It’s there in every organization: the door between the ideation and planning stage of innovation and the operational portion of the firm. You’ll find this door in services firms, manufacturing companies and not for profits. In addition to being the gateway between the virtual and tangible, it’s also the door between profits and losses.
Management holds the key to this door, and in most mainstream organizations, the door can be guarded more by the fear of loss than a promise of gain.
When organizations first undertake innovation programs, the decision process of what to take forward through the door is typically modeled after the stage gate process for their core business – and that is where the first mistake is made. The decision process for the core business has the benefit of being well informed by market studies, teams of experts and lots of market feedback. However:
Innovation programs that are truly valuable to the organization, by definition, deviate from the fabric of the existing business, and cannot take advantage of the intuition of the current offerings.
How do you know if this is an issue in your firm? There are two ditches on either side of the right track that I often confront when talking with firms:
- The first ditch is when the door is nailed shut, and only rarely opened. This usually happens when a company has launched something that didn’t go well, and the operations’ side of the house decides to keep those “anarchists” from R&D out of the picture.
- The second ditch is when the door is ripped from the hinges – and while there are many programs being tested, there is a lack of coherency. This situation produces the equivalent of an untended garden, and confuses both your ops team and your clients.
3 Keys to Improved Innovation
So keeping your firm out of the ditches and on the road to good innovation decisions becomes about creating a focused and robust discussion between the strategy team and the operations group. These recommendations are a start – each firm has its own needs that must be built into a team-based, decision-making model that serves the stakeholders well.
1) Rather than a door, there needs to be a common area between ops and strategy.
For example, we have three season rooms in the Midwest that allow us to enjoy the outdoors behind screens that keep the weather and bugs at bay. This bridge between the outdoors and the indoors is key to enjoying the outside – without losing the interior comforts of home.
In the same way, building a zone in which real dialogue can take place in a common language is key to making innovation happen. One of my favorite examples of this happened during a cost reduction program for a major aircraft manufacturer: the program manager could not make any headway, as when the engineers would propose something, the manufacturing team would dismiss it as ill informed. When the manufacturing team offered a change, it was shot down as being too impactful to the design.
To break this logjam, they rolled a jet into a hanger and provided both groups with massive amounts of brown paper, tape and markers. As they proceeded to tape notes directly onto the airplane, the two groups began to have a real dialogue. They had found their middle ground, and needless to say, the logjam was broken.
2) The decision must be informed by information outside the walls of your firm.
Great decision making in innovation always comes from insights gained from getting out and using your capabilities and insights combined with new information.
Toyota has it right with their concept of “go and see.” While doing a pilot for some communications equipment in the transportation space, for example, one of our team members did a ride along on an installation. As he watched the technician struggle in gloves to thread fasteners in the frigid weather, the concept of simplified mount was developed. This concept proved to be the key to differentiation in a very competitive space.
3) There needs to be robust processes in place for filling the front of the decision-making process with new ideas and removing those that aren’t living up to their potential.
Good decision processes alone will only get you so far – you also need to have a culture that is trained to both see the unexpected as an opportunity and be willing to bring these early insights forward. Healthy curiosity leads to a good crop of programs to pick from.
One example I will share:
I had an individual on our customer service team bring a strange request to our attention: she had received a call for a device with performance that was roughly twice as stringent as our core product. Normally, a customer service rep would have said “no” and moved on; but in this case, she asked the second and third questions. It seemed this customer really needed a part in this form factor and was willing to pay a significant premium for it. Our process team did a beta study and before long, a new, very profitable product line was born.
So, how robust is the innovation gateway in your firm? Are you getting great looks at organic projects? Are you sending a positive message by funding them and rewarding the originators?
I would love to hear your thoughts. Please email me or Tweet me with your ideas and feedback.
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