Building culture, building strategy

Famed business consultant Peter Drucker once stated that "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." We tragically witness this Sisyphean drama over and over again in multiple scenarios.

Can’t do B without having A first...

Source: https://www.willett-ink.co.uk/

Often a client will ask us how can I innovate a product? This is somewhat analogous to hitting a home run on your first swing of the bat. It could happen, but it happens rarely. The challenge is not coming up with ideas; ideas are cheap, it is implementation that is dear.  Many a client laments about ideas that went nowhere within their organization. The idea was good, the prototype build was good, but the adoption and support within the organization was poor. Many tech scouts, intrapreneurs, and corporate development executives will have stories of what-might-have-been.  

Information technology is compressing the front end of the innovation funnel, making information, insight, and ideas increasingly available faster and more broadly. The bottleneck to innovation remains at the interface of the testing and scaling of ideas for market implementation.

Mastery of any task or task set, like innovating a product, service, or business model, takes practice and training. One does not simply show up at the big game and expect to win. In the past, one could talk about this as the “right to win,” often thought of as prior market position, experience in market, capabilities, network penetration, and balance sheet. In the arena of innovation, the question is, how much do you practice innovation in your business? What is it that you do every day to strengthen your innovation muscles?

Quick questionnaire to help you assess how much you practice innovation:

1.      Do you often talk about innovation within your company?

2.      Do you actively make visible initiatives for innovation within your company?

3.      Is innovation actively funded inside your company? This could be traditional R&D but increasingly importantly, do you also include process improvement?

4.      Do you expect everyone or anyone to innovate within your company?

5.      Do you support and stand up your innovators through thick and thin?

6.      Do you reward learning and innovation, even in the face of failure, or do you recognize only those things that succeed or survive?

7.      Have you built an engineered path, or better yet, a corporate structure, that allows innovation to be shared and propagated through your organization?

8.      Do you actively benchmark yourself against industry to observe, recognize, measure, and reward/adopt innovation?

9.      Does your company typically move quickly to assess and respond to external change and threats?

10.  How would you assess the creativity level of ideas and discussions within your company?

If you answered in the affirmative for more than 5 of the above, then you are doing quite well, though like all innovators, you probably think [and rightly so!] that innovation never stops improving itself, that it is a process and journey and not an event or end destination. Sadly however, most companies confuse awareness for activity and thus fail to build the necessary infrastructure for day in-day out innovation.  

Selected quotes from the field:

“As a tech scout I am a cost and liability until something I find makes it way through our stage-gate system. If it does, then I am the rare hero. Most often, though, ideas die well before Stage 2 due to intrinsic cultural issues.”

“Everyone in our organization knows that tech scouting will be the first to go in the next recession. We’re viewed as a nice-to-have.”

So, what do you do if you want to improve innovation at your company? 

Stop doing this:

I want an innovation that I can make or take and get my organization to implement for greater growth.

And start doing this:

I want to build an innovative culture that embraces change that results in innovative new products and services

Many executives identify innovation as a want for a discrete thing or object:

“Find me an innovative idea/technology/product/service/model and I will find a way to get my organization to implement."

In their mind innovation works like this:

Object ---> Process ---> Culture

Whereas innovation works more like this:

Culture ---> Process ---> Object

Many executives don’t like to think this way because it involves more time, effort, and therefore cost.  And of course, the pressing need for growth is always upon us. Innovation for them is a noun and not a verb. It is an event, and not a process. However, organizations that seek to sustain innovation for competitive advantage and market longevity will realize that in the longer run, building an innovative culture is the only real competitive advantage worth building.