Посты с тэгом: culture of innovation

Want to Innovate? Make Sure You Have a Seat at the Table

Published date: May 23, 2016 в 6:22 pm

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For most companies, the top marketer, usually called the chief marketing officer, is part of the senior leadership team and sits on the executive committee or management board. In other words, marketing has a “seat at the table.”
But here’s the challenge. If you let things slip in terms of your team’s skills and effectiveness, you’re going to lose that seat. If marketing is seen as weak or ineffective, over time, other departments will slowly start stealing away your responsibilities. If left unchecked, your department will dwindle, leaving your team little more than a sales support function.
Here are some examples. Imagine you have a talented marketer in your department who handles sales forecasts used by manufacturing to decide how much product to make. She leaves to take another role, and her replacement is just not as good. Eventually, the manufacturing team will step in and take over forecasting. Hey, they’re doing it because they need to get the job done.
This could happen in other areas. Pricing could go to finance. Product development goes to R&D. Distribution slips away to the supply chain group. Marketing promotions goes to Corporate Communications, and so on. You’re left with a bunch of junior marketers who do nothing but create sales aids. Not good.
The biggest challenge is that many people believe that anyone can do marketing. Other groups see the marketing department as a great development opportunity for their staff.
For example, the national sales manager wants to give division sales managers new challenges and experiences. They apply for a job in marketing despite having no marketing skills. Other departments do the same thing. Over time, you end up with a marketing department that, by design, is operating at less than 100% effectiveness. You’re in trouble.
Here’s what you can do about it. First, you have to build a marketing department that is seen as having a strong core – it has solid people, strong processes, it meets its obligations, and it positions itself as leading the charge against the competition. That means you have to focus on getting the right talent and building competency within your team.
You have to create an amazing team of people with leadership skills so other departments see marketing as the hub of all company activity.
You must change people’s perception of marketing-as-a-cost-center to marketing-as-an-investment- center. Money spent on marketing will yield a sound return on investment. That means you have to deliver on your promises.
So evaluate your current situation, your talent pool, and your responsibilities. Create a plan to build a strong marketing core. Then go and get back that seat at the table.

Innovation Clusters: Why companies are better together

Published date: February 29, 2016 в 4:16 pm

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  • Innovation clusters require six key ingredients: skills, accommodating policy framework, infrastructure, low cost structures (in early stages), a good lifestyle offering and serendipity.
  • Clusters are like the companies they host: they change over time, and their long term success depends on how well they adapt to the challenges of success, like congestion and increased rents
  • Clusters are strongly reliant on an open immigration policy at the national level – tightening borders reduces a cluster’s access to global talent

Innovation is often associated with triumphant lone inventors. The likes of Thomas Edison, Louis Pasteur or Bill Gates are the central characters in this narrative. But all innovators spring out of a specific context. The environments that foster their individual and collective success are very often ‘innovation clusters’: ecosystems that stimulate and nurture the best ideas and attract the brightest talents.
Clusters emerge when a network of companies co­exists within a geographic location, allowing each of them to collaborate – and compete – in a way which delivers greater productivity gains than they would achieve in isolation. Silicon Valley is the most famous, but there are countless others across every continent.
Clusters attract innovative people. They network, leading to the cross­-pollination of ideas. Companies benefit from each other’s success: What one invents, rivals can access – think of a productivity­boosting tool like Dropbox. And what one firm invents, others can build on. Think of the ‘sharing economy’, led by trailblazers Uber and Airbnb, in turn giving rise to an army of start­ups taking the same idea to new applications. The sharing of knowledge, the spill­over effects of innovation and the networking that densely populated spaces enable are all key ingredients for start­up success.
Yet for all their benefits, innovation clusters are not straightforward to build – and many do not last, even with the ‘magic ingredients’ seemingly there. To prosper, clusters need six key success factors: skills and talent, accommodating policy frameworks, infrastructure, low costs (especially in the early stages), a good lifestyle offering to draw talent, and finally ­ good luck, whether geography (proximity to key markets), historical accidents or even good fortune.
The ‘big 6’ success factors
EUI-BriefingPaper-Dubai-v2-r2_graphic-1
These six factors are necessary conditions, although they are not always sufficient. Many places in the world lay claim to these six, but never give rise to a successful cluster. These factors are best seen as the necessary conditions for clusters, but not – on their own – the silver bullet. Cluster success depends both on individual factors, but also the interplay between them. Good universities are little use if there is no connectivity with industry. A high standard of living is not helpful if immigration policies prevent global talent from moving to the cluster.
There are clearly many that have done it well, are still doing it well, and some that have tried and struggled.
– See more at: http://destinationinnovation.economist.com/part-1/#sthash.iRIxQ9vD.dpuf
 
