Today we proudly handed over a 270 paged innovation deliverable for a client. It contains a vast 75+ pages of ethnographic customer insights, 50+ pages of trend scan and 40+ great ideas with visualizations. I am very happy with the output and so were the clients. Now we have all these new insights and ideas, so what's next? What is needed is an important next step for any innovation effort, the question now is how to we activate these ideas and get buy in from different stakeholders up and down the organization?
For many organizations, finding the ideas is just the first step; the challenging next step is what to do with these ideas. Any truly innovative ideas must get people worried as the implications may include cannibalization or shifting of power within the organizations. So running around with these great ideas does not make you a more popular person.
Although innovation prefers dedicated groups or departments with assigned resources and responsibility, innovation needs to spread to every level of the organization. The key is to facilitate direct, person-to-person communication across the organization rather than up and down traditional chains of command.
If a person or a group comes up with good ideas, the question is how easy or difficult is it for them to get access to support including funding and top management attention not to mention supportt? What about support outside the organization? Organizing for innovation is itself a bigger challenge, it is not just about having a dedicated innovation group or expanding research and development, “organizing” means borrowing internal resources from different departments, creative way of financing the early stages and structuring the partnership strategies.
There isn’t one best way to organize for innovation. There are several ways to do that; one option is Procter & Gamble's FutureWorks division, a fully staffed group that is mandated with identifying, developing and seeding new growth platforms for the organization. Another option is build an innovation unit working with outside consultants to bring in a more structured process to develop innovation capabilities. Outside consultants can help stimulate innovation by broadening perspectives and bring in new lenses. Companies that choose this path typically believe that their organization has the right basic infrastructure to support innovation. However, they believe that managers and teams need help solving practical innovation problems, developing new mindsets or gaining exposure to important external developments. Three important things that are often ignore:
- We need to look at innovation as an end-to-end discipline, a
holistic process that needs to be managed as a discipline with
dedicated resources and budgeting
- We need to develop a company-wide idea collection system to help
get everyone involved in innovation and that includes bringing new
insights to everyone in the organization, not just market research
cater to the marketing department.
- We must manage and measure our innovation progress which include
measuring incremental and new revenue from new products, your success
rates and your pipeline and tracking customer engagement along the
customer lifecycles.
