It’s a sort
of history repeating. In times of economic malaise, many corporations finally
decide to think of their future and invest in strategic experiments on
innovation .
And this is even truer for companies competing in ‘red ocean’ markets.
The challenge,
as usual, is on how to install an effective innovation process into a company
which has established mechanisms set up since long to support a main stream
business, spending as few resources as possible of course.
How to
rapidly overcome the cultural opposition of sceptical managers and colleagues
upon the opportunity, better, the need to provide the company with a process
which is able to structurally gather valuable ideas and transform them into
competitive value?
How to
rapidly design and deploy a process able to provide concrete results in short
time?
What type
of competence needs to be involved?
Relying on
external consultancy might give you the tricky confidence that will facilitate
quick results in a field where you still have not gained enough experience. But
completely relying on external consultancy will also expose your company to
awkwardly adapt to theoretical and very elegant academic models that very
little have in common with your company’s culture and mechanisms or with its
realistic investments capacity. This might turn very expensive and actually frustrate
the fulfilment of your honest, managerial evolutionary vision.
So, apart
from the usual prescriptions having been suggested by modern literature and
industrial experience on innovation during the past ten years (such as. strong
commitment by the top management, opening
to external contributions, creating dedicated cross-competence groups, etc),
what can really make it work?
Well, just
think about it, what kind of venture is pretty similar to the one I’m talking
about?
- Little
money to invest, many constraints, few resources
- Uncertain
targets, uncertain results
- Strong
inertia to change in the target market
- Little time
available to provide results, possibly with short life cycles
- High possibility
to fail
- Need for
quickly learning
- Effectively
communicate assumptions on possible return to gain credibility and the
possibility to get funds for growth
- The main
asset you can count on is people and their competence
Well, I’m
talking about start-ups. The main difference between the start-up challenge and
setting up an innovation function inside of an established company is about
CHANGE. Professor James Belasco talks about “teaching the elephant to dance” .
Many recipes are available on the market. But, how can we make it in time of
global crisis and resources shortage?
My idea is
that, before starting to look for your source of change outside of your company
(consultancy, openness, …), even if interesting and important in terms of
opportunities, a more sustainable resource is your company itself. And I’m not
talking about your R&D office. Your main asset is the people working for
your company, mainly if yours is a service company. I think it’s the case to go
through some progressive steps:
- Make a “Darwininan” selection of the
people more motivated to make innovation experiments (creativity, enterpreunership,
sensitiveness to customers’ needs, feasibility attitude, some awareness on
economics).
You can do this by
instituting an internal contest on innovation, a simple one (just ask to
describe a value proposition and the target), meant to gather ideas (no
restrictions on this: incremental and radical) and let them be considered by
top management. Select the most valuable ones using FEASIBILITY as main criterion.
Don’t forget to reward the people proposing the best projects; forgetting it
would turn a boomerang in terms of engagement.
- Create a hub
involving the people Darwinianly (I mean those having demonstrated attitude to
effectively experience change) selected on former step and honestly ask them to
design the innovation process. Ask them to do it as if they were projecting
the business model of a start-up, ask them to fill up a business model canvas.
Then merge their visions and make a ‘manifesto’ out of it, to be shared with
the whole company.
The mission of the hub
will be to acknowledge the strategy of the company and, according to it, scan
the company to identify the pain points.
The hub needs to become
the listening point that might have birth inside of your company. The real
innovation, for people, will be having other people available to listen to
their ideas and give them help to communicate them effectively. The hub will be
the team in charge of gathering any valuable idea through the internal
communication channels that need to be properly set up.
- The hub will have to associate any
draft idea in a proper pain-basket and then make a selection to promote those
ideas being considered more feasible and coherent with strategy. The hub will
also have to translate the drafts into a form more compatible with a more
mature business analysis.
- After that, the selected business
models will be proposed by the original submitter, supported by the hub, to a
management steering committee that will make a second selection and will give
the responsibility on feasibility and implementation to an internal manager,
the one closest to the identified target. The original submitter has to be
rewarded and possibly involved in the development.
This is a
short and simple summary of a more general idea that would give the company
many advantages (people engagement, capitalization of internal competence,
creating a basket of ideas which might lead the company’s next growth strategy,
for example).
The goal of this short article is to start discussing about this
vision, which is about injecting some entrepreneurial spirit in the elephant
and just count on its latent, sometimes hidden, strengths.
DP
