End-To-End Innovation

TLDR; Innovation needs to happen at every stage of the value discovery, design and delivery process including customer empathy, value proposition design, solution development, eventual delivery (and beyond) but people often front-load innovation efforts and don’t approach it holistically.

To explain the title a bit more.. I’m not suggesting that innovation is a particularly linear process (the road to innovation is rarely a straight one), and neither am I suggesting it is a finite process (we all know it is a continuous process of cyclical-feedback and improvements)..

By end-to-end innovation, I mean that innovation happens, and is necessary, at many stages along the value identification, development and delivery process and I’d like to explain why I strongly believe this.

And by innovation, I mean all types of innovation whether it is incremental, sustaining, disruptive or radical (or whatever your chosen innovation lexicon).

Context: My background in both Practical Innovation & Innovation Theory

Having developed software or lead/managed development teams for over 20 years, I am intimately acquainted with the product development lifecycle designed to deliver tangible value to the customer.

Fast-forward, and as Head of Innovation, combined with my MSc Entrepreneurship Management & Innovation, I live and breathe innovation theory in depth, ranging from customer empathy, business model design, value proposition creation, market analysis, and business differentiation.

This along with my lifelong focus on personal development and learning, I like think my experience and skills are rooted in invaluable technology, business and people perspectives.

?? Common Innovation Mistakes ??

Those that know me, know that I am a pretty pragmatic guy, so I try to refrain from binary points of views such as “this is right, this is wrong” as I know in reality there are a spectrum of different viewpoints and approaches.

By the way, if you ever see people with overly dogmatic opinions – run.

However, I do see a lot of less than ideal innovation practices (in my opinion), and shall discuss them briefly before I continue explaining why I believe an end-to-end innovation mindset and approach is beneficial.

Problem: Front loading and siloing innovation

I’ve seen a few places where the business innovation function predominately does design thinking workshops, maybe some user personas, and if you’re lucky some customer segmentation before inevitably going with an off the shelf/pre-approved/designed solution/play. Off the shelf, one-size-fits all plays are the antithesis of developing bespoke solutions for the customer.

I’ve even seen this method of "innovation" used as a sales / upselling exercise disguised as innovation designed to inevitably push people in the direction of the latest piece of released software.

This process tends to happens solely at the start of their innovation process before moving onto traditional solution design and development.

In my opinion the innovation function should be involved in almost every step of the value creation and delivery process, as not only does the value originally conceived need to be ensured of its correct creation and delivery, there will invariably be improvements that can be made to the value development process.

I’m talking about the 1% incremental aggregation of marginal gains, the theory of constraints, the collective kaizen, business process reengineering. All these innovative improvements that can be applied to the whole end-to-end innovation process that certainly isn’t a front-loaded exercise.

As innovation lives just as much in the operational day-to-day processes as the holistic 10,000 feet strategy.

Problem: Too much theory

In a lot of innovation roles I see advertised are for little more than?design thinking or ideation workshop facilitators and innovation scorecards creators. I have to stress that without tangible, practical applications, innovation is useless. That’s why I use the term practical innovation – innovation that has practical, tangible value as opposed to the innovation theory.

Problem: Too much innovation theatre

Where you get thought leadership publications that big up a businesses innovation capabilities without detailing how they've actually done it, you get innovation theatre.

A fictitious or exaggerated marketing production for the benefit of would be innovation service customers. It's often all sizzle, no sausage. Glossy, immaculately designed PDF's and industry reports often hide the inability to deliver on the very innovation being marketing.

If you are selling innovation services, I advise you to "Show, don't tell".

If you are buying innovation services, ask for proof of capability and expertise. Don't be drawn into weeks or months of "exploratory discussions" without a demonstration of capability.

Ask for value demonstration, often in the form of thin verticals of functionality or proof of concepts (POC's). These are much better indicators of a companies innovation capabilities than glossy PDF's or industry publications.

Share examples of your delivered innovations, don't just talk about it. Talk is cheap.

Problem: Soloed Innovation, Not holistic enough

When I’ve seen innovation roles advertised, they are clearly aligned with a specific function in the business whether it is sales, marketing, product or even HR. I get it, these functions all want to benefit from innovation. Personally however, I’m a believer that innovation is a holistic undertaking, in order to gain benefits across the whole business.

Why should one department be more innovative than any other?

Problem: Innovation not embedded into the culture

Culture is a tricky one. I don't think culture can be designed as easily as how people believe it can. What you can do is grow and nurture a culture.

We've just recently seen entire organisations drop D&I initiatives, which a day before were allegedly a big part of their culture. The thin veneer of company values is becoming more apparent when they can be changed at the drop of the hat.

