I think it’s safe to say that we are witnessing the extreme overuse of the term innovation in our speaking, business journals, Wall Street discussions and political dialogue. How did a perfectly good word come to mean so little?
The short answer is that the desire to have the benefits of innovation has resulted in everyone spreading the word around like peanut butter – and the hard work underlying it is getting lost. I’m not the first to comment on this trend; Scott Berkun discussed the same issue in this useful post.
The truth is that innovation is a mezzanine term that describes the results of a set of activities that yield innovation. To simply state we need to be more innovative without discussing the work and process weakens the term and our ability to achieve it.
In my work with clients, we use my framework of Right Project, Right Team, Right Plan to unpack the key pieces of innovation into modules that have real, tangible actions associated with them (and coincidentally, if any one of these are missing, considerable cash, resources and time are consumed). The second key concept is that each of these three ingredients need to be present for the benefits of innovation to show up for our stakeholders.
Right Project refers to the work of designing an investable project for an organization that strikes just the right balance of risk and reward for the firm in that moment of time. Surfacing this type of project is best done using two lenses:
- The first lens is building from the outside in, examining the relevant aspects of current economics, market structure, perceived customer needs, and ecosystem capability. All these areas are examined seeking answers to the questions: What is the world outside the firm trying to tell us? If we were building this offer from scratch, is this the way we would do it?
- The second lens is from the inside out and answers the questions: What is our core DNA? Does ours best align with the customer’s job that needs to be done right now?
This is hard analog work, but it cuts to the heart of getting a project that people can really get behind, is big enough to be material and impactful enough to change our customers’ lives for the better.
The goal of this work is to build a program that uses the unique DNA of the firm and unique insight into the market and customer need to build a project that represents a significant improvement in the eyes of the customer. This is in contrast to the small incremental moves of most firms that are driven from internal “strategy” sessions.
Right Team means having the talent on the project that can deliver the vision and benefits that the project promises. Getting the right talent on board is critical to delivering the promise of the project, and many firms slide sideways here. The team that does the project design work needs to be reconfigured to deliver the results and benefits. This work involves taking a look at the org chart and the capability of your subject matter experts in a very sober light. Many times the skills that bring great ideas to the table need to be rebuilt with members of the senior leadership team to execute on the meat of the program. There is a reason you hear in the hallway, “it’s time to shoot the engineer and ship…”
My posts on the five key needs for a team that delivers provides a good overview of this work.
Right Plan is the development of strategy that takes the work of the Right Project team from small scale to full implementation in the marketplace. In this work, the team will be faced with building at least three organizational change programs:
- The first organizational change that needs to be delivered is convincing the balance of the firm beyond the core team that the benefits of this program are valid and worth the effort.
- Typically the next layer of change is designing a program to work with the distribution portion of the firm to convince them of the desirability of placing this new offering in their portfolio of customer products and services.
- Lastly, the customer themselves represent a people group that is going to have to undergo a change cycle to realize the value of the new services.
You may have never thought of innovation at this level before, because frankly it’s hard work and many practitioners shy away from the hard truth. I can tell you, though, that decomposing the full scope of what needs to be completed is life changing for leaders and firms who realize just what they need to do, and then go to work on the how.
The bottom line? By infusing the term innovation with the richness it deserves, you can start building the underlying processes and muscles it takes to truly deliver it.
If you’d like to talk about innovation as it relates to your work, I do reserve a few slots in my schedule for private, executive coaching relationships. To learn more about how I can help you guide your organization to clarity, action and growth, please call me at 847-651-1014.
