How to Gather Strong Support for Your Innovation Goals
In this month’s residency in Barcelona, we did a poll on why innovation doesn’t reach its potential (at the least) or (even worse) why innovation is dead on arrival.
The top blockers that came up as reasons why innovation never crosses the finish line had nothing to do with the ability to generate great ideas, or with skills people need to apply lean startup experimentation, design thinking, open innovation or to lead hackathons.
The biggest challenge: How to get support for new ideas from an organization that is focused on executing the current initiatives.
For the past 5 years, I’ve been working with teams to figure out why we seem to be so schizophrenic:
On the one hand, we know we need new concepts to fuel growth.
On the other hand, we ask the innovation teams to provide metrics that demonstrate certainty about how an early-stage initiative will turn out (revenues generated, customers served, market share).
On the one hand, we think we’re supporting collaboration and diversity of opinion.
On the other hand, when the moment comes to invest seriously in innovation beyond the early prizes and small initial investment, we’re baffled by where we should place our investment bets. We wonder: What’s the ideal portfolio for innovation investment?
On the one hand, we believe that pitching ideas is the final route to buy-in.
In reality, we learn that the naysayers, skeptics, analysts and other silent judges can enter the scene and put the kibosh on projects we thought had full support.
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We’ll never grow unless we bring together the world of “let’s imagine” + the world of “it’s impossible”. |
ToolBox
Here’s where we fail most often and what to do about it.
🔷 Assumption on Alignment
Where We Fail: We assume that everyone has the same passion that we do about the need for growth.
How To Enlist Support: As innovators, we need to earn trust from leaders who run lines of business and support their priorities. How can our innovation help a product leader expand her customer engagement?
🔷 Custom Narratives
Where We Fail: We neglect to modify our narrative about the innovation initiative to match the needs of the people whose support we need.
How To Enlist Support: There should be no one-size-fits-all approach to describing the value of our innovation initiative. The finance group will need a narrative that speaks to their needs for revenue growth; the marketing group will need a customer + competition narrative; the technology group will need a platform narrative. Stop telling the story in the terms you like and start asking the people around you what matters to them.
🔷 Shiny Objects
Where We Fail: We get too excited about the bright shiny object aspects of our innovation at the expense of emphasizing the fundamentals.
How To Enlist Support: It’s tempting to blame the organization for not being supportive of innovation when it’s actually on us to run the spreadsheets to address business fundamentals that will kick in after the excitement of the early stages of a new business model, a new ecosystem play, a new product launch.
🔷 Critique Avoidance
Where We Fail: We are tone deaf when naysayers offer criticism.
How To Enlist Support: Early in the innovation process invite leaders from the logistics, supply chain, compliance, governance groups to co-creation sessions. Make sure to understand the depth of potential areas of concern, the risks they anticipate, and the fears they express. Integrate their talents into addressing the risk as part of the total innovation solution.
