Thought Starters for Creating a Successful Innovation Strategy

Innovation is one of the most over-used buzzwords in business today. It’s taken over from retired business buzz-words like disruption, game-changing, outside-the-box, cutting-edge and change agent and is often used by people who have very little knowledge about the subject yet refer to it often to fill space without meaningful intent.

The biggest difference between innovation and the other pre-mentioned buzzwords is the historical definition behind it; Innovation stands for a significant positive change, it’s about solving difficult problems and focusing on an outcome or result, it’s about creating quality across multiple areas of business at the same time. Innovation has given us assembly line, the internet, flat screen TVs, and mobile devices, it’s separated companies from their competitors and is one of the most sought after capabilities in today’s business landscape. But like any other result, innovation needs a plan behind it, it needs a strategy that guides its implementation and ensures its success.

Why Create an Innovation Strategy?

Creating an innovation strategy is nothing more than committing to a set of repeatable policies or behaviors aimed at giving you and your company a competitive advantage. Great strategies humanize their vision by clarifying objectives and priorities and promoting a sense of alignment with the different groups responsible for it. Your innovation strategy will speak to the goals of the business, the problems that need to be solved and the processes needed for different business functions to work together.

What is the Goal of an Innovation Strategy?

Development of an innovation strategy should start with a clear understanding and description of the objectives that will help create a competitive advantage for you and your company. When doing this, it’s important to avoid generalities like company value and growth; focus on specific areas where change will create your competitive advantage.

An innovation strategy should answer some of the most import questions within your company, such as:

  • How will we increase our value with existing customers?
  • How will we attract new customers to our products and services?
  • How will we increase the intrinsic value of the company?
  • How will we evolve our products and services?
  • How will we make it easier to get our products and services to our customers quicker and more efficiently?

In addition to this, it’s important that your innovation strategy has metric expectations behind it, by speaking to the following issues:

  • What is the return on investment from innovation?
  • What are the key performance indicators we’re looking to achieve?
  • What resources are required to create value and change?
  • What are the processes required to create and evaluate the success and failure of change?

It’s important to understand that the innovation strategy of one company most likely won’t work for another. Companies like Apple, Tesla, Corning, and Boeing have an innovation strategy that is core to its long-term business strategy but trying to copy or imitate their ways of innovating will probably fail within another company. Every company is different, as is every team, product and service. It’s important that your innovation strategy takes this into consideration. Learning from others is never bad, but trying to emulate their strategies may lead to negative results.

Conclusion

While innovation is an overused business buzzword, it is necessary to add to the value of an existing business. Today most companies are looking to innovate their consumer experience and add value in new and exciting ways. The creation of an innovation strategy will help guide long term change within your organization and allow you to make the right business decisions with regards to innovation.

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5 factors that lead to an effective fail-fast/succeed-sooner culture

There’s a misunderstanding in the way many organizations embrace a fail-fast to succeed-sooner culture. All too often it’s used to justify speedy, under-informed decision making, just good-enough deliverables and products, and missed performance expectations; when in fact the true purpose of a fail-fast to succeed-sooner culture is to foster innovation by giving investment to ideas that may push the bar further while reducing their inherent risk.

Innovation is important

The idea of the fail-fast to succeed-sooner culture came from the startup world at a time when innovation was driving dramatic change in the way people received information, interacted with products and services and communicated with one another. Today the pace of innovation hasn’t changed; most organizations are going through some form of disruption to the status quo, but companies need to embrace the right fail-fast to succeed-sooner culture to ensure that they are not allowing the mantra to be a justification for mediocrity.

Failure is Important

Failure is an important part of the innovation process, though many people fear failure as the pressure to succeed is so intense. In many cases it drives people to create shortcuts to prove success and an illusion of viability rather than focusing on the metrics that truly drive business results forward.

Embracing the right fail-first to succeed-sooner culture requires that the teams involved are working in an honest an open environment. It requires courage and support from management and patience in the face of adversity. Because of this it is very rare that companies truly create the right culture.

5 Factors to success

A true fail-fast to succeed-sooner culture embraces experimentation; learning from mistakes while capitalizing on successes, focusing on long term goals and performance gains.

This requires that:

  1. Leadership is delivering a vision that all projects can be measured against
  2. Projects should follow a well understood methodology that allows for measurement
  3. No one project is so crucial to the long term vision that the entire success or failure of that vision rest solely on that one project
  4. Teams are given the opportunity to evaluate and change projects on a regular basis
  5. Both successes and failure are truly celebrated

Conclusion

The speed of innovation is not going to decrease and because of this failure is inevitable. Embracing a true fail-fast to succeed-sooner culture requires that teams work in an open and honest environment focusing on a long-term vision. It requires that teams adjust their expectations that mediocrity is an acceptable reason for failure and that the greatest successes come from experimentation with a purpose.

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The evolving role of the Chief Digital Officer

The role of Chief Digital Officer isn’t new addition to the C-Level suite however the requirements of the role are quickly evolving. In the past the role more often focused on increasing digital capabilities within the marketing function; delivering on digital customer experience across the web, social and mobile while being involved in the expansion digital commerce and content. Today, digital business transformation is driving traditionally minded companies to rethink their entire operational structure; requiring the CDO’s role to transform into a more strategic business leader, driving structural and political change within traditional companies.

Leading organizational change can be messy and the Chief Digital Officer should be right in the center of it. The creation and execution of digital strategies may contradict many long held beliefs within an organization and challenge the status quo. This requires a CDO to many hats, some of which are less related to digital business yet are increasingly just as important:

Educator

Digital change often requires investment both financially and culturally. In order to successfully transform a traditional business into a leading digitally centric company requires education within every level of the organization. The CDO needs to lead this education and tailor it for every aspect of the company. They need to ensure everyone from the CEO down understands the value obtained by digitally transforming business and has the skills and information necessary to affect the change.

Relationship Manager

As discussed, digital transformation requires companies to rethink their entire structure. Because of this, the CDO must have the ability to bridge and enhance business relationships, forming trust amongst their peers. It requires bringing together groups of people who may not traditionally have spoken to each other. They need to fill in the gaps between business units and build a sense of comradery amongst disparate groups in order to push the entire company forward.

Visionary (Fortune Teller)

The evolution of digital within business can happen at an extremely fast pace. Technology changes quickly and understanding how the latest trends can impact business can be mind boggling. A seasoned CDO will be able to forge through the vast wilderness of information and technology and predict the innovations that will positively affect change.

Team Leader

Chief Digital Officers are rarely an island unto themselves. Many companies are looking beyond digital strategy and are focused on building their own internal digital capabilities. This requires a CDO who understands the roles and responsibilities required to build an effective team. It also requires the CDO to lead and motivate that team towards business change. The ownership of data, content, technology and customer experience can require large multi-disciplinary teams and the leadership and management of these teams falls squarely on the back of the CDO.

As business evolves, digital transformation may drive change faster than many companies are comfortable moving. Finding the right Chief Digital Officer is a daunting task, but is crucial to the success of business in today’s digital age. It’s no longer good enough for a CDO to be well versed in customer experience, data and analytics e-commerce and technology innovation; a strong CDO will also understand business strategy, operations and ways in which companies can change their entire structure to a more digitally centric business approach. They need to be the perfect balance of strategic thinker and delivery master and must continue to evolve as the needs of companies and consumers change.

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