Key Questions to a Company Struggling with Innovation
What questions would you ask to a company that is struggling with innovation?
The questions should serve two purposes; you need to get a better understanding of the state of the innovation capabilities at the company and you need to challenge the existing mindset of their employees.
You can see my take below on four different areas. It would be great to hear what you think of them and what questions you would ask.
CULTURE AND INNOVATION
• What are the key elements of a strong innovation culture? Work this into three clearly articulated goals for innovation at your company.
• How are executives/managers at your company a hindrance for innovation? Give three examples
• What should be the key roles for executives, managers and employees on innovation?
INNOVATION AND THE COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE
• Why are your competitors better at innovation? Focus on their strengths, not your weaknesses
• What are the biggest obstacles for your company to work with external partners? Give three examples
• Which benefits could your company get out of open innovation? Give three examples
PEOPLE DEVELOPMENT AND INNOVATION
• What are the shortcomings of your employees when it comes to innovation? Give three examples
• What programs can be established to improve innovation skills at your company?
CORPORATE STRATEGY AND INNOVATION
• You are the new CEO at your company. What three actions would you take on innovation on day 1?
• What can be done to ensure better alignment, interaction between the different business functions? Give three examples
• What can be done to make innovation an integrated part of the overall corporate strategy?
Let me know what you think.
Stefan,
Innovation is available within all of us; it is a matter of awakening the sleeper within people to turn the innovation switch into a glowing light.
Dig into the budgeting process of the organization. This will reveal riches of gold. There must be a paradigm shift away from a “planning to a budget” approach toward a “budgeting to a plan” approach. This alone will bring innovation into the culture building silos of collaboration.
Many organization use the silo budgeting approach of “planning to a budget” accepting an existing pie of a certain size and deciding how to divide it while hoping that the silos will be happy with his/her allotted portion.
The new paradigm would call for planning on how big the pie should be before its creation so that all the silos had exactly as much as s/he wanted to meet the end-states. Very sound wisdom to know the difference, especially in the area of innovation projects, since existing budgets may not allow for the execution of effective future initiatives, such as those involving infrastructure, social media, and technology.
Cheers…Steve
How would could you collect ideas from the supply base? And which departments ought to be involved?
What can be done to improve supplier involvement throughout innovation projects (from idea to production)?
Both questions relate to the department alignment question you already posted. I think companies need to change their Procurement involvement in innovation. Better alignment and a stronger role of Procurement as the supply base interface will enable the company to find ideas, and it will reduce the conflicts that readily occur when Procurement is involved too late (ie after specifications and suppliers have practically been selected by R&D). It will require a completely different kind of service from Procurement from what Procurement traditionally offers though.
Regards,
Robbert
I'd start off by setting the framework with the innovative / creative talent available internally. So, my first question to the company's CEO & HRO would be – What is the internal HR capacity to innovate in all levels?
Without evaluating what is available within, companies tend to seek innovation from outside, which later clashes with innovative ideas inside which weren't even given a chance to be valued.
The best atmosphere for innovation is a motivated group of workers, eager to show what they are worth.
Nice set already. I'd suggest trying these:
How would could you collect ideas from the supply base? And which departments ought to be involved?
What can be done to improve supplier involvement throughout innovation projects (from idea to production)?
Both questions relate to the department alignment question you already posted. I think companies need to change their Procurement involvement in innovation. Better alignment and a stronger role of Procurement as the supply base interface will enable the company to find ideas, and it will reduce the conflicts that readily occur when Procurement is involved too late (ie after specifications and suppliers have practically been selected by R&D). It will require a completely different kind of service from Procurement from what Procurement traditionally offers though.
Regards,
Robbert
Why do you need to innovate? If you want to live beyond globalization, you need to shed your commodity products and services, so you need to innovate.
You're good at those commodity things. You were taught how to manage those commodity things. You built a company that learned from the market just how those commodity things could be managed profitably. You have an orthodoxy. You have a cost structure. You have a policy base. You have your path dependencies. You have a market.
