Written by: Kristian Elmefall, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Innovators who work in an established company are often called intrapreneurs. The fact that there is an innovation process, established methods and established forums in an organization make life so much easier for the intrapreneur. When none of this is in place, it is difficult to drive innovation and it is therefore natural for the intrapreneur to get involved in changing the organization.
Pursuing innovation is, as we already stated in my previous article, difficult. Changing the way we work in an established organization is also difficult. Conducting innovation work and at the same time implementing an innovation process is, therefore, almost impossible. No matter how difficult it may be, you need to choose between the two.
Is the purpose to transform the company into a company that works systematically with innovation and uses established methods and forums to support innovation work? Then support from management is required to carry out the transformation work which goes across the entire organization. HR may most likely need to be involved because incentive models, culture, and governance often need to be changed. This work includes defining an innovation process, in which areas should you innovate, how should you get ideas in, how should these be developed, and what different stages of ideas should you monitor? A very successful way of working when it comes to managing different stages is to set up gates, requirements, where different amounts of resources are made available. From the beginning, an idea receives only extremely little time and money from the organization to produce evidence that it is a good idea, which is required to meet the requirements of the next gate. In the stage after the second gate, a little more resources are made available and the requirements for proof become higher in the third gate to unlock additional resources and so on.
Is the purpose instead to run an innovation project that will deliver an innovation? In the best case, only resources are required, a committed team and a sponsor who can defend the project in political discussions and lift the innovation further when it is time to scale up. But the focus will then be on reducing risk in the project. Instead of change work in the organization, the activities now become to formulate hypotheses and validate these by performing experiments and talking to customers.
Finally, let us return to the question in the title. Which came first, the innovation or the innovative way of working? There is no given answer to that, but an organization can definitely succeed with one innovation without having an innovation process implemented. To have recurring innovation, however, an innovation process is needed, otherwise, it is very unlikely that the organization succeeds in producing several innovations. The important thing is to distinguish between the work of implementing an innovation process to create an innovative organization and the work of running innovation projects. It requires different skills so it is best done by different teams, but above all, it can not be done at the same time. Those who are currently running an innovation project cannot also drive a transformation work across the organization to make it more innovative.
Kristian Elmefall, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Kristian is a Swedish serial entrepreneur and senior management consultant, with a double degree in Executive MBA and computer science. Kristian has gathered experience in innovation and business from a large number of industries and companies of all sizes over the last 20 years. As co-founder of the consultant firm LEAPS, is he now helping customers to understand how the industries that the customers are operating in is evolving, how to stay relevant and competitive under those circumstances, and how to set up an innovation process to secure reoccurring innovations in line with the company’s strategy.
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