Now more than ever, creating a culture of innovation within your business is essential if you want to keep on being successful. But innovation can quite often feel like a bit of a slog, with constant hurdles to get over that sap everyone’s energy and creativity. So how do you overcome these challenges and create a high-performance innovation team? Here are five things to consider – crack these and you’ll be heading in the right direction.
It might sound obvious but if you’re going try and do something, you should know what it is you’re trying to do. So, the first thing you need is a definition of what ‘innovation’ means for your business.
Putting a man on the Moon or discovering penicillin is clearly innovation, but these types of mega-breakthroughs happen rarely, so it’s not really helpful to have something too grand as your aim. Businesses need a more flexible definition of innovation that works for them. When Mars created personalised M&Ms, it wasn’t innovation on the same level as NASA’s big achievement, but it was still a new idea in the category, and it proved to be a huge commercial success.
Moving even further down the ‘mega-breakthrough’ scale of innovation, things like changing the flavour of a throat lozenge or the colour of a pair of shoes are not that revolutionary but they could refresh your brand or create incremental revenue streams.
So, for your business, define what innovation means at the start of the process, so those involved have a framework to guide them and know what success looks like.
Having an overall strategy for your business is essential for delivering successful innovation. This will give your team direction and help make sure effort isn’t wasted pursuing innovations that aren’t aligned to your business’s vision.
Your team need to be able to look at every innovation opportunity through the lens of the strategy so they can select the right projects to drive the business in the right direction. There is always room for disruptive new ideas, in fact they should be encouraged, but you need a strategy that allows these to flourish.
The strategy needs to be relevant, clearly communicated and make sense. You should be able to ask anyone at any level what the top-level strategy is for the business and get the right answer. If you can’t, then you either haven’t communicated it well enough, people don’t understand it, or worse, people don’t agree with it.
Despite what you might think, an ‘innovation process’ isn’t an oxymoron. The type of process we’re talking about isn’t one that will stifle creativity or put up barriers. A good innovation process will guide you, help you be creative and, most importantly, help get your ideas off the ground so you can deliver them.
An innovation process needs to be easy to understand and be flexible and agile enough for your team to innovate whenever and wherever they need to. Importantly a good innovation process should also enable those who are less experienced to innovate too by providing a step-by-step framework to follow.
Within Propeller, we have a simple 5-stage innovation process called Sprint. From brainstorming and selecting ideas to developing pitches and testing concepts, it provides all the guidance and tools you need to get your team feeling motivated and empowered to innovate every day.
An innovation culture is the number one thing to get right. You can have the best strategy and process in the world but without a good culture of innovation it will be hard to get to where you want to be. Culture is that indefinable positive feeling you get when you visit a company. It goes far deeper than having a fancy office in a nice part of town. It’s a vibe you get from being there. It feels authentic and energetic and it comes from the people. With a strong and positive culture, innovation will flourish.
Creating this kind of culture starts with the leaders and requires them to understand what motivates their team. And in turn the team have to trust in the leaders – their vision for the company and how it will get there – and also trust in each other. When you have that mutual appreciation of where you are going and that mutual trust and respect for each other, ideas and innovate thinking always start flowing more easily.
Propeller features a module called Pinboard which is specifically designed to help build a healthy innovation culture within your business. It provides a platform for your team to share and comment on ideas and the trends and insights that affect your business. It also allows business leaders to put out briefs and challenges to get things started. By giving everyone a platform to share ideas, and by valuing everyone’s inputs, it creates a continuous innovation conversation amongst the group.
To successfully innovate you need to figure out where to place your bets. There’s usually no shortage of ideas and some of them will be great and some not so great. But you need to figure out which ones you are going to back to create a healthy innovation portfolio. To do this you need to define different horizons for your innovations and how much resource you are going to put into each one. You then need to apportion your innovation efforts in line with this plan.
A healthy innovation portfolio will have projects in different horizons. Innovations that keep your current offering fresh and relevant; innovations that allow you to move into new adjacencies that make sense to your business; and also big audacious innovations that could be the future of your business, your sector or even the world! If you can get this right and align your innovation efforts to it, you will have success over the short and long term and be able to defend against being disrupted by competition or market changes.
Need help with yours? Get in touch to discuss how Propeller’s innovation portfolio management module can help.