by Robyn Bolton | Dec 22, 2020 | Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
“The definition of insanity is repeating the same actions over and over again and expected different results.”
This quote, often (wrongly) attributed to Albert Einstein, is a perfect description of what has been occurring in corporate innovation for the last 20+ years.
In 1997, The Innovator’s Dilemma, put fear in the hearts of executives and ignited interest and investment in innovation across industries, geographies, and disciplines. Since then, millions of articles, thousands of books, and hundreds of consultants (yes, including MileZero) have sprung forth offering help to startups and Fortune 100 companies alike.
Yet the results remain the same.
After decades of incubators, accelerators, innovation teams, corporate venture capital (CVC), growth boards, hackathons, shark tanks, strategies, processes, metrics, and futurists, the success rate of corporate innovation remains stagnant.
Stop the insanity!
I have spent my career in corporate innovation, first as part of the P&G team that launched Swiffer and Swiffer WetJet, later as a Partner at the innovation firm founded by Clayton Christensen, and now as the founder of MileZero, an innovation consulting and coaching firm.
I have engaged in and perpetuated the insanity, but I’ve also noticed something – 90% of what we do in corporate innovation speaks to our logic and reason, it’s left brain focused, and 10% speaks to creativity and imagination, our right brains. BUT 0% of our work speaks to the hearts hopes, fears, beliefs, desires, and motivations of the corporate decision-makers who ultimately determine innovation’s fate.
We spend all out time, effort, and money appealing to their brains when, in reality, the decisions are made in their hearts.
Of course, no corporate executive will ever admit to deciding with their heart, after all, good management is objective and data-based. But corporate executives are also human, and, like other humans, they make decisions with their hearts and justify it with their heads.
Consider this very common scenario:
A CEO announces to investors and employees that “Innovation” is a corporate priority and that the company will be making a “significant” investment in it over the next 3 years. A Chief Innovation Officer is put in place and Innovation Teams start popping up in every Business Unit (BU).
These BU Innovation Teams are staffed with a few people and given budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. They are told to use Design Thinking and Lean Startup methods to create new products or services to better serve existing or new customers.
Each BU team, excited by their new mandate and autonomy, fan out to talk to customers, host brainstorming sessions, and create prototypes. They pull together business cases showing the huge potential of the new product or service and run experiments to prove early market traction. They meet regularly with the BU President and other key decision-makers.
Everything is going perfectly until, about a year into the work, the company has a bad quarter, or the BU is likely to miss expectations, or an innovation experiment delivers worse than expected results.
Suddenly, everyone is a skeptic. Budgets get cut. Team members are re-assigned to “help” other projects. The team’s portfolio shrinks to a single project. And like that – poof – the Innovation Team is gone.
As apocalyptic as that scenario may seem, the numbers back it up. According to research by Innovation Leader, the average tenure of a Chief Innovation Officer is 4.18 years while an Innovation Manager’s tenure is 3.3 years.
What went wrong? The company did everything by the book – they hired the right talent, established dedicated teams with dedicated budgets, talked to customers and created a portfolio of ideas, built prototypes and made small bets.
Innovation is an investment in the future so one bad quarter shouldn’t be its death knell. But it is.
The reason is that executives know that innovation must be invested in today to produce results in the future, but they do not believe that they will be rewarded for prioritizing the future over the present.
This belief then leads to fear about the uncertainty of future returns and the repercussions of failing to deliver the present, which then leads to fear that their career will stall or that they will lose their job, which then spirals into all sorts of other fears until, eventually, the executive feels forced into a “them or me” decision.
They decide with their heart (fear) and justify with their head (bad quarter).
The solution to this is neither simple nor quick but it is effective – we must dedicate as much time and effort to recognizing and addressing the thoughts, feelings, and mindsets (heart) that executives and key decision-makers face in the pursuit of corporate innovation as we spend on the structures, processes, and activities (head) of corporate innovation.
If this sounds like coaching, you’re right. It is. Just as executives benefit from coaching as they take on new and greater responsibility, they also benefit, in the form of increased confidence and better results, when they have coaches guide them through innovation. This is because innovation often requires executives to do the opposite of what they instinctively do when managing the core business.
Innovation is a head AND a heart endeavor, and we need to start approaching it as such.
To do anything less is the definition of insanity.
