Innovation and entrepreneurship are essential for engineering managers who want to create value, solve problems, and lead change in their organizations. But how can you develop and implement a strategy that fosters a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship among your engineering team? Here are some tips to help you get started.
Before you can create a strategy, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and why. What are the problems or opportunities that you want to address with your innovation and entrepreneurship efforts? What are the benefits and impacts that you expect to create for your customers, stakeholders, and organization? How do you align your goals and vision with your organization's mission, values, and strategy? Having a clear and compelling vision will help you communicate your purpose, motivate your team, and guide your decisions.
Once you have your goals and vision, you need to evaluate your current situation and identify the gaps and challenges that you need to overcome. How innovative and entrepreneurial is your engineering team right now? What are the strengths and weaknesses of your team's skills, processes, tools, and culture? What are the barriers and enablers that affect your team's ability to innovate and create value? How do you measure and monitor your team's performance and outcomes? Conducting a SWOT analysis, a benchmarking study, or a survey can help you gather data and insights to assess your current state and gaps.
Collecting of data of various sources to corroborate analysis are critical, thus assessment of current state must be as objective and unbiased as possible, suspending of your own personal viewpoints are critical.
Based on your goals, vision, and assessment, you can now develop a concrete action plan and roadmap to create your engineering innovation and entrepreneurship strategy. What are the specific objectives and milestones that you want to achieve in the short, medium, and long term? What are the activities and initiatives that you need to launch, execute, and support to achieve your objectives and milestones? What are the resources, roles, and responsibilities that you need to allocate and assign to your team and other stakeholders? How do you prioritize, coordinate, and align your action plan and roadmap with your organization's strategy and operations?
In my experience, your plan should be as solid as concrete but fluid as water. Things don’t always turn up the way you plan them too. Sometimes, there are unforeseen curves and potholes other times there are roadblocks. What’s important is to have a solid vision, and a definitive set of goals with a maleable plan.
To implement your action plan and roadmap, you need to build your team's capabilities and culture to foster innovation and entrepreneurship. How do you develop and enhance your team's skills, knowledge, and mindset to generate, evaluate, and execute innovative ideas and solutions? How do you create and maintain a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship that encourages creativity, collaboration, experimentation, learning, and feedback? How do you reward and recognize your team's efforts and achievements in innovation and entrepreneurship? Providing training, coaching, mentoring, and incentives can help you build your team's capabilities and culture.
Start with clear, compelling goals aligned to the customer value proposition and the organization's mission. Establish enabling structures to cultivate and sustain the innovative culture. Build experimentation and learning into the innovation process and establish a safe space for risk-taking. The planning and evaluation systems must emphasize working creatively and diligently to resolve the key unknowns, but must also incorporate frequent reexamination of assumptions and validation of results to fail fast and pivot, as necessary.
Another key element of your engineering innovation and entrepreneurship strategy is to engage your customers and stakeholders throughout the process. How do you identify and understand your customers' needs, preferences, and expectations? How do you involve your customers and stakeholders in co-creating, testing, and validating your innovative ideas and solutions? How do you communicate and demonstrate the value and impact of your innovation and entrepreneurship efforts to your customers and stakeholders? How do you solicit and incorporate feedback and suggestions from your customers and stakeholders to improve your innovation and entrepreneurship outcomes? Using customer-centric and stakeholder-centric methods, such as design thinking, lean startup, and agile, can help you engage your customers and stakeholders effectively.
Storytelling and human to human connections trump A/E/C data. Period. An engineering client recently went to a sales presentation. She used the method I taught to share a quick anecdote and she got a round of applause! The ROI is there as well…
Finally, you need to evaluate and improve your engineering innovation and entrepreneurship strategy on a regular basis. How do you measure and report the results and impacts of your innovation and entrepreneurship efforts? How do you compare and contrast your results and impacts with your goals and vision, your benchmarks and standards, and your competitors and peers? How do you identify and analyze the successes and failures, the best practices and lessons learned, and the opportunities and threats of your innovation and entrepreneurship efforts? How do you use your evaluation findings and insights to refine and update your strategy, action plan, and roadmap? Using data-driven and evidence-based approaches, such as balanced scorecard, OKRs, and KPIs, can help you evaluate and improve your strategy.