Spyreism no.4 - Dance with executives who want to go to the innovation ball with you

There’s a tendency of innovation managers to regard their activity as an “all or nothing” affair that should be enforced from the top down. This is similar to startups that don’t do a good enough job of identifying their target audience and believe that broader is better. Spreading efforts and resources over a wide market for a young startup is usually detrimental. Similarly, we believe that innovation managers should look at the initiation of their activities as if they were a startup selling a product (innovation funnel) to a target audience (executive team). Who do we go after in the startup world first? They are called early adopters. The best practice is that once these early adopters who suffer most from the problem our product is solving start using it, broader circles of customers will realize the benefits and then follow suit.

It is a very similar case here with executives as the internal customers of our innovation funnel. Executives are the ones who make the decisions regarding innovative ventures that come out of the innovation funnel. They are the ones who decide whether to start implementation and deployment as part of official work plans, a decision that means they are prioritizing this venture over other things they were planning. Getting executives to this point is a challenging task and doing this properly lies at the heart of Spyre’s methodology.

The focus of this article is on the correct way to begin as my partners and I are often asked about what the first step towards innovation should be. The last thing you want to do is enforce an innovation agenda on a reluctant executive team. Dance with the executives who wish to go to the innovation ball with you. Identify your one or two executive early adopters and perform the following steps:

1. Define with them what business goals they wish to achieve through innovation. Is it revenues from new sources? Improved profitability via operational excellence? Specific challenges they wish to solve using startup technology? Make innovation into a means to an end and not the end in itself. Position innovation as a way to bring executives closer to their goals in leaps and bounds.
2. Get participating executives’ commitment to:Openly discuss innovation activities.Encourage employees to participate and allocate some of their work time for this purpose.Approve some of the experiments/pilots and adopt successful ones into the work plans.
3. Construct the funnel and present viable opportunities to the participating executives. Make sure to communicate this to the entire executive team and if there’s any sort of event where opportunities are presented include other executives as well as judges or observers. This creates “writer’s envy” and some of the executives who didn’t cooperate to this point will be interested to start doing so. This way you will get gradual adoption of your funnel by executives similarly to the way customers gradually adopt a new product.

Executive cooperation is the key to the success of innovation activities. This analogy that regards them as the adopters of a new product will help you as innovation managers in many situations and is a highly recommended approach for the early stages of the program

If you wish to discuss how this can be done in your organization , click below to schedule a complimentary meeting https://www.spyre.group/advisorymeeting .