*** Originally published on on Forbes.com ***
by Robyn Bolton | Dec 15, 2020 | Innovation
“Speed Kills” is as true in innovation as it is on the road.
Although it’s a widely held belief that speed equals success in business, as evidenced by companies’ drive to be first to market and Silicon Valley’s mantra to “Move fast and break things,” there are as many examples of companies that won by moving slow and steady as there are of those that moved fast.
Don’t believe me?
Apple was never first to market in a category.
Facebook was not the first online social network.
WalMart was not the first discount store.
The key to success isn’t doing things quickly, it’s doing the right things rapidly.
This is harder than it sounds to large companies that have internalized the belief that they need to act more like start-ups. In fact, in my work with corporate innovators, also called Intrapreneurs, I often find myself in the strange position of advising them to slow down.
Not slow down to the glacial pace of the core business, of course, And certainly not slow down simply for the sake of it. But to slow down to allow time to learn, explore, and build confidence that they are solving the right problem in the right way for the right people.
The three most common “Innovation Speed Traps,” times when innovators instinctively speed up when they should slow down, happen early in most innovation efforts.
Speed to idea – Everyone loves ideas. They are exciting to create and energizing to pursue. Unfortunately, they’re also a dime a dozen and as evidenced by the percentage of start-ups that fail due to poor product-market fit, no guarantee of market success.
Innovators that start with an idea tend to fall in love with it and pursue it with a single-minded passion that crowds out information and insights that could indicate a pivot or even an entirely new solution is required. This leads to investments of time, money, and energy in an idea that is unlikely to ever achieve market adoption or success.
Speed to MVP – Even more exciting than an idea is when an idea progresses to a prototype and an MVP (minimally viable product).
While a prototype is incredibly helpful in getting customer feedback and refining a solution, focusing solely on the solution (product, service) to the exclusion of other elements of the business model can leave value on the table. Even patented solutions can be easily copied whereas innovations in other parts of the business model, such as the revenue model or key processes, are much harder to copy and scale.
Speed to market testing – Once a business model MVP has been created, many companies then launch it into one or more test markets as a way to gauge its commercial viability. This small-scale testing feels safe because it’s confined to a small portion of the company’s overall market, but it also makes it incredibly difficult to isolate the root cause(s) of unexpected or poor results.
As common as these Innovation Speed Traps are, they’re also easy to avoid.
Slow down to understand the problem then speed to an idea. Successful innovators fall in love with the problem, not the solution. That means that they slow down, talk to customers and stakeholders, and invest time in deeply understanding what the real problem is and why it is a problem.
For example, in the 8-week Intrapreneurship Academy program I teach for high potential managers in the cable industry, participants start the program by identifying a problem that they want to solve during the course but, most of the time, however, they rephrase their ideas into a problem statement. When, in the second week of the course, they take the time to interview customers, they realize that not only was their idea wrong but that they were focused on solving the wrong problem
Slow down to consider the whole business model then speed to an MVP. Once innovators are clear on the problem and confident that it’s the one that customers most need to be solved, they should consider scheduling two brainstorming sessions. The first can focus on creating a solution to the problem and the second is dedicated to discussing and brainstorming sew approaches to other parts of the business model.
Slow down to identify Deal Killer Assumptions then speed to testing – Instead of testing every element of a new solution all at once, innovators should apply the scientific method to the innovation. To do this, innovators brainstorm all of the assumptions they’re making then assess how confident that they are that the assumption is right and the risk to the innovation’s viability if the assumption is wrong. Assumptions where there is low confidence and high negative risk should be tested by a single specific experiment. Once each Deal Killer has been tested, the team’s confidence that the assumption is right is increased, and the negative risk to the solution’s viability is decreased, then innovation teams can progress to integrated tests like test markets.
By slowing down, corporate innovators can speed up and get to real results and lasting change far more efficiently. They just need to remember the word of the late great basketball coach, John Wooden,
“Don’t mistake activity with achievement.”
by Robyn Bolton | Dec 11, 2020 | Podcasts
by Robyn Bolton | Dec 9, 2020 | Innovation, Leadership
Innovating – doing something different that creates value – is hard.
Innovating within a large organization can feel impossible.
In my work with corporate innovators, we always start with great optimism that this time will be different, this time innovation will stick and become the engine that drives lasting growth.
