In one of my previous blogs I looked at how a CEO/COO who really wanted to see Innovation break out in their organisation needed to “Fake it to Make it” – so, if you are a CXO who’s following along, here’s what you need to do next – simply ask yourself some challenging questions to ensure you can effectively unleash innovation in your organisation. Easy to say very difficult to do – why - because this is a business problem most CXOs don’t face every day. Ask them to reduce a cost base, manage a product launch, reorganise a distribution network and they are all over it. However, ask them to unleash innovation and they are lost. It’s the equivalent of asking a plumber to carry out laser eye surgery. They don’t know what questions to ask or what to do. As a result most CXOs default to instant action and rapidly implement all or some of the following initiatives to “get things going”
1. Employee suggestion box – “they know where the problems lie”
2. Customer suggestion box – “they’ll tell us what they want from us”
3. Innovation Training – a 1 or 2 day sheep dip for senior managers to help them become innovative
4. A communication campaign – encouraging everyone to “unleash their inner creativity”
Now whilst these are actually all potentially useful and viable solutions and they do show “executive intent” they are no substitute for some basic planning and the asking of some first order questions that may deliver much more suitable interventions, notably here’s my Top 10:
1. What are the business outcomes I want from unleashing innovation?
2. How much budget and resource am I prepared to allocate to delivering these outcomes?
3. What type of Innovation do I want to “unleash”? – e.g. business model, product design, pricing structure etc.
4. What level of innovation do I want to “unleash”? e.g. from better sharing of best practice to development of a new business
5. Do I have people in or around my organisation that are capable of unleashing it – if yes how do I engage them, if no how do I find some?
6. What process do I need to put in place to govern and manage innovation?
7. What kind of incentives do I need in place to encourage innovation?
8. What will we stop doing to make space for innovation?
9. How do we need to change our culture so that it is accepting of innovation?
10. What external resources can help me drive innovation? E.g. technology, expertise etc
When you’ve answered these questions you are right on the brink of being able to unleash innovation into your business. The good news is your now walking and talking innovation and are asking all the right questions– in subsequent blogs I’ll dig into some of these questions in a bit more detail and do please feel free to get in touch if you are feeling overwhelmedJ
No comments:
Post a Comment