Over the past couple of months I’ve had the same conversation with a number of different people that essentially amounts to this: “I’m in an innovation role at a large corporation and while it’s exciting, it’s lonely.”
I’m sympathetic to their plight from my last role leading innovation in social at Ogilvy & Mather, the advertising behemoth: while there’s incredible amount of excitement around innovation, actually being in the driver’s seat can be a lonely and often frustrating experience. So I decided to get a few of these folks together in what we only half-jokingly referred to as The Innovators Self Help Breakfast Group.
All of those at breakfast were charged in some way with fostering innovation in their organisations, but all in quite unique ways. Their roles covered a range of activities including;
– Changing the organization’s culture
– Challenging and changing the organization’s process
– Updating the organisation’s knowledge (with reverse mentoring of leadership being a popular tactic)
– Imagining the future of the business
– Meeting with startups and bringing them into the business
– Providing investment / incubation to startups
– Licensing or lending their brands to startups
Despite this range of activities there seemed to be some common issues
– Swampiness: senior management using the complexity of the corporation to evade commitment / hide from change
– Risk averse culture: these businesses have actively and properly worked to reduce risk by building risk averse cultures and processes to underpin that so that you’re fighting against both the corporate brain and muscle when trying to get them to take risks
– Compliance: Regulated industries come with their own set of compliance issues which are automatically imposed directly into any kind of innovation effort (for those in banking and health)
– Business cases: as listed or even just properly managed businesses the uncertainty of ROI around much innovation is unacceptable: a business case has to be made for each piece of innovation and improved customer experience is not a valid reason unless tied to an immediately obvious revenue increase or a cost saving
– Internal digital entropy: the digital development teams that have been built up internally by most large organisations are often expensive and slow, driven by processes unsuited to the requirements of agile development
But it’s not all gloom and graft, there were also plenty of solutions shared;
– Eating together: lunch and learns seemed to be a widely used tool for sharing information and fostering engagement around innovation
– Know yourself 1: Corporates competing with entrepreneurs are going to struggle; a manager in a corporation is risking part of her annual bonus whereas an entrepreneur is possibly risking her home or money borrowed from family and friends: the stakes for entrepreneurs are higher and so the focus is stronger.
– Know yourself 2: Corporates need to recognise what they are good at – usually that is scaling not starting businesses. And that’s what the startups come to the large organization for – that formidable skill in scaling across markets, categories, languages and timezones are what multi national corporations are incredibly good at
– Putting senior people from the organisation into mentoring roles with startups and eventually on boards and as non-execs helps them to understand the pressures and processes that startups experience and also gives the senior an opportunity to share years of specialized knowledge with what are quite often young and inexperienced teams
– Putting skin in the game; one of the innovation departments charges internal clients a fee to participate in the programs. Initially because they literally had no budget it turns out that it was a great way of getting internal cleints to take the partnership seriously. Another innovation team provide desk space in their building to bring startups close to their business
– Make innovation a facilitator of, but not responsible for, The Future: in one model the innovation team makes intros to 5 startups to pitch against a brief and the internal client at the brand makes the selection and so owns the relationship and opportunity
– Keep a slush fund: due to the cost and time involved in using internal development resource it can be wise to keep a bit of extra budget tucked into a mobile development brief or an apps program and deploy that discretely
The journey continues: we will continue to meet over breakfast and as long as no-one in the group objects I‘ll continue to share non-specofc observations. If you lead innovation or have in snuck into your responsibilities at a large brand or organization – hit me up on email lryan (at) spredfast.com and as long as you’re not a competitor to one of our existing breakfasters I’ll get you along for some group innovation therapy.