A Step-By-Step Guide for Business Innovation - David J. Neff and Randal C. Moss

Innovation, true institutional innovation, makes indelible, positive impacts on a business’s corporate culture and ability to drive revenue. When implemented, successful innovation programs can attract top talent, improve staff retention, drive new lines of business, and create an agile organization able to adapt to changing environments.

A culture of innovation requires executive leadership to engage the entirety of their staff to take ownership of innovation development, and incorporate it into their daily job functions. Every employee has a unique view of the organization, and can identify opportunities to better serve their constituents. Identifying these gaps should be an organizational priority, because each gap is an opportunity to innovate a new program or fill a need.

These days, it is insufficient to rely on a suggestion box in the break room to drive innovation. You need to present your employees with the resources and support necessary to effect a change on the problem they have identified.

Step 1: Create Opportunities for Awareness and Innovation

When the American Cancer Society initiated its Futuring and Innovation Center in 2002, they were inundated with ideas on how to solve constituent challenges. The Center drove a cultural change within the greater organization by developing a structure through which even the most junior staff were able to submit ideas and participate in their development. Beyond the value of the new programs, and beyond the new revenue from them, The Center fostered a culture of individual responsibility and gave every staff person the tools and opportunity to make lasting and meaningful changes to the way that the organization operated. The lesson? Encourage your employees to extend themselves outside of the prescribed job descriptions.

Additionally, Royal Dutch Shell PLC was a pioneer in organization awareness, able to engage their entire company — top to bottom level. Shell developed and implemented an innovation identification and development program called “Game Changer,” which actively sought outside ideas for energy production, distribution, and even new sources that could drive profitability and overall growth of the company. Shell calls out to its entire network asking “If you have a creative mind and you believe your invention can transform the energy industry, perhaps you should be speaking to us. We invest in novel, early stage ideas that could impact the Energy System to help you get them from your mind to ‘proof of concept.’”

But awareness need not solely be an external effort. Air Products and Chemicals considered awareness as an internal challenge. Air Products employs a vast array of engineers with diverse background and interests. However, this vast resource was not being tapped, simply because the interests and skills sets of each engineer were hidden. Air Products recognized the challenge and created an internal system to catalog all of their engineer’s technical expertise and passions. Now, project managers leverage the system to create high relevance ad-hock technical teams that align people with their technical skills and passions. The result is better products and engaged employees.

Step 2: Take A Systematic Approach

In the Innovation and Commercialization 2010 McKinsey Global Survey, one of the biggest challenges expressed by participants was the need for better organization of innovation. In fact, 42 percent of survey respondents said that improvement in innovation organization would make a profound positive impact on their ability to drive innovation.

Interestingly enough, “organization” was closely followed by “developing a culture and climate that fosters innovation” as the second biggest challenge. The report is telling when it says, “Organizational factors, including innovation-specific processes and links to support functions, remain a challenge. As hard as it is for companies to implement organizational changes in increasingly complex environments, the results suggest that when companies make the effort, they will experience more success with innovation.”

The lack of a highly functioning innovation system is one of the preeminent barriers to developing a culture of innovation. An innovation structure provides individuals with great ideas the resources and corporate support to usurp the standard business development process.

The Shell Game Changer is a strong example of how a large organization can act nimbly by creating a separate pathway for ideas to route. Game Changer relies on a stage-gate process to bring in, evaluate, validate, test, and launch new innovations. The American Cancer Society leveraged the success of the Shell system and adopted a similar framework for their innovation development program called Springboard. Both programs took a regimented and systematic approach to innovation development, passing hundreds and thousands of ideas through screens until they were left with only the most viable innovations. At which point, those ideas received not only funding, but developmental support.

