Reimagine the status quo & show me the money!
The popular expression of ‘’Ideas are cheap, and only execution matters’’ is accurate in many cases. However, I personally cringe at how that phrase undermines the importance of a great idea as a core foundation of any future product or service. Aren’t all the commercialized solutions once originated from a raw idea?
Today, corporations have developed new ways to elaborate ideas into new business opportunities, through different forms of corporate innovation, in addition to traditional R&D innovation work. Corporate innovation as a fairly novel term typically means intentional efforts to strengthen out-of-the-box thinking as a part of the corporate operations and environment. Stereotypically, large corporations are considered as slow in change due to established processes and business models. Their innovation work is mainly focused on developing and fine-tuning existing products rather than ‘’re-thinking the wheel’’. However, this stiffness and low pace of corporations’ change is not related to its individuals or means that the brightest minds only work in startups and not in corporations. It is more due to the processes, business model, and ways of working than the actual brainpower and creativity of the employees.
Many corporations acknowledge that fact also themselves and are looking for ways to shift to more ‘’outside of the box’’ ways of thinking and working. It has been recognized that there is a lot to learn from startups to improve innovation work. While the operational model of startups enables them to go after fresh ideas and opportunities, corporate R&D departments focus more on improving existing offerings. Large company size naturally comes with limitations, which are embodied as established ways of doing things. But there is always a silver lining in everything. Large company size offers also more resources, which in turn, startups might be lacking.
So where to start the change towards rethinking and reinventing corporate’s innovation work with existing limitations and resources?
As simple as it might sound — start with the vision and goals-setting, by rethinking the existing ones. It is important to set concrete targets and new, desired outcomes of the innovation processes. Is it customer experience, or developing the product line in a more sustainable way, that your company is after? When you can successfully articulate what your company wants to achieve in the future, it is possible to create a road map of today. To take that vision and turn it into reality, it is important to support that road map by allocating enough funding for execution. Once you have a vision, road map and money allocated, now what?
How to organize and carry out the actual corporate innovation?
There are many ways of corporate innovation in advancing that roadmap; from open to closed innovation and hackathons, to name a few. Let’s focus on what can be done internally, among your own employees. As mentioned earlier, there are incredibly smart people working in corporations, and providing them with new tools and resources to innovate can result in new successful solutions. However, limiting the innovation work to take place only among your own employees can limit the perspective in the long run. Developed solutions in a closed innovation process in a corporate venture program, can bring up the risk that the solutions’ product-market fit is not properly validated. But there are also great opportunities. At its best, intrapreneurial programs provide the corporation’s talents the opportunity to accelerate their ideas into a feasible reality.
“If the program is organized in a way that people have a chance to innovate, design, and develop initiatives with colleagues which they do not usually work, the outside-in perspective has been achieved internally, at least on some level.”
However, even the greatest innovations would be developed inside of a corporation as a result of intrapreneurial efforts, the inability to communicate the business value of it might drive it to hit the brick wall. Those projects will not proceed to commercialization for a very fundamental reason. The money.
“In addition to enough funds for productization, money is needed both as a resource, but also as a result. Being able to communicate the business value that innovation can generate is crucial.”
The top management is naturally very interested in whether the new venture creates new revenue streams, savings, or for example brand value. In fact, everyone working in the company should be interested in that, at the end of the day. But is it everyone’s responsibility to be able to deliver an engaging pitch about the business value to corporate decision-makers in the audience? Is it required that R&D engineers are capable to paint the vibrant picture of endless possibilities from a customer’s perspective? Many corporate innovation efforts aim to increase the customer-centricity across the different business units, but not everyone needs to become a marketing or sales expert as a result.
A gentle swift in the mindset and the possibility to work with people from various professional backgrounds can create amazing results. Just remember to show me the money!
