Now, more than ever, there’s massive amounts of pressure on corporates to be as innovative as possible.
Even if they’re market leaders, trying to do things the way they’ve always done is an invitation to have some young startup supplant them.
Trouble is, innovation doesn’t always come easily to big corporates. After all, the skills needed to hold onto a position of dominance are very different to the ones needed to make a disruptive entry into the market.
Knowing that, what are some strategic initiatives corporates can undertake to unlock innovation within their organisations?
Several small bets
Before we look at those initiatives, however, it’s worth pointing out that you shouldn’t bet the innovation bank on a single initiative.
Instead, learn from the lean startup movement and experiment with several initiatives, making note of what works and what doesn’t.
Remember, every company is different. What worked for other companies in the past might not work for yours. Experimentation is therefore imperative as you figure out what’ll unlock innovation in your organisation.
Awareness building
That said, it’s generally not the worst idea to start unlocking innovation in your organisation with an awareness campaign.
Among the initiatives you can undertake in this phase are hosting keynote speakers, holding town hall meetings on innovation, and sending employees to innovation conferences.
All of these initiatives help make your staff aware of what people mean by innovation. Furthermore, they can help get your employees thinking about innovation within the organisation and what it might look like.
Engagement
Having made your organisation aware of what innovation looks like and how others go about doing it, you can get everyone engaging with it in a hands-on manner.
Doing so means holding training sessions around concepts like design thinking, and lean startup and agile methodologies.
You can also introduce them to things like idea challenges and design sprints.
When it comes to hosting an idea challenge, simply present a business problem and ask the organisation to come up with ideas that solve the problem. The key is to have meaningful rewards and recognition for the winners so that they feel properly incentivised for taking part in the competition.
Design sprints meanwhile are a multi-day process that uses design thinking to reduce the risk when bringing a new product, service or a feature to the market.
Outcomes
By now, you should be starting to look at how innovation can produce viable business outcomes in your organisation.
Some of the outcomes-based innovation initiatives you can implement include hackathons (preferably around a specific business challenge) and open innovation initiatives (where people from different part of the organisation come together to figure out how they can move the company forward).
If you’ve got the wherewithal to do so, you can also set aside dedicated time and budget for your staff to explore new ideas.
The most famous example of this is Google’s “20% Time”, although variations on the idea have existed in the corporate space for some time now.
Hard measures
As your organisation becomes increasingly comfortable with innovation and what it entails, you can start looking at the kind of initiatives which mark you out as truly innovative.
These include internal incubators (where you allow members of your team to run startups within the organisation) and external accelerators (where you fund startups and provide them with the resources they need to grow with the eventual possibility of acquiring them).
You can also look at things like updating your incentive structures and performance reviews and undertaking innovation environment diagnosis and remediation.
Bringing in help
Whatever innovation stage you’re at, it’s never the worst idea to bring in a little outside help. At Innoway, we have the expertise to help corporates undertake the kind of initiatives discussed above. If you’d like assistance with them, contact us here.