Christensen demonstrated how all of the things you have prevent innovation. Culture is one of those things. Christensen suggested that separation works.
Separation is just talk. The business community has not adopted separation. They worry about scale, but the way to achieve scale in a globalism facing business is to realize that innovating just once won't cut it. You have to innovate again and again. Worse, that innovation must be discontinuous. Separation solves the scale problem, but you have to be massively separated, so you can organize around the technology adoption lifecycle. Then, separation will be adopted.
Until then, we will continue to look into our orthodoxy toolbox and suggest that the things in it like culture will solve the problem–sure a culture of separation. But, you have a hammer, so every problem is a nail.
Really good questions, I'd love to survey some key people in my company with these.
Fernando makes some good points about evaluating what's within. I'd add…
"Who are your internal knowledge brokers and how are they integrated into your innovation process?"
I also strongly believe that what Steve says about budgeting and planning probably affect many, particularly professional services companies. So under Corporate Strategy & Innovation a good question would be "What does your innovation budget look like?"
appreciate your input/stefan
Innovation will only be as good, or bad, as the environment. The first questions I would ask describe the culture.
How would you describe your brainstorming sessions, what are the characteristic?
How well do your employees work together during brainstorming sessions?
Are employees and management supportive and respectful of each other's ideas?
A great post and some great questions in response.
In survey after survey, C-suite executives never dispute the need to innovate (new markets, new products/services, more competitively differentiated offerings) to achieve future growth. Yet, many of the very same surveys (Forrester, Harris Interactive, BCG, and countless others) cite a lack of structure, innovation tools and methods as a key barrier to innovation.
As a process, innovation CAN be systematized to bring unprecedented efficiencies and ROI to idea generation, research, problem solving, market and technology landscaping and more.
Questions I'd ask:
How are you empowering your innovation workers (marketing, researchers, engineering, R&D, production, etc.) with knowledge?
On a daily basis, engineers, scientists, researchers and other innovation workers, must tackle complex product development challenges. With access to internal knowledge like lessons learned and best practices, innovators can avoid reinventing the wheel or repeating costly mistakes. Access to external knowledge such as patents and online publications provides fresh perspectives, spurs creative thinking and provides insights outside of your domain or industry.
What framework are you providing to enable innovation collaboration?
As innovators tackle new innovation challenges, they struggle with identifying and leveraging the right subject matter experts. With a collaboration framework, innovators can connect – actively and passively – with subject matter experts based on what they know and in the context of the innovation challenges at hand.
What innovation tools and methods are you arming your innovation workers with to help them more efficiently and effectively perform innovation activities?
By arming engineers and scientists with tools to help them focus their problem solving and speed problem resolution – all the while leveraging internal and external knowledge and sharing and exchanging this knowledge with their peers – innovation and product delivery are accelerated and worker productivity is enhanced.
Back in the '90's, a client of mine (CKO, grocery distribution company) asked me what I'd do to help their company grow (I was a vendor selling IT products/services at the time). In a typically naive way, I decided I had to isolate what the assets were, determine how they could be better used, and what small investments could be made to cause those assets to be more productive by either increasing the customer base or the gross percentage of current client business they captured.
I focused on unique assets, everything else being 'commoditizable', the unique assets could not be duplicated by competitors, therefore they would be lasting advantages. They were warehouse locations, relationships with clients, relationships with vendors, data on past sales, and knowledge of employees. Seems obvious now, but one of the things I suggested was to expand customer base by using product knowledge and relationships with vendors (buying power) to begin selling goods in regions where they didn't have warehouse assets (in the NE where acquiring prime warehouse real estate was prohibitively expensive) without ever taking physical product possession, purely electronic transactions utilizing TPL.
The point is that the intellectualization of the "what do we have, what do we do, how do we make money?" concepts is lacking in virtually enterprise I have worked with, and innovation, in distribution at least, must start there.