written down in the Freedom Charter in 1955. Of course, it would have been conceived differently if it had been an ANC-only document-—and some within the ANC bitterly protested—but it was the common ground that document created that brought about the end of Apartheid.

Influencing Institutions

All too often, those who seek to bring about change, whether that change be in an organization, an industry, a community or throughout society as a whole, seek only to mobilize support among interest groups. That’s necessary, but far from sufficient. The truth is that only institutions can bring about real change.

In South Africa, Mandela and his comrades suffered under an all-powerful regime. Yet what they understood was that the government relied on many institutions outside the country for its survival. That was a significant vulnerability that could be exploited by mobilizing interest groups to influence key institutions.

One key campaign was taken against Barclays Bank in British university towns. For example, in 1984, Anti-Apartheid activists spray-painted “WHITES ONLY” and “BLACKS” above pairs of Barclays ATMs in British university town to draw attention to the bank’s investments in South Africa.

This of course, had little to no effect on public opinion in South Africa, but it meant a lot to the English university students that the bank wanted to attract. Barclays share of student accounts quickly plummeted from 27% to 15% and two years later Barclays pulled out all of its investments from the country.

It was a major blow that helped lead to other corporate divestments, sanctions from western governments and, eventually, the downfall of the regime. Apartheid had simply become economically untenable.

Surviving Victory

Mandela’s ascension to the Presidency of South Africa in 1994 was a historic triumph, but if it had stopped there the victory would have been limited. As we have seen more recently in places ranging from Ukraine to Egypt, even great, hard-fought victories can quickly be reversed. Every revolution inspires a counter-revolution.

To achieve lasting change, you need to plan to survive victory and you do that by reaffirming your commitment to common values. In the case of South Africa, that meant adhering to the principles of the Freedom Charter, which called for equal rights for all citizens, even for the white oppressors. That’s why today Mandela is remembered as a hero and not some tin-pot dictator.

In researching Cascades, I found that these principles held true not only in political and social contexts, but even in the corporate world. Radical change was achieved in firms ranging from IBM, Alcoa and Experian to fields like healthcare and education. In many cases, the degree of change surpassed anything anyone thought possible.

The truth is that success doesn’t depend on how radical or how moderate the vision, but how well you can appeal to shared values. Or, as Mandela himself put it, “to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Weighing the Effectiveness of a Leader

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Weighing the Effectiveness of a Leader

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

As a college student, I was a volunteer on Joe Biden’s initial race for U.S. Senate. I recalled him saying something like, “If I’m elected, come see me in Washington.” Twenty or so years later I did just that. I put Biden to the test.

It was after a speaking engagement in Washington, D.C. I was about to head to the airport when I spotted the majestic Capitol dome in the distance. I remembered Biden’s promise. I had the cabbie to take me over to the Senate Office Building wherein the Delaware senator’s receptionist dutifully passed along my request.

Moments later a smiling and familiar figure appeared. The senator shook my hand and barely slowed down long enough to usher me to accompany him over to the Senate floor where he needed to cast a vote. We visited on the tram back and forth, and shortly we were back at his office, whereupon he thanked me for my service and disappeared.

Brief though it was, Biden passed my little test. He kept his word. He walked his talk. It was just that simple, yet I never forgot it.

I recall that incident from long ago because right now because it seems that leaders everywhere are being put to the test. Constituents, employees, and everybody else is asking tough questions about the competence and character of leaders.

As an innovation coach and public speaker, I’ve had a 35 year ringside seat to observe leadership in action. Working in 54 countries, and in every state and with businesses and trade groups of every size and industry, I’ve seen examples of great leadership that inspired me no end. I’ve worked with top teams of businesses in Rome, Charlotte, Bangkok and Abu Dabi. I’ve observed leadership in mobile phone companies in Bahrain, staffing companies in Kansas City, energy companies in Kenya, and direct selling companies in Peru. And lately, as we all have, I’ve seen dysfunctional and self-serving leadership at the national level that has disgusted me and made me fearful for future generations.

Never has there been such an urgent need for leadership as right now. Many of the readers of InnovationTrends are CEOs and senior leaders of large organizations. This is my call for you to step up to the plate: your company, your country needs you to lead.

And as leaders, you and I face three distinct challenges going forward:

  1. Can we build trust where trust is lacking?
  2. Can we anticipate change and think ahead of the curve?
  3. Can we execute skillfully and turn vision into reality?

Let’s examine these one-by-one:

The first thing leaders must do is build trust.

From the White House to the schoolhouse to the state house and to businesses and nonprofit organizations large and small, followers are asking those in leadership positions: are you the “real deal” and can I trust you? Do you have my back? And can I trust you to keep me and my family and my community safe? Can you steer and navigate this organization to a better place, or will you stand idly by as it is disrupted by forces you don’t understand, and don’t have a strategy to counteract?

