Five Innovation Succes Factors

Most (top)managers ignore innovation. For innovators, like you and me, it's hard to get buy-in for innovation for which we are so passionate. You can de-risk innovation with five innovation success factors, I like to share with you.

Being full-time focussed on helping corporates to become innovative (again), I discovered a pattern of five factors which have to be present to be able to innovate successfully, As you can see below you need: urgency, creativity, a methodology, freedom and discipline.

Dr. Norbert Reithofer is the chairman of the supervisory board of BMW. He once said when he was CEO, that he started to innovate by developing electrical cars because "doing nothing was a bigger risk ...". And these words resonate so much.

Innovation is doing new things or doing things in a new way. It often fails and is risky. That's why improvement always wins from innovation. Only on the moment that doing nothing is a bigger risk, (top) managers are prepared to stick out their necks and fully support real innovation.

Without urgency you get resistance.

So when there's no urgency to innovate, everybody will stay in the operational excellence mode, When you, as innovator, try to push innovation among your colleagues and bosses it will only lead to resistance, which will frustrate you to the bone. So as innovator you need the patience of a hunter to pick the right moment to launch your new initiative and get buy-in. Without urgency you get resistance.

You can start innovation with an idea, a customer friction, a new technology or a strategic need. In any way, you will have to come up with a new impactful solution creating value for both your customers and your organisation. Creating real new solutions requires a creative mindset. Not only at the initiators of the idea, but also at everyone involved transforming new ideas into reality, because they will implement something in a different way.

Without creativity you get business as usual.

Without creativity, with your operational-excellence-hat on, you will always come up with the same, a little bit better, solution, Now there is nothing wrong with improvement. It's a great way to stay profitable and relevant on the short term. But on the long run, as every market get disrupted by newcomers once in a while, improvement is not enough and you need to innovate. Without creativity you get business as usual, as you can see below.

Having urgency and creativity present in your organisation is a great start. It creates a lot of energy and a lot of new wild ideas. Having a lot of creative ideas is important, but you cannot send out invoices for them ;-). You have to transform ideas to new impactful products or services with value for your customers. This road is long and difficult. They are proven methods to help you to go to market effectively, transforming ideas into new solutions for customers, like Lean Startup, Design Sprints or the FORTH innovation method .

Without a method you will make a lot of mistakes leading to chaos

Without a method you overlook important aspects, do things in the wrong order and make a lot of mistakes. And with many initiatives and projects going on, the uncertainty increases which leads to chaos, as nobody knows which route to take and management will lose trust.

When you have urgency, a clear innovation goal and people with a creative mindset using the right methods, it is essential to give them freedom. Why? Innovative people are often curious explorers with an independent attitude. They love to challenges and are passionate about creating new things. You need to give them the freedom to explore, to challenge, and to create. Of course you must give them a strategic direction with clear goals formulated in an innovation assignment which got the buy-in of top-management as their boundaries for exploration.

Without freedom you cannot create something new.

Innovators need freedom. Without freedom you cannot create. They will feel like birds within a little cage. No freedom leads to frustration.

The road from idea to market launch for new concepts takes on average 18 months for new services and 36 months for products, with great differences per sector. At this moment I am helping a big chemical corporation to improve their innovation performance and it takes in chemicals five to ten years to launch new innovative solutions, or even more. Most big firms have innovation funnels or stage-gate processes in place to help them keep track of all their innovation projects and to prioritise the best ones.

No discipline leads to stagnation.

Real innovation is a matter of endless experimenting trying to make an attractive and feasible solution. Each project has to take a lot of hurdles. And discipline, a regimen and ability to be continuously active, and improve and train yourself, is essential to be able to make progress and deliver results. Without discipline nothing will materialise. It leads to full innovation funnels without any progress and stagnation in your business.

Do you know how successful you are in innovation at this moment? We have developed a free innovation scorecard to give you insight in your innovation performance. When you answer 22 questions in 4 minutes, you will receive a personalised 18-pages report.?Click here to do the test.

Are you as innovative as you think you are?

• Discover through a set of practical and straightforward questions how innovative your organisation really is.
• The assessment will show what areas you are 'spot on' and where you have to put some effort in to be a better innovator.
• You get practical tips and will discover how you can start improving your processes, organisation, and performance with a proven method

In just four mins you know more.?Take the Innovation Scorecard here.

I wish you lots of success implementing the five innovation success factors effectively. Feel free to share the model among your LinkedIn connections and colleagues.

innovative regards,

Gijs

Take the Innovation Scorecard here .