Innovation is key to success in any industry. It can be the difference between staying ahead of the competition and falling behind. But how do you implement innovation in your company? What are the best ways to encourage and foster a culture of innovation?
When looking to appoint a team to drive innovation your company, it is important to consider the implications this will have to internal teams and processes, as well as to the service offering and clients. One step in clarifying the deployment strategy can be to determine where the focus of the implementation will be in the first instance, which can later evolve as teams adapt and grow their understanding of the concepts and techniques.
One way to simplify your understanding of the approach can be to look at only two of its dimensions: focus and implementation. The focus can be internal (looking to change your company) or external (looking to change your client interactions). The implementation can be centralised (looking to create efficiency) or decentralised (looking to create adoption). In this post we will go through what each of them mean for your company and explore some of the pros and cons behind each of them. Here’s a matrix I created to help with the visualisation:
Centralised team with internal focus: the change team
This is when the team’s function is to implement techniques to improve existing processes within the company. The individual or team will look at how things are done for specific elements (e.g. the invoicing process, collaboration processes between the sales team and design team, the implementation of safety practices, etc.), assess the current state, help the relevant stakeholders define the desired outcome, and work with them to create the change processes for implementation by those involved.
Pros:
- Can be deployed fast, consecutively, and efficiently across teams and functions.
- There is a centralised point of contact for all change initiatives.
- Can create the change plan and handover to the stakeholders for implementation, allowing the team to move to the next challenge.
Cons:
- Can become a bottleneck as more processes are identified for change.
- The effectiveness relies on prioritisation of focus across multiple potential changes, which can be defined by others outside of the team (and can often have conflicting priorities).
- Can generate the thoughts that thinking about these changes and processes is ‘someone else’s job’ (i.e. the ‘innovation team’)
Centralised team with external focus: the service offering
This is when the company has identified that there are benefits in offering the skills of a change team (like the one identified in the previous point) purely as a service to clients. This does not necessarily mean one needs to exist internally in the first place, as this can be solved by acquiring an existing firm or hiring a whole team with the intention of making it an offering from the get-go. The intent here is to focus on creating a new revenue stream, which may or may not help with getting clients to engage with other elements of the company’s service offering.
Pros:
- Can be set up relatively quickly.
- The purely external focus can allow for a targeted approach to existing clients or an expansive approach into clients the company does not (or cannot) currently serve with the existing offering.
Cons:
- Can be more prone to having a sub-culture within the organisation (e.g. ‘us and them’).
- The offering may be too far from the ‘traditional’ service offering and may be perceived negatively by the market due to lack of credibility (e.g. ‘why are these people doing this?’).
- The previous points could potentially be mitigated by setting up the new offering as a separate entity, but this would only make it harder for any of these skills to permeate into the larger organisation.
Decentralised team with internal focus: democratising innovation
This is when the focus goes into changing the company’s ways of working. It can be thought of as an evolution of the centralised change team from providing solutions to specific elements into providing coaching and on-the-job application of tools and techniques within teams across the organisation, effectively equipping and empowering those teams to own both the change creation and its implementation. In this quadrant the company would still have a team that is trained in the techniques required for implementation, but rather than being a full-time team looking solely into this, it could be comprised of team members across multiple departments and roles who have a ‘dual-hat’ responsibility.
Pros:
- The implementation of these techniques across multiple teams simultaneously as a way of working and solving problems can help create a shared language that fosters collaboration.
- By upskilling colleagues and role modelling these behaviours, they can be more easily embedded into the culture.
- Changes can be long-lasting and profound as the organisation evolves in its maturity and application of the concepts and techniques.
Cons:
- The dual-hat element of this can result in people de-prioritising the assisting, coaching, and upskilling of others due to lack of time available and focus on pressing deliveries required in their ‘main role’.
- If not done consistently and visibly, the efforts of the distributed team can become diluted in the larger organisation.
Decentralised team with external focus: the experience mindset
This is when the focus is on the way the company provides its service or products to clients, and the efforts go into changing the way customers feel and think about the interactions the company provides, beyond the product or service they are purchasing. A strong user-centric approach dominates all processes and interactions, and the focus is on how these are being provided. In the typical Apple example, it’s about the anticipation in the unboxing, the in-store service, the intuitive interfaces. It is much more that the product. It’s the move from selling a health tracker to providing a healthy lifestyle. Beyond Apple, it’s about creating a loyal client base that not only thinks what the company offers is good, but they love how they feel in the process – before, during and after the interaction.
Pros:
- If done right, this can be a source of sustainable growth to the business for extended periods of time.
- This deeper understanding of the user and the company’s ability to implement design-led changes can result in the discovery of new revenue streams and business models, helping to maintain relevance and sustainability of the business into the future.
Cons:
- Takes longer to master, as it needs a critical mass of people within your company to not only see the benefit but be willing to apply it.
- The best time to start the journey is before you need it, which can be hard to execute when operational and tactical matters take precedence over strategic long-term initiatives.
Your way forward will be unique to you
After exploring each of these four options, it is clear that there is no right or wrong way to go about it. One potential road in the journey toward the experience mindset could be to start with a change team, move to democratising across the business and from there move on to the experience mindset. Another way can be to begin with the service offering and put processes in place for the skills to be disseminated in client teams and internally, effectively trying to accomplish the democratisation and the experience mindset in parallel. The approach will be as unique as each company needs it to be to be successfully implemented in its particular context.
Things like the level of executive commitment, available budgets, perceived risks, appetite for transformational change and many other variables, will play a role in determining which one of these the company can currently begin to implement in a way that will generate the required momentum and buy-in from all involved. Understanding the potential future possibilities can help you map the steps to reach your desired state, embarking on the journey at a pace that makes sense for your company.
What is one action you can implement this week as a result of reading this article? Give it a go and let me know how you go!
