How to Win at Innovation

It takes agility and speed for companies to win at innovaton: Agility enables companies to identify market opportunities and adapt their processes and products to capitalize on changing customer or market demands. And the faster that products and services get to customers — speed — the greater the advantage over competitors that try to keep up (and by the time they do, they’re chasing the next new entry).

But how are agility and speed accomplished?

Winning Innovation, a business novel we recently wrote, tells the a story of a good, competent Italian bicycle manufacturer that’s facing declining profits and growth. The company leader learns — often grudgingly — that he and his colleagues must embark on an innovation excellence transformation that can put them on a path to sustained prosperity. In theory it sounds simple enough, but it’s not. That’s because two things have to change for innovation excellence to take hold: processes and people/culture. One is much easier to change than the other.

Processes

The bike company, like many manufacturers today, is frequently its own worst enemy. R&D leadership pursues projects that appear to support the company or their own personal interests without examining more closely what they actually can and should deliver to the company. As important, they lack the ways to spark ideas and projects they should be pursuing that can dramatically boost the value of a company’s product portfolio.

The company learns that innovation processes should consist of a creative, collaborative, and agile front end that is able to efficiently explore countless new ideas to reduce the risk before a significant investment is made. And once an idea enters the product or service pipeline — with the backing of all functions — it is supported with effective technology development (technology is developed with a laser focus on the knowledge that is needed); efficient mass design (products or services are created with manufacturing-like lean efficiency to eliminate wastes); and speed and agile risk management principles.

Innovation processes are not necessarily easy to change, but once those working within those processes can trial and see the potential benefits of new ways of working, they’re likely to get on board. And that’s where the more challenging element of culture comes in.

Culture

Innovation excellence requires culture change on two fronts. The first is to instill components of traditional lean culture, including respect for people, humble leadership, sound change management practices, and modeling behaviors that eventually alter manager and frontline behaviors and their beliefs (necessary for sustainable culture change).

The second component of culture change is the establishment of an innovation culture — i.e., the behaviors and principles that turn everyone in a company into an inventor, not just engineers in R&D. This requires enabling, supporting, and nurturing innovation at every level of the company, in executive team meetings to daily huddles with frontline staff. It also involves educating, engaging, and holding everyone in the company accountable for innovation. Innovation culture includes prudent risk-taking and a realization that some ideas will fail (which is OK, as there are lessons to be learned from failures). It also involves providing the appropriate rewards for success.

Culture change was the primary reason we wrote Winning Innovation as a novel. It’s easier for individuals to prepare for culture change if they can experience how others react to it and imagine themselves in those situations: a CEO realizes that innovation excellence starts with him but that he can’t make all the decisions to achieve it; a young engineer learns what it takes to move an invention from idea to potential product and, along the way, how to better lead others; a snarky sales executive finally puts the company before her own interests, embraces change, and contributes to substantial gains.

A few foundational steps can get any company in any industry started with innovation excellence:

• Develop an engaging strategy, objectives, and goals and a plan for deployment
• Quantify the current product portfolio (value of products today and through their lifetime minus what they cost to get to market and price depreciations) and a future product portfolio (products and services that could be in the innovation pipeline)
• Establish a creativity engine (e.g., idea suggestion system, hackathons, creativity kits) and power it with the involvement of everyone
• Honest and caring leadership (“This is what’s needed and why, and I need your help.”)

The biggest results of an innovation excellence transformation are achieved when it touches the entire organization. Because of this, we set the Winning Innovation story in a midsize company, revealing the relatively quick transformation (less than two years) that, nonetheless, provides for impressive and immediate results:

• A fast, agile organization in which everybody has become an innovator
• Company executives that have learned how to teach and guide rather than decide and direct
• An entrepreneurial mindset that cost-effectively pursues a range of innovations
• An engaged and educated workforce that has learned how to transform their own company from the inside out 

Winning at innovation takes some work. Winning at innovation takes some time. Winning at innovation delivers unimaginable returns to the top and bottom lines.

Check out the book if you found this interesting and explore it more.

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About Authors:

Norbert Majerus is a popular keynote speaker, consultant, and co-author of the business novel Winning Innovation — How Innovation Excellence Propels an Industry Icon Toward Sustained Prosperity. Follow Norbert on LinkedIn or visit leandriveninnovation.com.

George Taninecz, co-author of Winning Innovation, is president of George Taninecz Inc. and for more than 20 years has helped executives publish award-winning books, articles, and white papers that illustrate applications of lean thinking and operational improvement. George also is the VP of Research at The MPI Group. Find George on LinkedIn.