Step 3: Turn Ideas into Business Reality

Here is an easy guide for transforming all those wonderful innovations from words on an email, to actionable programs or products:

1. Discovery. Gather business concepts from your staff and volunteer network. Create challenges for them by posing particular questions and asking for solutions, and have an open channel for people to send in their unique ideas for consideration.
2. Scoping. Give concepts an initial review against your carefully selected criteria. Some key criteria are: Scalability, Sustainability, Cost Basis, Tie to Organizational Mission, and Capacity for Execution. This is where your process begins to pay off. By weeding out unsustainable ideas early on you preserve development energy and funding for viable ideas.
3. Create a Business Case. Once approved, engage the person who submitted the idea to draft a business plan of their concept. The business plans should thoroughly outline the mission, goals, evaluation tools/metrics, and resources to test the viability of the idea as a prototype. A review committee should consider a completed business plan as a formal application for funding.
4. Conduct Constituent Market Research. Engage the idea submitter to commission a market research study to determine what demand exists for their concept. Ideally, you already know the problem it is going to solve, and the value it will bring your customers or constituents. Now you need to see if there is a market for it. Your research can be as complex as engaging a firm, or as simple as creating an online survey.
5. Development and Testing. Create a rapid prototype to prove the concept works. We suggest that you aim to prove the concept within a nine- to twelve-month time frame. We strongly encourage limiting funding to encourage bootstrapping, and keep the effort focused on proving the viability of the concept, not creating a full-fledged program.
6. Launch. If chosen for implementation, work closely with the idea submitter to identify the resources and department support best suited to deliver the program to market, and arrange the smooth transition and success of the new program.

From the outside, brilliant business innovation may seem like art. But it’s more science than you think. We work in nonprofits, where innovation is the name of the game: Now, you know our strategy for success.

via chiefexecutive.net

 

Four Tips on Winning by Yum Brands President David Novak: Chief Executive Magazine

Yum! Brands’ David Novak at right

Yum! Brands’ David Novak has a secret for staying on his leadership toes: the “hot-shot-replaces-me” scenario. “I think, ‘If someone replaced me tomorrow, what would he or she do?’” explains the CEO of the world’s largest restaurant company, which encompasses the KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell brands. “Since I like my job, why don’t I do it first?”

Results suggest his method is effective. During his tenure as CEO, the $11 billion company has flourished, reporting 13 percent-plus earnings per share growth for each of the last nine years. Novak has also spearheaded global growth; approximately 75 percent of the company’s profits now come from outside the U.S. versus 20 percent in 1997. The firm is one of a handful of U.S. companies that have taken China by storm, in its case by leveraging brand expertise—intellectual property that local competitors can’t reverse engineer as they might a physical product.

In a recent meeting with Chief Executive, Novak, who penned the recent book, Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make BIG Things Happen, offered four tips to delivering growth.

Be Humble. “Recognize that nothing big gets done by you alone,” he says. “So you need to know who’s on your team the same way a marketer knows its target audience. Know your people cold. What’s in their heads? What are they thinking? And then you’ve got to say, ‘Okay, to take them with me to achieve this strategy, what perceptions or beliefs do I have to build, change or reinforce to get them to come along?”

Grow Yourself. “Never stop learning,” urges Novak, who points to John Wooden, legendary UCLA basketball coach, as an example. “When he was winning national championships he met with and studied extra tall people and coaches of extra tall people. He was still focusing on growing himself. I think when you do that you’ll end up growing your business because you’ll be sharpening your skills and be able to apply that personal growth to growing your business.”

Wipe out “Not Invented Here” Syndrome. “Often when you have success, you get so insular that you don’t go outside and look to see what other people are doing,” he says. “I tell people one of the ways you get promoted in our company is to be a know-how builder, to get knowledge from other people and make yourself [and the company] smarter.”

Make Your Culture a Hero. “When we started our company, I had a chance to do a gigantic do-over, because we had been part of PepsiCo,” he explains. “So we looked at some of the best companies in the world at that time—Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Target and Southwest Airlines. Every one of them said the key to their success was their culture. You want to make it clear what you value in your company and then recognize the people role-modeling that behavior. Then make culture the hero of all the good things that happen in your company. As a CEO, you have to be the culture champion. via chiefexecutive.net

Hire Jim Woods to Speak to or Advise Your Organization

Innovation, Growth, & Hypercompetition Consultant/Speaker/Business Coach

 Website: InnoThink Group

Request a consultation: Office: +1 719.266-6703  or complete our form.  

 

Innothink Group is a strategic management, innovation and business coaching consultancy. 

Our Guarantee. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting nearly two thirds of our fees at risk subject to hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships with shared responsibility. See a few of our clients.   

We provide broad ranging advice covering innovation, commoditization, competitive advantage, business policy and strategy, as well as global strategy and implementation.