I see many companies that allegedly have a culture of innovation, yet don't demonstrate this in their day-to-day operations. The proof is in the innovation pudding. Don't pay attention to how companies talk about innovation, look at how they are living and delivering it as a part of their culture.

If you have a great idea of how to improve your business and there isn't an existing clear process for communicating, sharing it and ultimately implementing it, your business doesn't have a culture of innovation.

If your business doesn't have a track record of implementing innovations suggested by its staff, your business doesn't have a culture of innovation.

If your business isn't constantly striving/encouraging for innovations to be surfaced and implemented, your business doesn't have a culture of innovation.

Problem: Lack of knowledge around the art of the possible

If you are hiring for innovation skillset, make sure it is aligned with practical applications. I’ve seen innovation talent with little or no knowledge of how to realise their innovation theory because they don’t know what is possible with one or more technologies that will inevitably deliver the innovative value.

Whether it is web, cloud, desktop, mobile, IoT, AI or XR – you need your innovators to know what value adding innovation can be delivered with one or more of these technologies. Your innovators need to know the art of the possible and ideally be able to quickly demonstrate this with proof of concepts (POC’s).

Not having practical innovators who understand the art-of-the-possible and having solely innovation theorists can be dangerous for the following reasons:

• Due to a lack of understanding, they can oversell what a technology or solution is capable of delivering, disappointing the client or underestimating the effort.
• They very often miss new opportunities, as they are unaware of what different value adding propositions different technologies can deliver – I’ve seen this a great deal.

But good news! Rather than front-loading innovation, being too theoretical, engaging in innovation theatre or treating it as a upselling sales function, if done correctly, innovation can deliver a great deal of value across an entire organisation.

Here’s how.

? Solution: Holistic End-To-End Innovation ?

Treat innovation as something that needs to be considered, managed and designed holistically from beginning to end.

It starts with understanding

Empathising with customers, spending time to understand how their business functions both at the strategic and operational level is important. I recently spoke to an organisation that doesn't have business analysts, instead it has the very people developing the value adding solutions speaking to its customers to understand their business. Very refreshing. Nothing get's lost in translation with direct access to the customer.

Map pain points and opportunities

Are you developing pain killers or vitamins?, looking to solve your customers problems and / or delight them? Only by fully understanding the problem domain and empathising with the customer can you hope to develop the correct solution.

Wear many hats

In my opinion, the best innovators are practical innovators and can wear many hats. Because of practical innovators cross-discipline approach some days they are building POC's, some days they are business analysts and other days they are being product managers or helping with marketing strategy.

Ideation

Ideas are the easy part. Anyone already in the innovation sector is generally already skilled in lateral thinking and ideation (hopefully).

Don’t leave ideation solely to the customer or to the innovators. The customer will have large blind spots around the art of the possible, and innovators will have blind spots around the problem domain.

Solution design

Practical innovators are aware of all the ancillary considerations required when designing an innovative solution that innovation theorists either don't or can't consider.

Resilience, security, scalability, adaptability, compliance are just some of the non functional requirements often overlooked by theoretical innovators.

Solution developments

This is where practical innovators shine. They bring the innovation to life, creating the value where once there was none. The value that keeps the business ticking and hopefully growing.

Solution delivery

Value creation is nothing until it is delivered and returning value. Any innovation is worthless at idea or development stage.

Solution marketing

Build it and they will come right? Not quite. If you are developing a product and/or service your innovators will be aware of the end-users, who controls the budget and how to market the value proposition of the innovative product or service.

Often traditional marketing is insufficient for marketing innovative products and services. Guess what, when you are marketing innovations, you need to think.. you guessed it. Innovatively.

To be honest, do to their in depth knowledge of the problem area, empathising with the target customer and intimacy with the value proposition, I think innovators shine when it comes to marketing.

Solution improvement

Just because you have delivered an innovative value adding solution, doesn't mean your job as an innovator is necessarily done. Imagine if we'd stopped at the first version of the lightbulb or car. Ideally you should put in place mechanisms for gathering information, feedback and? telemetry to make data-driven, informed decisions of how to make the value adding solution better.

Ideally we want to go on a journey of continuous innovation with out customers.

As innovation is an iterative process. It is never finished.

Summary

Different organisations will get more bang for their buck than others by approaching Innovation in a holistic end-to-end way, so mileage may very. The important thing is to make time and space to experiment, fail, learn and try new things.

Try embedding innovation innovation at every step of your businesses value creation and delivery process or else you will surely be out innovated by an organisation that understands it and executes it better.

I'm a big fan of this phrase.

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.

But when it comes to business, it is wrong. If you change nothing, eventually you will start to get diminishing returns as the world around you is changing whether you like it or not.

What will you innovate and change?

-- Lee