(It's like the pedestrian's creed. From grebo_guru on Flickr.)
Recently, I've been working with companies to design their innovation strategy and to develop a culture of innovation. In related meetings with executive leadership teams, I've been asked to share my opinion on the common pitfalls these companies will face. There are plenty of them, but one stands out recently as a subtle but important challenge.
In a prior post, I described some innovation leadership imperatives:
Share Direction
Give Permission
Provide Support
Commit
The last imperative, handled poorly, can lead to trouble. Leaders and project teams often fail to align themselves and their colleagues around what they are committing to do. Failing to communicate that intention can lead to mismatched investment, timelines and expectations.
For example, "leadership" might be committing to develop new commercial platforms that represent $100s of millions in potential. A pilot team, for the exact same project, might just be trying to learn about a market that's new to them. The team might receive a budget commensurate with a full-bore market blitz, while what they need is a program designed to help them cheaply investigate a new area. They didn't decide whether they should go small to learn, or big to win.*
Ask yourself and your colleagues, what are we committing to do:
to start?
to learn?
to win?
to change?
It might feel like a scary conversation to have, but it's far scarier not to have it.
* I've been digging the WSJ / MIT SMR Business Insight collaboration lately. Here's an article that describes the idea of experimentation at scale.
