Finding and Keeping Innovation Champions
Segment 1: Finding and Keeping Innovation Champions
What are innovation champions?
- Passionate about an idea
- Will do almost anything to see the idea become a reality
Why are they iimportant?
- Give me a person with passion and I can build a team that will succeed
- An innovation champion, in many cases, is the difference between success and failure
How do you find them?
- Ask people “what are you working on that is exciting?”. The passion will come out …
- Look for people with a unique voice on their passion (blogs, social network sites, etc)
How do you keep them? What motivates them?
- They want to realize their dream
- Protect them from the corporate anti-bodies
- Give the champion the authority to be the advocate for the vision
- Use proper resource management (constrained innovation) to ensure success
Be careful to avoid the “1 hit wonders”
- Be aware that champions go through ups and downs depending on the cycle of their projects
- Think two the three projects ahead of your champions
- Challenge them with “hard problems” for them to solve on their next projects
If you are a champion, how do you make yourself known?
- Share your authentic passion
- Contribute to existing projects (show off your passion)
- Create your portfolio
Segment 2: Creativity Exercise – The McGyver/Apollo 13 Method
You are given a problem/objective
Open your desk drawer, purse, briefcase
Only use items you have
Create as many ideas within 20 minutes
Task
- You got to work and realized your forgot to get a gift for co-workers upcoming wedding
- Use only items within your reach
- Each idea you develop must be practical (describe its uses)
- Each idea must be made from two or more items
How many can you come up with in 20 minutes?
List your ideas in the comments … send me photo’s and I will post them …
Segment 3: Listener Question
How do you find adjacencies for an innovation? (Byron)
