Lessons Learned From Creating Innovation Teams
Segment 1: Lessons Learned From Creating Innovation Teams
- Changing the organizations culture
- People will resist
- Be prepared for corporate anti-bodies
- Secure deep management support
- Win by example
- Find/train/support innovation evangelists
- Define the metrics
- Management needs proof of impact and success
- Secure broad agreement on the right metrics (management, finance, operations, etc)
- Metrics that have worked for me (not exhaustive):
- Gross Margin impact from R&D
- Ideas in pipeline
- % of projects killed
- ROI on pipeline (needs years to prove out)
- Average time from idea to impact
- Value of the innovation funnel
- Find Innovation Champions
- Its not just the idea …
- You need the passion of the innovation champion
- Passion is a key success factor for any given innovation program
- You can build a team around a champion.
- Its very hard to create the champion.
- Champion does not necessarily mean leader
- Reward Failures & Successes
- Define reward structure
- Don’t penalize failure
- For success and failure, make the reward public
- For failures, success if you learn from them.
- Be transparent on all projects
- Adapt To Your Organization
- Innovation approaches is NOT a one size fits all
- Listen to experts (blogs, podcasts, books, etc)
- Learn from those who have developed their innovation organizations
- Try it yourself
- Adapt to your organization/culture
