Starting Your Innovation Journey
The first step on a journey always requires the most conviction. Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu alluded to this- “a journey of a thousand miles always begins with a single step”. Beginning an organisational innovation journey can be demanding, arduous, confusing and testing. Having been through this and advised others on this first hand, below I’ll share some of the key things you can do to make this journey smoother, easier, more enjoyable and resonant with your key stakeholders and ultimately a higher chance of being successful in it’s design and implementation.
The key things to consider are - clarity on your innovation goals or outcomes. Why innovation matters to your organisation, what innovation goals you are pursuing and to what end. Consider how you will deliver against these goals, who will play key roles in this journey, how you will resource this and what success may look like after three months, six months, a year, two years and three years. By year three, much will have changed but if you’ve succeeded you will have an operational and fully funded innovation program running. Of course, your goals may look completely different. And that’s okay. The important thing is to work through the process to getting some goals bedded down.
Once you’ve set your goals it’s time to consider how ready our organisation is to embark on this innovation journey. This is the bit you don’t want to skip or gloss over. Neglecting innovation readiness is the best way to ensure you don’t achieve any of your innovation goals, despite best intentions. I was half way through writing this blog when Harvard Business Review Ideacast released this podcast on a similar theme- “The New Leadership Structures That Unblock Innovation”. The key thematics here are around leadership structure, culture, capability and systems. This is well worth a read or listen in the car.
Finally, form should follow function. Once you’ve decided what your goals are and how ready you are to innovate (which will tell you what immediate actions are important), you will consider what form or structure your innovation approach will follow. In this section, I outline some of the leading models of innovation design and deployment in the for purpose sector along with some examples of where it is being done especially well.
Set clear innovation outcomes you want to achieve
Innovation is already a nebulous and vague concept to most. It can interchangeably be used as a noun, an adjective and a verb. It is something you do, an outcome you achieve, a process you use or the way you do something. We can clarify what it means and how it can serve us by reaching some clear innovation goals or outcomes. So let’s simplify the thought process. If we do innovation well, what are the most relevant outcomes we will hope to achieve?
Here is a sample of innovation goals that I’ve seen before that are useful to consider:
We want to develop new products and services that expand our core service offering and add value and new revenue streams to the client experience
We want to develop new service models, build an evidence base for these and then secure funding to take these to scale
We want to develop new ways of delivering products and services that enhance the customer experience and the social impact
We want to create a culture that naturally promotes innovation, reduces barriers and friction to ideation and results in more experimentation
We want to reach new customers or market segments, beyond our traditional base with our existing product and service mix
We want to shift our operating model to improve how we do everything to improve our productivity, margins and reduce our expenses
We want our people and leaders to be curious and creative generators of solutions that lead us boldy into our next phase of growth and impact
I’d recommend highlighting a maximum of three of the above goals to focus on to tailor your innovation program toward. You may want to achieve them all and that may happen, but it’s good practice to force yourself to rank the priorities accordingly. If it was me supporting you as Shackleton Labs, I’d be opening with a conversation and menu that looks a bit like this and might be best prosecuted through a series of roundtable discussions, surveys or workshops to gain alignment and to test your top priorities.
Ultimately, this will help you gain the buy-in you need from all stakeholders that you wish to embark with you on this innovation journey as friends and supporters. I would also invite stakeholders to suggest goals that are not on this menu. Finally, and this is never done enough in our sector, share your innovation goals with your partners in the sector and ask them what they think about these goals. Do they accurately reflect your current state, direction and ambition level?
2. Consider your organisation’s innovation readiness
The biggest mistake I’ve seen in this space, is neglecting this step, which is extremely common. You may have a visionary leader or three, you may have a fantastic technology setup and products, or you may have people who just love to innovate. These are all great things to have, but if your organisation simply isn’t ready to deliver on it’s innovation ambitions, then your failure to plan is your plan to fail in the innovation space. This is where we talk about de-risking innovation, by dealing with organisational barrers, enablers and implementation risk up-front. We do this because we know that “vision, without execution is hallucination”.
Feedback from a large C-suite study indicates the following- A Gartner CIO Agenda study reported that 73% of business leaders rate their greatest strength in innovation as researching customer needs or ideation, but only 27% say they excel at executing or scaling product plans, highlighting a large execution gap. This is supported in the same study by this finding 52% of CEOs said their organizations are “too slow” at converting technology investments into real business value, largely due to weak focus on execution rather than lack of ideas.
