Articles
Using Innovation to Drive Corporate Growth
Are You Getting All You Can from Your Innovation Pipeline?
Innovation under delivery versus expectations is a common complaint. But it doesn't have to be. Organizations that adhere to a few simple operating principles have higher Innovation success rates, and reap more growth from their Innovation investments. Said another way, not all Innovation efforts are created equal. You can determine if your organization's Innovation work is more or less likely to succeed by addressing four simple questions:
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Are your resources doing the work 100% dedicated to corporate innovation?
Corporate Innovation is not for sissies. It's a full time call, not a part time job. Part time work means partial attention, and that partial attention gets trumped by the urgent and immediate press of daily business. If you want any individual's Innovation work to get more than the last twenty minutes of every Friday afternoon, don't piggyback it on top of other work. Setting your Innovation work up with 100% dedicated resources will lead to smaller teams. That's fine. They'll be much more effective than larger numbers of part-timers. -
Are your Innovation teams working to a fast cycle rhythm?
Speed matters in Innovation work. Teams need to be working very closely to be able to quickly flex with changing conditions, and adapt to new learning the moment it comes in. Different from going businesses, the dynamics of an Innovation project are not well understood. In fact, the dynamics are often misleading. Teams that don't work closely, don't speak with each other at least daily, or do not do rapid cycle learning, are destined to misinterpret what they are seeing and either overinvest or prematurely kill their project. -
Are you personally involved and providing senior level leadership to your Innovation work?
Only you can provide your level of experience. Only you can help martial the level of resources needed, and keep those people assigned and focussed and the funding in place. Antibodies exist in every organization, and those antibodies will work against anything they view as 'foreign.' In this case the 'foreign' is the Innovation work. The antibodies are especially strong, and your help especially needed, if you have been wise enough to pull in resources from outside your organization to provide skills and expertise your Innovation work would otherwise be lacking. -
Are you treating your Innovation work the way a venture capitalist would?
Corporate Innovation projects are sometimes handicapped by the fact that they don't have a funding event, as entrepreneurs would if they were outside the umbrella of a large company. A frequent result is that risks don't get managed in proper order. The prime example is business model risk which is often overlooked or addressed late, in a corporation -- whereas a venture capitalist usually identifies business model risk as one of the first risks to learn about and manage.
While addressing these four questions won't guarantee you success, your odds of winning will be significantly raised by using these operating principles. You may even find yourself in the enviable position of having to sequence your launch investments behind a large number of proven-successful Innovations.
Anne Lilly Cone is an expert leader in Innovation, Consumer Strategy and Insights, and New Business Development. She had over 25 years of experience creating business breakthrough by identifying and harnessing future consumer dynamics to manage business risk in her previous role at P&G, and now puts her expertise to work for other multinational clients. Key outcomes of her work at P&G include MDVIP and other health care ventures, and Mr. Clean Performance Car Wash, Tide Dry Cleaners and other franchise ventures. Anne is available to consult.
Contact Information
Call or e-mail Dick Bruder, CCC President/CEO, at (513) 233-0011 or dbruder@cincconsult.com
