The Journey toward World-Class Innovation: 5 Keys to Successful Implementation

Building transformative innovation capability can be extremely daunting for established organizations that have spent years optimizing their core business for scale efficiency. Many underestimate the effort required or mistakenly take a piecemeal approach. They might set up an innovation lab, build capacity to test and validate ideas with customers, establish a venture-style investment board, or implement collaboration tools. While each of these improvements provide value on their own, maximum benefit comes when all elements work together as an integrated system. Despite their best intentions, these companies end up frustrated when they do not achieve the benefits that others do.

This performance gap is explained by differences in their approach to implementation. Implementation requires a coordinated set of capability building initiatives that support and reinforce one another to achieve lasting results.

There is a plethora of resources on the topic of innovation—its benefits, frameworks, processes, and tools. This article will discuss insights into the “how” of building transformative innovation capability in an established organization. A leading practice way to implement leading practices.

Five Keys to Successful Implementation

1.??????Building the case for change

Successful implementations are preceded by activities that build organization-wide understanding of the need for change. They make clear the answer to the question, “Why innovate?”?They communicate an ambition that motivates the organization around an overarching purpose. It can be a growth objective, but more often it is a purpose-driven strategy that justifies the need for both core and transformative innovation, reinforced with shared goals and incentives (examples shown in Figure 1). Unfortunately, it often takes a crisis such as a disruption or a loss of key people before a company realizes the extent of the changes required.

2.??????Learning by doing

Long, drawn out new process design efforts followed by training and rollout are not effective when trying to implement a new way of working. Instead, start by kicking off a few innovation teams with real customer problems to solve. Train them on fundamental capabilities just in time, meaning train only those who will apply the new methods and immediately before they begin their work. The goal in this initial stage is to get started and demonstrate success quickly.

As an example, begin using customer insight techniques to identify and validate customer needs in target opportunity areas (e.g., empathy interviews, job mapping, validation experiments). Get teams out of the building to talk to customers in week one. Conduct ideation sessions that encourage bold thinking and push teams out of their comfort zones. Identify solution hypotheses and start running low-cost, call-to-action (behavioral) customer experiments.

Allow for agility as the teams learn what works and does not work for stakeholders. These teams will quickly find out where the corporate barriers are, what enablers are needed, and what it takes to produce desired outcomes.

3.??????Creating the change roadmap

Once you have a fact base to support investment in closing capability gaps and removing barriers, you can begin building alignment on the future state and path to get there. Leaders must be 100% in agreement on the practices, organizational changes, and time horizon needed to realize their growth ambition.

A change roadmap provides the blueprint. This is a time-phased plan that captures both high impact “quick win” and longer-term, transformational changes, relative timing of activities, and dependencies across each capability-building workstream. A well-constructed and maintained roadmap level sets expectations for value realization and prevents isolated initiatives from popping up.

The below graphic can be used as a starting point for the roadmapping discussion. It utilizes data from Accel Management Group’s benchmark database to show relative impact versus effort for key transformative innovation capabilities.

Roadmap development is a hands-on and highly interactive exercise. Stakeholders must work collaboratively to prioritize capabilities relative to the unique needs of the business, taking company culture, organization, and priority objectives into account. Strong facilitation helps participants stay on point, incorporate leading practices, reach consensus, and fully support final decisions.

4.??????Leading the way

Creating new growth businesses is one of the most important contributions a CEO can make to the long-term success of the company. Executive leadership’s role is to create the environment, drive the growth agenda, model behaviors, remove obstacles, and provide unwavering, visible support. Furthermore, they must establish the growth ambition, make explicit the strategic opportunity areas (i.e., where to play), confront inexorable tension between core and transformative new businesses, allocate resources, and continually combat the tendency toward complacency.

Effective innovation leadership requires changes to fully formed mindsets that will make leaders uncomfortable at first. As they build understanding of the capability differences between operating the core business and exploring the future, the pieces will start falling into place. Customer evidence will replace spreadsheet projections, metered funding will replace big bets, and asking questions will replace expressing opinions. Excitement will build as a portfolio of many ideas narrows to a few fully validated solutions ready to scale and the future of the company begins to take shape.

5.??????Sustaining the momentum

Achieving world-class transformative innovation capability is a journey that requires a continuous improvement mindset. Start with the fundamentals, demonstrate success, build momentum, be willing to evolve as you learn, and layer in advanced processes, techniques, and tools over time.

Organizations can only absorb so much change at once, and people are more likely to adopt changes that they themselves design. Give stakeholders the experience of being involved directly in planning, designing, and executing the changes. Everyone in the organization must be involved with remit to allow different, more entrepreneurial operating processes to thrive.

Established companies are being challenged like never before. The processes, tools, and skills that help them maintain and grow existing businesses are not enough. Discovering new opportunities and turning them into tomorrow’s growth engines requires a new set of capabilities. In the last decade, entrepreneurial methods have made their way into large corporations. We now have a methodology and growing toolset for discovering, incubating, and scaling new sources of growth. Understanding these capabilities is the starting point for most companies, but the biggest challenge is to implement them to achieve real and lasting benefits.