Within weeks, sometimes days, however, we start to be “loved to death,” a practice that takes one of two forms:
- The Protector who says, “That’s not how we do things and, if you insist on doing things that way, you’ll get shut down. Instead, do things this way”
- The Enthusiast who exclaims, “This is amazing! I would love to be involved. And you should share what you’re doing with this person, and definitely tap into this other person’s experience, and I know this third person will want to be involved, and you definitely must talk to….”
Neither mean harm. In fact, they’re trying to help, but if intrapreneurs aren’t careful, The Protector will edit their work into something that is neither different nor value creating, and The Enthusiast will suffocate them with meetings.
4 More Innovation Derailers
Being “loved to death,” is just one of ways I’ve seen corporate innovation efforts get derailed. Here are the others:
Performances for senior executives. Yes, it’s important to meet regularly with senior leaders to keep them apprised of progress, learnings, results, and next steps. But there’s a fine line between updating executives because they’re investors and conference room performances to show off shiny objects and excite executives. It takes time for innovation teams to prepare for meetings (one team I worked with spent over 100 hours preparing for a meeting) which is time they aren’t spending working, learning, and making progress.
Vanity metrics that that feel good. There are well-established metrics of success for existing businesses, but there is no commonly accepted set of innovation metrics because innovation evolves too rapidly and is pursued for countless reasons. As a result, Intrapreneurs are tempted to “game the system” and measure things like site visits and NPS that make executives feel good, but which don’t measure the viability of the innovation in the market.
Inviting everyone to everything. Transparent communication is important in all aspects of business, not just innovation. But just as established businesses choose when, how, and with whom to be transparent so too must corporate innovators. For example, one 100+ person accelerator invited everyone to every meeting and treated all comments as equally important. While this may look and feel egalitarian, it paralyzed teams because they had to respond to every comment, test every suggestion, and defend every decision.
Basing incentives only on the core business’ performance. Despite the mantra to “act like a VC,” it isn’t practical for large organizations to incentivize innovation teams the same way VCs incentivize their staffs or portfolio companies. But the other extreme – using the same incentives with both core business and innovation teams – is equally damaging because it results in the pursuit of “safe” projects and demoralizes intrapreneurs.
As common as these 5 innovation derailers are, they are also easily overcome:
QMWD meetings. Quarterly, Monthly, Weekly, Daily (QMWD) is an incredibly effective planning framework I often use with clients. Here’s how it works:
- Schedule one leadership meeting per Quarter and one per Month.
- Create templates so that teams can quickly fill in blanks, instead of creating presentations from scratch
- Monitor time spent preparing for meetings. If more than one Week (appx 40 hours) is spent preparing for a Quarterly meeting and/or more than one Day (8 hours) is spent preparing for a Monthly meeting, revise the templates, process, and expectations
Evolve what you measure when. According to research by CB Insights, the top two reasons start-ups fail is no market need and they ran out of cash. To avoid this fate, intrapreneurs should always measure desirability, feasibility, and viability and change shift of the three is most important based on where the innovation is in its lifecycle. For example, early innovation metrics should focus on whether there is a need and whether the innovation satisfies it (desirability). As confidence about desirability grows, metrics should shift to focus on the whether the innovation can be made and delivered in a financially attractive way (feasibility) and whether the customer is willing to pay (viability).
Use transparency to build support and let experience drive progress. Innovation teams need to share their learnings with other teams, and they need to be open to feedback and suggestions. Create a specific time and place for that to happen. For example, one of my clients hosts a monthly Lunch & Learn for teams to discuss projects. Outside of that dedicated time, however, empower innovation teams to move quickly because they are closest to the market.
Base incentives on the core business and innovation objectives. It’s important to foster a mentality that “we’re all in this together” amongst core and innovation teams, which is why rewarding intrapreneurs on some elements of the core business’ performance is essential. However, intrapreneurs are not working on the core business and, as a result, their incentives should also reflect what they are working on. Like innovation metrics, there’s no common standard for innovation incentives which is why I encourage my clients to base innovation teams’ incentives on their objectives for the year and to adjust, even fundamentally change, incentives as objectives shift.