The second thing leaders must do is to anticipate future threats and opportunities.

This week I’m interviewing Rick Sorkin, CEO of Jupiter Intelligence, a climate risk startup with headquarters in Silicon Valley, and whose business booked ten times as many contracts in the first quarter of this year as it did in the prior year. “I think that the pandemic was a bit of a near death experience,” Sorkin told the Washington Post. “Once people got past [it], they were like, ‘Oh, what else is there like this that we’re not worrying about?’” Climate change is at the top of that list.

By using advanced computer modeling, Jupiter forecasts the likelihood of a wildfire disaster, or the threat of a flood engulfing your chemical plant. Jupiter offers a whole new level of insight into what might previously have been considered “unforeseen” risks. Post Covid/Post Jan 6 everyone instinctively realizes we are living in a period of ever-broader “unsustainable” risks. Today’s leaders can no longer kick cans down the road. They must lead, for their anticipation skills are on full display. All leaders need to develop and use better tools and methods to help anticipate threats, but also, as Jupiter is doing, to position, wherever and whenever possible to translate them – using creativity and innovation thinking — into opportunities.

The third thing that leaders need to do is to execute successfully and turn vision into reality.

I once interviewed Warren Bennis, the late leadership guru and former president of the University of Cincinnati. Professor Bennis believed in the adage that great leaders are not born but made, insisting that “the process of becoming a leader is similar, if not identical, to becoming a fully integrated human being,” as he put it in an interview with the New York Times. Both, he said, were grounded in self-discovery.

Yet It was Bennis’s definition of leadership that I recall now, as being particularly appropriate to the times we are living in. Leadership, as Bennis saw it, is “the capacity to translate vision into reality.”

And that vision-to-reality transformation is what we need to study now, to celebrate now, and to strive to get better at. Instead of “just getting by” or muddling through, true leaders develop a vision of where they want to take the organization. They study the trends, they look back to be guided by history, and they inform themselves consciously and consistently as to where today’s trends are headed, and they take risks and make investments, rather than merely “kicking the can down the road” for future leaders to deal with.

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – May 10, 2012

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“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”

– Steve Jobs

“While an innovation vision determines the kinds of innovation that an organization, and an innovation strategy determines what the organization will focus on when it comes to innovation, it is the innovation goals that break things down into tangible objectives that employees can work against.”

– Braden Kelley

“Innovation is creativity with a job to do.”

– John Emmerling

What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – May 8, 2012

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“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.”

– Jack Welch

“An innovation strategy is not merely a technology roadmap from R&D or an agenda for new product development. Instead, an innovation strategy identifies who will drive a company’s profitable revenue growth and what will represent a strong competitive advantage for the firm going forward. Under this umbrella the innovation goals for the organization can be created.”

– Braden Kelley

“Innovation is part of a process that involves creating something new (invention), figuring out how to commercialize it (innovation) and then actually getting to adopt it (marketing)”

– Noah Brier, Percolate
Submitted by Jason Williams

What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation QuickStart Guide

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Innovation QuickStart GuideYou know how sometimes when you order a product you get this inch-thick instruction manual that you never read, but also how there is sometimes a QuickStart Guide of 5-10 simple steps to get you up and running quickly?

Well, Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire is the instruction manual that an increasing number of organizations are ordering for teams to help them with their innovation efforts. But, I’m sure companies could also use an Innovation QuickStart. So, here is one you could use (excerpted in part from my book):

10 Steps to Get Your Innovation Efforts Off to a Good Start

1. Conduct an Innovation Audit

How can you know where you are going to go with innovation if you don’t first know where you already are? For this reason I created a 50 question innovation audit and linked it to an Innovation Maturity Model from Karl T. Ulrich and Christian Terwiesch of Wharton Business School.

Innovation Maturity Model

2. Define What Innovation Means for Your Organization

Here is a simple exercise you can do next time you get together in your organization to talk about innovation. Have everyone in the group write down what their definition of innovation is, and then compare that to the official definition of innovation for the organization (if you have one) and the innovation definitions of others in the group. Defining innovation as an organization is important because it helps you determine what kinds of innovation you are focusing on as an organization, and what kinds of innovation you ARE NOT focusing on.

3. Create a Common Language of Innovation

Creating a definition of innovation is the first step in creating a common language of innovation. The importance of creating a common language of innovation is that language is one of the most important components of culture. If people in your organization don’t talk about innovation in a consistent way and see communications reinforcing the common language, how can you possibly hope to embed innovation in the culture of the organization? Ensuring consistent language in presentations, emails, etc. and having people read the same book on innovation or taking the same training courses are just some ways to help create and reinforce a common language of innovation.

