Innovation Leadership

One benefit of my job as a Research Analyst at Stratascale – An SHI Company is that I get to talk with people from Vation Ventures about technology and innovation. I did not make it to Vation's Global Summit in November, but Troy Cogburn recently gave us a great recap of customer experience, cybersecurity, and data management advancements.

Last week, Jessica Stone posted an article on Innovation Leadership, based on a fireside talk with John Shepard at their Global Summit.

From the introduction (bold added by me):

"We’ll explore the critical aspects of innovation leadership, highlighting the importance of establishing a vision for innovation, utilizing data and AI for strategic decisions, and fostering a culture that encourages creative thinking. It also examines the significance of cross-functional collaboration in driving innovation within large organizations. Further, the discussion touches on the influence of intuition in technology development and the crucial role of attracting and nurturing talent to shape the future of businesses."

I agree with everything in the article. A few comments to add on and go deeper.

Adhocracy

"Innovation Leadership" makes me think of adhocracy, which I first learned about from Jeff DeGraff (from his co-authored book Competing Values Leadership), but the concept is older than that. Others have written about its key elements: informal and entrepreneurial, creativity culture, doing is better than guessing, flattened hierarchies/individual empowerment, learning in "the field" and direct interaction with users.

"Adhocracy" runs through the article, even if that word from management theory is not used.

Understanding customer experiences

When understanding customer experiences is so important to innovation, you need specialists who have studied the science of human interaction with technology and developed methods to research and evaluate experiences. I call those people User Experience practitioners. UX teams, likely already in your marketing and software development organizations, should also be embedded in your innovation efforts.

You need everyone (not just UX team members) focused on defining, designing, and delivering good customer experiences. Design thinking is a common way for organizations to incorporate empathy, idea testing, and other design methods into a culture of innovation.

Talent

In order to attract and retain excellent talent, you also need to define, design, and deliver good experiences for employees. Unhappy employees who are frustrated with the tools they use all day will work somewhere else, plus cranky employees won't be good stewards of the brand when they interact with customers. Employee experience is getting more attention from HR, but it should also be part of your innovation playbook.

Technology drives change

With technology being a driver of change and innovation, it is easy for enterprises to get distracted by the next shiny object and forget about business objectives and user goals. "Fall in love with the problem, not the solution" is a mantra for entrepreneurs, but it also applies to corporate innovation.

AI for better interactions

A lot of AI and automation business cases are built on saving money by replacing humans with bots. The bigger potential for AI is to change the paradigm of how we interact with computers, from issuing commands to specifying the outcome we want. There are still a lot of human behaviors to understand and innovative interactions to design because as we shape AI, AI shapes us.

Innovation within larger enterprises is hard, but I have found the leadership activities spelled out in the Vation Innovation Insights article make corporate innovation possible, enjoyable, and sometimes extremely successful.