The Buzzwords Minefield: "Corporate Innovation" in the Kenyan "Ecosystem"

One day a friend told me how “we”, the players in the startup/tech scene, have a lot of buzzwords. He pointed out how confusing the words can be in conferences where they are often used interchangeably, though neither the audience nor the speakers fully grasp their meaning.

You probably have heard people use words like "ecosystem", "accelerator", "bootstrap", "scaleups" and many more. Recently, I saw an event called “Growthccelerator." What does that mean?, I asked myself.

So today I'm going to narrow my thoughts on a word that I have used a lot too. What does corporate innovation mean? I would like to explain how I understand the meaning of this phrase.

This phrase has steadily earned the right to be mentioned among the buzzwords of Kenya. This is largely due to corporates’ acknowledgement that they have to, need to, and want to innovate, but don't know where to start. The attention to innovation is further compounded by the fact that they risk losing their competitive edge if they don’t stay up to date with the latest technologies, trends and talent acquisition strategies.

Innovation was initially housed in the R&D department of corporates, where they did deep research to develop solutions, primarily for their clients. This process was mainly planned and executed internally. It took longer and more resources to birth new inventions and was siloed from the rest of the company's operations. However, clients began appreciating the more customer-focused corporates and shifting their business to those companies who prioritized their needs over internal expertise and priorities. It became clear that it was better to have a faster and cheaper way of meeting the clients’ needs in a creative way. The rise of organisations that do deep market research before launching products and services (Google, Microsoft and IDEO) led to other corporates to rethink their approach to launching new products or services.

More organisations began to rethink the process of how they should engage their clients (internal staff and external clients) on problem-solving. These changes were driven by these larger shifts, as well as by new challenges from tech startups who were eating (disrupting – buzzword alert) the corporates’ pie. They started to think critically about innovation as a need.

So, what in the world is corporate innovation? Is it a department? Is it an event? A conference? Or a hackathon? I would say it all the above. By this I mean, innovation is a process and at some point, you might choose to host events or attend conferences as part of your organisational innovation journey. You might also create a department within your organisation that can help bring an innovation mindset to the larger team. There are many pundits who have defined corporate innovation already but the focus should be more on the set of activities and mindsets, rather than a single definition. I specifically liked the framing that I recently was part of co-creating with my fellow corporate innovation experts and enthusiasts in a workshop in Rwanda.

We defined corporate innovation as “a continuous creative process where an organisation works to improve and enhance their product or service offering and efficiencies, aligning the improvements with their company’s goals while leveraging on their client’s feedback and available resources at their disposal”.

My key takeaways on what it takes to say that a company has been engaging in corporate innovation are:

1.    Management, mostly C-suite buy-in, should be unquestionable. This means that they fully support the innovation journey and activities. They should also agree that it’s not a thing left to a specific sub-group within the organisation (e.g. young employees, management, etc), but rather should be embraced as a mindset by the entire team.

2.    Intentional allocation and attachment of resources towards the innovation activities so as to achieve the goals (e.g. personnel, space and time).

3.    Alignment of the corporate innovation strategy to the current company’s set goals (very important) at 1 year, 5 years, 10 years or as part of the company's mission.

4.    It is a continuous process and hence you need to know what resources and timeline you have as an organisation and conduct activities that align.

5.    There is a consistent and reliable feedback loop and execution mechanism from your clients, be it internal (staff) or external (clients).

How ready is your organisation for innovation or corporate innovation based on the above?

Let’s engage further!