4. Define Your Innovation Vision

A startup begins life as a single-minded entity focused on innovating for one set of customers with a single product or service. Often as a company grows to create a range of products and/or services, the organization can start to lose track of what it is trying to achieve, which customers it is trying to serve, and the kind of solutions that are most relevant and desired by them.

Jack Welch, CEO of GE once said, “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.”

Vision is about focus and vision is about the ‘where’ and the ‘why’ not the ‘what’ or the ‘how’. A vision gives the business a sense of purpose and acts as a rudder when the way forward appears uncertain. An innovation vision is no less important, and it serves the same basic functions. An innovation vision can help to answer some of the following questions for employees:

  • Is innovation important or not?
  • Are we focusing on innovation or not?
  • What kind of innovation are we pursuing as an organization?
  • Is innovation a function of some part of the business?
  • Or, is innovation something that we are trying to place at the center of the business?
  • Are we pursuing open or closed innovation, or both?
  • Why should employees, suppliers, partners, and customers be excited to participate?

When people have questions, they tend not to move forward. For that reason it is crucial that an organization’s leadership both has a clear innovation vision, and clearly and regularly communicates it to key stakeholders. If employees, suppliers, partners, and customers aren’t sure what the innovation vision of the organization is, how can they imagine a better way forward?

Pre-Order Nine Innovation Roles Card Decks

5. Define Your Innovation Strategy

Many organizations take the time to create an organizational strategy and a mission statement, only to then neglect the creation of an innovation vision and an innovation strategy. An innovation strategy is not merely a technology roadmap from R&D or an agenda for new product development. Instead, an innovation strategy identifies who will drive a company’s profitable revenue growth and what will represent a strong competitive advantage for the firm going forward. Under this umbrella the innovation goals for the organization can be created.

An innovation strategy sets the innovation direction for an organization towards the achievement of its innovation vision. It gives members of the organization an idea of what new achievements and directions will best benefit the organization when it comes to innovation. As with organizational strategy, innovation strategy must determine WHAT the organization should focus on (and WHAT NOT to) so that tactics can be developed for HOW to get there.

Innovation Vision Strategy Goals

6. Define Your Innovation Goals

Just as managers and employees need goals to know what to focus on and to help them be successful, organizations need innovation goals too. Clear innovation goals, when combined with a clear innovation strategy and a single-minded innovation vision for the organization, will maximize the instinctual innovation that emerges from employees and the intellectual innovation that occurs on directed innovation projects.

While an innovation vision determines the kinds of innovation that an organization, and an innovation strategy determines what the organization will focus on when it comes to innovation, it is the innovation goals that break things down into tangible objectives that employees can work against. Let’s look at P&G as an example to see how these three things come together at the highest level:

Innovation Vision

  • Reach outside the company’s own R&D department for innovation

Innovation Strategy

  • Create a formal program (Connect + Develop) to focus on this vision

Innovation Goal

  • Source 50% of the company’s innovation from outside

The 50% goal gives employees and management something to measure against, and it sets a very visible benchmark that the whole organization can understand and visualize how big the commitment and participation must be in order to reach it. It is at this point of communicating the innovation goals that senior management also has to communicate how they intend to support their efforts and how they will help employees reach the innovation goals.

7. Create a Pool of Money to Fund Innovation Projects

Product managers leading product groups and general managers leading business units typically have revenue numbers they are trying to hit, and they will spend their budgets trying to hit those numbers. As a result, there are often precious little financial resources (and human resources) available for innovation projects that don’t generate immediate progress toward this quarter’s business goals. As a result, many organizations find themselves setting money aside outside of the product or business unit silos that can be allocated on the future needs of the business instead of the current needs of the product managers and general managers. This also allows the organization to build an innovation portfolio of projects with different risk profiles and time horizons. But, however you choose to fund innovation projects, the fact remains that you need to have a plan for doing so, or the promising projects that form your future innovation pipeline – will never get funded.

8. Create Human Resource Flexibility to Staff Innovation Projects

Some organizations allow employees to spend a certain percentage of their time on whatever they want, but most don’t. Some organizations allow employees to pitch to spend a certain percentage of their time on developing a promising idea, but most organizations are running so lean that they feel there is no time or money for innovation. Often this is true and so employees sometimes work on promising ideas on their own time, but they shouldn’t have to. And if you make them do so, it will be much more likely that they will develop the promising idea with others outside the company and the organization will gain nothing from these efforts.

Don’t turn your motivated intrapreneurs into entrepreneurs.

