Spyreism no.1: It's not about ideas. It's about making ideas happen.

Spyreisms are phrases we consistently repeat when discussing innovation with our varied client base. What is excellent about these phrases is that they encapsulate complex notions in just a few words. So let's talk about Spyreism no.1:

Often when my partners and I meet potential clients, there’s a history or an ongoing practice of trying to come up with the best ideas or trying to locate the most promising and mature startups. There are ideation sessions, hackathons, creative thinking retreats, prototype design workshops, startup fairs and the list goes on and on. I like to say that the only two things that come out of hackathons are features and T-shirts. Unfortunately, the same thing can be said about most occurrences of the events mentioned above. Innovation professionals spend so much time on coming up with attractive shiny objects in the form of well delivered pitches, prototypes and so on and they completely neglect the heavy lifting that is required to nurture such opportunities until they become deployments at scale. Why is that? The answer is simple. Because deployments are very difficult to achieve.

In every such event I have attended during my career, there are always 2-3 potentially groundbreaking opportunities that are either self-censored during the event and presented in a version that is much less ambitious or are fully presented and then cut back into shape so that management can select it without taking on any risk. In other words, compromise on features and not aspire to anything beyond that because organizations do not have the necessary skills for evaluating such opportunities that are what we like to call “outside of the organization’s comfort zone”. Oh, and the T-shirts you get there are usually great. Nothing against T-shirts.

Getting to innovation outcomes at a venture level takes time and effort. Here are some of the guideposts we have to pass along the way to a successful deployment at scale of an innovative venture:

1. Management sponsorship - Managers have to get excited about an innovative venture and be willing to sponsor it.
2. Access to knowledge - Innovative ventures cannot mature to fruition and impact organization KPI’s without access to experts inside the organization.
3. A relentless driving team - Just like startups cannot be founded by committees, so are innovative ventures totally dependent on a committed and highly driven team.
4. Handle gatekeepers - Every project that is outside the organization’s comfort zone raises red flags for various gatekeeping functions such as data security, legal, regulations etc’. Teams must negotiate their way around this in order to make progress.
5. Demonstrate constant progress - Management teams get excited by movement and progress. Innovative ventures must have a cadence of presenting their progress in a language that differentiates them from standard projects as they are a different animal.

Getting to such guideposts without someone to assist you who has been there, done that, got the T-shirt (a different T-shirt than the one from the hackathon), and also has proven experience in guiding others like you to the same outcomes is very hard. Imagine having to do that for 30 ventures running in parallel. This volume is mandatory for a high ROI innovation-related activity simply because we’re dealing with ventures that have by definition a low probability of success. Venture capital firms know this very well and that is why they run abundant funnels. The goal is to do the same inside established organizations.

At the end of the day, ideas, startups, and prototypes are great initiators of innovation but they are only the first step in a long journey. Organizations that wish to become innovation-proficient must invest in the infrastructure, tools, and methods that have proven to be effective in achieving that.?

Spyre Group - Innovation Ecosystem Design

If you're interested in becoming innovation proficient and you wish to learn more about how this is done, come visit the Spyre website or click below to schedule a complimentary meeting https://www.spyre.group/advisorymeeting?