So Ideation or visioning is usually not the problem. Readiness to implement innovation is the key challenge. Here are some of the usual sorts of questions or domains we’d seek to probe to assess innovation readiness.
If you have a bold and innovative idea, are you likely to share it in an open forum or meeting at your workplace?
If you design and run an experiment at your workplace and it fails, how is this received by your team and management?
How would you rate the current level of innovation capability within your current workforce?
How comfortable and experienced are your board, leaders, management and people with innovation thinking and practice?
How well will your current organisational culture react, respond or answer the call to courageous innovation?
These questions go to key concepts such as psychological safety, leadership style, reactions to failure, current capability and cultural settings. Shackleton Labs has developed an innovation readiness survey and toolkit that we can use to assess your innovation readiness and suggest pathways to action. When you reach the end of the blog we encourage you to have a go at our short form version. This will give you a sense of where you are at and the work that needs to be done to get innovation ready.
3. Select the right innovation model you want to pursue
There are a range of innovation models you can use to meet your goals. The most common model I’ve seen deployed in Australia is to hire an innovation lead, manager or head of innovation. This person is responsible for delivering on the innovation goals with an executive member or the CEO accountable for meeting these goals. Let’s call this single role innovation. The challenge with this approach is that there a range of enablers and resourcing needed in place to ensure the success of this approach. Another challenge is cultural and hierachical, around perceived seniority and the ability or licence to challenge existing norms, without damaging brand and relationships. Where an organisation has a mature, curious and experimental culture, where all ideas are welcome, this approach works well.
It can even work well without one single person being responsible for innovation- the distributed innovation model. This is what we see occasionally in smaller, tightly bonded dynamic for purpose organisations. A good example of this is at the Alannah & Madeline Foundation (AMF), where no one person is responsible for innovation. Everyone is responsible and expected to support innovation in a wholly distributed and participatory manner. Sarah Davies, CEO of AMF encourages leaders to enter her office whenever they are ready and pitch innovation ideas. This unconstrained, free form and high trust approach has been highly successful for AMF but relies on courageous and supportive leadership and a mature deliberative culture as well as many of the above enablers being in place.
A key threat to the single role innovation model is the parlous state of for purpose funding and the right-sizing of not for profits and social enterprises, we have by my estimates likely fewer than 50 roles in the Australian for purpose sector that are innovation specific roles. Isolating by seniority, it is likely less than 25 roles in Australia that are innovation manager or higher in seniority and remuneration. This doesn’t mean that innovation isn’t prioritised or valued, it just means that much of the strategic work and decision-making power is carried by other more senior leaders and that these roles in practice are largely around the daily doing of innovation.
Many for purpose organisations may want to make an innovation role a C-suite, executive level role or head of role, but simply cannot afford to, when senior roles are already being stripped back to the essentials in many for purpose organisations. This is why a fractional innovation leader model, such as Shackleton is well placed to support your organisation. This is where you may have identified innovation leaders internally, but there is a lack of capacity and capability internally to design and deliver outcomes. Shackleton would work with your leaders and innovation team or council to ensure you meet your innovation goals. Partnering with Shackleton at a 0.1 or 0.2FTE gives you C-suite quality, experience and outcomes at around 30% of the cost of a full-time senior hire.
Setting up a fully fledged innovation lab is another best in class approach to delivering on innovation. This works well where you have an experienced innovation leader and sufficient resourcing to build out a team and sustain it for at least three years, until it is notionally at a level where it is financially sustainable and adds significant social value to your work program and value proposition. There are very few fully funded and operational innovation labs in the for purpose sector today. When they work, they can work spectacularly well. One example is the work of Our Watch and their first of its kind Violence Prevention Innovation Lab, funded by Minderoo Foundation for 3-years.
Shackleton is here to talk about your innovation challenges, aspirations and opportunities. Before we do so, why not have a go at our innovation readiness short form survey, it will take you 2 minutes and give you a great steer as to where you are at in terms of your organisation’s innovation readiness and what next steps can best support that journey. Have a go below and then let’s discuss-