Say “Thank You” and move on. As the Protector and the Enthusiast give advice and make connections, remember that they are trying to help, so write down what they say and respond with a genuine “thank you.” Then decide what will be helpful, do it, and ignore the rest. If they follow-up, have another conversation but odds are they won’t because their focus has shifted.
Lots of things derail innovation but, with a little planning and commitment, it’s possible to stay on track and do the “impossible” – innovate in a large organization.
Originally published as “Four Actions that Derail Innovation (And What To Do Instead)” on July 7, 2020 at Forbes.com
by Robyn Bolton | Nov 18, 2020 | Innovation, Stories & Examples
Companies love to invest in idea generation – challenges, hackathons, software platforms to collect and sort submissions.
Companies do not love the ROI of these investments because they require a lot of money and time and the ideas rarely become real and create value.
But one company is doing it right and they are loving the early results.
This morning I chatted with a graduate of the Intrapreneurship Academy that I teach in partnership with The Cable Center. It was the kind of life-affirming call that consultants rarely get to enjoy, one that is evidence that the work you do matters to both people and businesses.
During the program, he focused on solving a problem related to surfacing ideas within the organization, rather than relying on management to come up with new ideas and initiatives. As he worked through the innovation process, he found other passionate intrapreneurs and champions within his organization willing to lend their time, energy, and political clout to developing a solution.
In May, the idea generation solution went live.
A mere 6 months later:
- 20% of the organization submitted ideas
- 2 ideas, on average, were submitted by each person
- 60% of submitted ideas were presented to senior leadership
- ~20% of the ideas submitted were approved for further development
- 10% of ideas submitted are in the process of being launched
10% of ideas received funding and are being launched!
VCs would kill for that kind of success rate.
Ahh, but what about ROI? Launches do not equal market success. Value creation, specifically financial returns, are evidence of market success.
This was all done with $0 investment.
The team used internal resources for everything – existing software platforms and programs, design and marketing talent, and passionate staff and leaders to promote and participate in the program.
3 lessons learned on the path to success
Like all good innovators, the team prioritized moving quickly with “good enough” solutions and learning and adjusting rapidly based on feedback. Here are three of their top insights:
1. It’s all about People. People define organizations. People create ideas. People motivate and inspire other people. So, if you want to succeed, focus on people.
For example, every person who submits an idea receives personalized feedback about what worked or didn’t and how, if possible, they could make their idea more attractive to the business. Originally, this feedback was given by email because let’s be honest, it’s a lot more efficient. But people felt that the feedback was “cold” and felt discouraged and demotivated after reading it. Now, all feedback is delivered in a quick conversation that feels more personal and leaves people feeling heard and motivated
2. Build a Habit, not an Event. Early in the design process, the team spoke with a group in another region that was also creating an idea generation program. The difference was that they were designing it as an annual event (and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy and implement an idea management software platform).
But people don’t have ideas just once a year. They have ideas all the time. And the business needs new ideas for revenue generation and cost savings constantly, not just once a year.
So this team designed their program to be on-going – people can submit ideas at any time for feedback, senior management meets once every 1-2 months to review and approve ideas, and teams are started (and ended) based on data, not the calendar.
3. Imperfect Action is more important than Perfect Inaction – “Frameworks are great and really helpful, but….” As my former student’s voice trailed off, I couldn’t help but laugh. He was trying so hard to be polite, after all, I’m the person who taught him the frameworks, but we both knew that the end of that sentence was, “…you need to actually do things in the real world to know what works.”
Yes, frameworks, theories, templates, best practices, are all useful AS STARTING POINTS. They reflect what has worked in the past for other companies so, while they can help you avoid common mistakes or accelerate decision-making, they’re not perfect reflections of the current reality of your company and innovation. To know what will work for your idea, in your company, in your market, in your geography, with your team, and your customers, you need to get off the page and into the real world.
The next challenge – how to scale
With such clear early success, there’s huge demand to expand the program rapidly within the region. But premature scaling is the death-knell of many innovations.
So, the question facing the team is when and how to expand?
Should they expand laterally, rolling their country’s program out to other countries in the region, or should they expand vertically, moving the program up to be managed at the regional level?
Should they seek to increase participation in their current program, or should they expand their program’s offering to include trainings and challenges?
When should all of this expansion happen? What should happen first?
The fact that these questions are being asked is a clear sign of success. While there are no obvious answers, I do not doubt that the team will find them.
