What is the DNA of Your Strategy?
Project Status: How to ‘Bottom-line it’ for Senior Executives?
‘Leaders say they want more innovation1 , but what exactly does that mean? What type of innovation, and where is it most needed? These sound like difficult questions to answer, but surprisingly they are not.
Leaders can map present and future innovation, identifying those specific projects and initiatives that can drive today’s performance and unlock tomorrow’s potential.
Hidden Pockets of Innovation
‘Something does not add up’, said the experienced coach as she tried to reconcile the apparent contradictions in what the CEO had just said. In particular, two statements:
- “There is very little innovation happening in this organization.”
- “There are over 200 projects running at this time, with many more in the pipeline.”
‘Surely, many of those projects involve innovation of some kind?’ she mused. ‘What are all those projects and initiatives doing if they are not finding better solutions, improving business processes, exploring new technologies, and so on’.
‘If there are 200 projects with little or no innovation, something is seriously wrong’, she thought with raised eyebrows. ‘I bet there is probably a lot more innovation happening in the organization than the CEO realizes – hidden pockets of innovation and innovative potential’.
Opening her diary, she added ‘hidden pockets of innovation’ to during her following scheduled conversation with the CEO.
Seeking-out Innovation
Many leaders want more innovation and are frustrated at their organizations’ slow pace of change. Yet, leaders are often unaware of hidden pockets of innovation.
In the quest for greater innovation, these ‘hidden pockets’ of innovation and innovative potential are the ideal places to start.
Be-moaning the lack of innovation, while common, has little practical value. Let’s switch the narrative by seeking out innovation with questions such as:
- Where is innovation happening?
- What kind of innovation is it?
- Where is the potential for more innovation?
To answer these questions requires exploring the organization’s portfolio of projects, programs and initiatives.
Can’t See it? Re-think It!
Part of the reason why much innovation goes unnoticed is that managers are looking for the wrong thing. That is because the nature of innovation has undergone a fundamental re-think in recent years:
- Innovation is no longer seen as the reserve of software geeks, engineers and scientists. It doesn’t just happen in labs or incubation centres. 2
- Innovation is not just about products and technologies. It is also for processes, business models, ways of working and everything else!
- Innovation is about radical leaps forward and the progressive accumulation of marginal gains.
- Innovation is not just about Eureka moments and sudden discoveries. It is about unrelenting effort/experimentation, often driven by frustration with a problem.
- Few may rise to the level of Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, but everybody has the potential to be innovative in their own way.3
All this means that innovation is, or at least it has the potential to be everywhere – to be found right across the organization.4
In particular, innovation is to be found in the projects and Initiatives underway across the organization, such as:
- A high-profile project to revamp processes and systems in respect of internal operations
- A program of product development aimed at delivering exciting new features
- An initiative to explore emerging market opportunities and shifting customer needs
- A much heralded digital transformation Initiative taking place organization-wide
- An organizational restructure that is presently on the drawing board
- An array of ‘micro’ initiatives emerged from a voucher program to foster new ideas.
As this cross-section of projects suggests, there is more innovation happening in an organization than people realize, and there is much more innovation potential.
Where is Innovation Happening?
For an organization to have 50, 100 or more projects underway is not unusual. This portfolio of projects and initiatives is where to find hot spots of innovation and pockets of innovative potential.
Projects and initiatives are the ideal places to find innovation; even if you don’t see it there, they are the perfect place to start nurturing it.
Projects are ready-made vehicles for innovation. Each project brings together a group focused on solving a specific business problem or opportunity, with a project plan, budget and process for engaging customers and stakeholders.
Within these projects, some or all of the following ‘innovation-related’ activities are likely to be happening:
- Identification of needs and the definition of problems
- Exploration of opportunities and challenges
- Learning about markets, trends, etc.
- Listening to stakeholders and customers
- Information gathering and analysis
- Idea generation and creative problem-solving
- Testing and experimentation, mock-ups and prototypes
- Perspectives are being shared and new ways of thinking explored
- Changes are being planned or made
- Imagining and re-imagining the future and the setting of goals
Even struggling projects can fuel innovation – they may present the most significant learning opportunities.
What Kind of Innovation Is It?
A list of all the projects in a project portfolio typically has headings such as the project lead, project budget, status, etc. It is time to add some new columns regarding innovation.
Each project should have a short overview, and include a statement of its innovative contribution. That is how the project will contribute to the innovation, capacity or learning of the organization.
Here are some ways to classify the nature of the innovation:
What business need is being addressed? What is the customer/stakeholder need to be solved? What’s the job to be done?5
What is the focus? Is it innovation in respect of people, processes, systems, structures, etc.
What is the horizon? When will the innovation deliver results? Is it short-term (0-1 years), medium-term (1-2 years) or long-term (3-5 years)? Think Horizon of innovation.6
What is the zone? What type of innovation is it? Is it about productivity and performance gains to sustain the existing business, or is it disruptive innovation aimed at shaping the organization’s future – incubating breakthrough new ideas and successfully using them to drive transformation? (and catch the next wave).7
Is it Core, Adjacent or New? Is it innovation at the core of the business, in areas that are adjacent to the core (e.g. extension of existing product) or is it in entirely new areas8
Is it business as usual innovation? (i.e. concerned with the everyday running of the business) or business unusual innovation (a departure from the very day running of the business concerned with new processes, products, markets and technologies)?
Conclusion: There is probably more innovation happening in your organization than you realize. There certainly is a lot more potential for innovation. The place to look is in the projects and initiatives being worked on or planned.
SOLUTIONS & SERVICES: Here are some of the ways that our research & insights are put to work by our clients:
- For example BCG Consulting Group data suggests that ‘Nearly 75% of companies say innovation is one of their top three management priorities, and 35% rank it above all others.’ Source: https://www.bcg.com/capabilities/innovation-strategy-delivery/overview [↩]
- ‘Contrary to popular belief, innovation is not some mystical art that’s forbidden to mere mortals’ from Rowan Gibson, The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking, Wiley, 2015 [↩]
- ‘Every person can create something new – whether it is slicing beats with two turntables and a microphone or slicing genes with two test tubes and Crispr …innovation is universal.’from Ainissa Ramirez, ‘The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another’, The MIT Press, 2020. [↩]
- “One of the biggest misconceptions people have is that innovation is the job of a select few people—typically white-coated scientists toiling away in a lab, working on a breakthrough technology. That is one way to innovate, but innovation can involve a novel marketing approach, a different pricing model, a new way to organize a team, or even a new way to run a weekly meeting‘ from Scott D. Anthony, “The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas into the Market”, Harvard Business Review Press (April 1, 2014). [↩]
- ‘the Job to be done’ is the Clayton christensen concept of looking beyond the solution to what the customer wants to achieve (i.e. they don’t need a drill, what they need is a hole). [↩]
- Mehrdad Baghai, Stephen Coley, and David White, The Alchemy of Growth, New York: Perseus Publishing, 1999. [↩]
- Geoffrey A. Moore, Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption, Diversion Books, 2015 [↩]
- ‘Strategic transformation requires the seeds of growth and innovation to be planted while maintaining the core business, enabling rapid scaling when those seeds start to bear fruit.’
Colin Price & Sharon Toye ((Colin Price & Sharon Toye, Accelerating Performance: How Organizations Can Mobilize, Execute, and Transform with Agility, Wiley; 2017. [↩]