You must find a way to create resource flexibility. Organizations that want to continue to grow and thrive must staff the organization in a way that allows managers to invest a portion of their employees’ time into promising innovation projects. One model to consider is that of Intuit, which allows employees to form project teams and to accumulate percent time and then schedule time off to work on an innovation project with co-workers in the same way that they schedule a vacation. This allows the manager to plan for the employees’ absence from the day-to-day and allows the employee to focus on the innovation project during that scheduled leave from their workgroup. But that’s just one possible way to create human resource flexibility.

Pre-Order Nine Innovation Roles Card Decks

9. Focus on Value – Innovation is All About Value

Value creation is important, but you can’t succeed without equal attention being paid to both value access and value translation because innovation is all about value…

Innovation = Value Creation (x) Value Access (x) Value Translation = Success!

Now you will notice that the components are multiplicative not additive. Do one or two well and one poorly and it doesn’t necessarily add up to a positive result. Doing one poorly and two well can still doom your innovation investment to failure. Let’s look at the three equation components in brief:

Value Creation is pretty self-explanatory. Your innovation investment must create incremental or completely new value large enough to overcome the switching costs of moving to your new solution from the old solution (including the ‘Do Nothing Solution’). New value can be created by making something more efficient, more effective, possible that wasn’t possible before, or create new psychological or emotional benefits.

Value Access could also be thought of as friction reduction. How easy do you make it for customers and consumers to access the value you’ve created. How well has the product or service been designed to allow people to access the value easily? How easy is it for the solution to be created? How easy is it for people to do business with you?

Value Translation is all about helping people understand the value you’ve created and how it fits into their lives. Value translation is also about understanding where on a continuum between the need for explanation and education that your solution falls. Incremental innovations can usually just be explained to people because they anchor to something they already understand, but radical or disruptive innovations inevitably require some level of education (often far in advance of the launch). Done really well, value translation also helps to communicate how easy it will be for customers and consumers to exchange their old solution for the new solution.

The key thing to know here is that even if you do a great job at value creation, if you do a poor job at either value access or value translation, you can still fail miserably.

10. Focus on Creating a Culture of Learning Fast

There is a lot of chatter out there about the concept of ‘failing fast’ as a way of fostering innovation and reducing risk. Sometimes the concept of ‘failing fast’ is merged with ‘failing cheap’ to form the following refrain – ‘fail fast, fail cheap, fail often’.

Now don’t get me wrong, one of the most important things an organization can do is learn to accept failure as a real possibility in their innovation efforts, and even to plan for it by taking a portfolio approach that balances different risk profiles, time horizons, etc.

But when it comes to innovation, it is not as important whether you fail fast or fail slow or whether you fail at all, but how fast you learn. And make no mistake, you don’t have to fail to innovate (although there are always some obstacles along the way). With the right approach to innovation you can learn quickly from failures AND successes.

The key is to pursue your innovation efforts as a discrete set of experiments designed to learn certain things, and instrumenting each project phase in such a way that the desired learning is achieved.

The central question should always be:

“What do we hope to learn from this effort?”

When you start from this question, every project becomes a series of questions you hope to answer, and each answer moves you closer to identifying the key market insight and achieving your expected innovation. The questions you hope to answer can include technical questions, manufacturing questions, process questions, customer preference questions, questions about how to communicate the value to customers, and more. AND, the answers that push you forward can come from positive discrete outcomes OR negative discrete outcomes of the different project phases.

The ultimate goal of a ‘learning fast’ approach to innovation is to embed in your culture the ability to extract the key insights from your pursuits and the ability to quickly recognize how to modify your project plan to take advantage of unexpected learnings, and the flexibility and empowerment to make the necessary course corrections.

The faster you get at learning from unforeseen circumstances and outcomes, the faster you can turn an invention into an innovation by landing smack on what the customer finds truly valuable (and communicating the value in a compelling way). Fail to identify the key value AND a compelling way to communicate it, and you will fail to drive mass adoption.

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Summary

When you start with an innovation audit and creating a common language of innovation (including a definition of innovation), it sets you up well to create a coherent innovation vision, strategy, and goals. And then if you build in the financial and human resource flexibility necessary to create a focus on value creation, access and translation – and support it with a culture that is focused on learning fast – YOU WILL have built a solid foundation for your innovation efforts to grow and mature on top of. Are there more things that go into embedding innovation into your culture and creating sustainable innovation success? Absolutely. But, if you work diligently on these ten items you will get your innovation efforts off to a strong start.

What are you waiting for?

Image Credits: Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire


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Innovation Quotes of the Day – April 10, 2012

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“Failing doesn’t make you a failure. Giving up, accepting your failure, refusing to try again, does.”

– Richard Exley

“We must create clarity in innovation language, vision, strategy, goals, and participation for a continuous innovation culture to be created.”

– Braden Kelley

What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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