 
WRITTEN BY THE ECONOMIST INTELLIGENCE UNIT (with permission)
 
 
 

Marketing’s Seat at the Innovation Table

Published date: March 11, 2013 в 3:00 am

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Where does your marketing department fit when it comes to innovation?  In their article1, “Improving Marketing’s Contribution to New Product Development,” these author’s offer a dismal view:

“The prevailing view in most companies is that marketing is not a distinct function, and therefore, everyone can do marketing.  As a result, the status of the marketing department is in a steep decline, which is especially observable within the NPD process.  This development is surprising because it seems that top innovators strongly involve the marketing department in the NPD process.  Hence, strengthening the marketing department’s position with respect to NPD should be a priority to improve innovation performance.”

I agree.  But I believe the authors fall way short of what is needed to do that.  Their research points to two recommendations.  First, marketing departments need to excel at market research skills and tools to translate customer needs into product specifications.  Second, marketers should have strong market knowledge and a good understanding of the firms product portfolio.

Seen this way, marketing becomes nothing more than a market research department in support of R&D.  This grossly underwhelms the potential of a strong marketing mindset within an organization and the potential for great innovation.

For marketing to lead the innovation effort, I recommend the following:

1. Develop an Innovation Competency:  Innovation is a skill, not a gift.  It can be learned by anyone and applied systematic.  Innovative companies treat it as just another core skill by creating a well-defined set of innovation competencies and embedding them into employee’s competency model along with other required behaviors such as ethics and leadership.  A innovation method such as SIT, for example, gives a marketing employee the ability to “innovate on demand.”

2. Link Innovation to Strategy:  Marketing is the battle arm of any company, and it should lead the development of strategy.  When it links strategy with the innovation efforts inside an R&D department, it becomes more influential in what gets put through the NPD process.

3. Drive Innovation as a Process:  Defining innovation as just the NPD process is too limiting.  Marketing needs to sponsor cross-functional teams using systematic innovation tools that feed concepts into the NPD process.  Marketing needs to eliminate the “fuzzy” in the front end and make it crystal clear with a routine, sustainable process of generating new opportunities.

4. Innovate Under the Radar: In this month’s Harvard Business Review, Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg make a great point in their article, “The Case for Stealth Innovation.”  Savvy marketers know how to operate under the radar and nurture innovation programs through complex bureaucracy.  Thomas Bonoma’s classic HBR article from 1986, “Marketing Subversives,”said something similar:

“I
found that under conditions of marketplace change, success depended
heavily on the presence of marketing subversives in a company.
Subversive marketers undermined their organizations’ structures to
implement new marketing practices….And no matter what higher
management had decided to allocate to various marketing projects, the
subversives found ways to work around the official budget.  They
bootlegged the resources they needed to implement new, more appropriate
marketing practices.”

The same can be said about innovation.

1Drechsler, Wenzel, Natter, Martin and Leeflang, Peter S.H., “Improving Marketing’s Contribution to New Product Development,” Journal of Product Innovation Management, Volume 30, Number 2 (March 2013), 298-315.

10 New Year Resolutions for Innovation Leaders

Published date: December 31, 2012 в 2:00 am

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“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language

and next year’s words await another voice.”

                                                                                     T.S. Eliot

In 2013, think inside the box and give your staff these precious gifts to drive innovation forward:

1. Give them Hope: Hope is defined as a positive motivational belief in one’s future; the feeling that what is wanted can be had; that events will turn out for the best. Without hope, tasks such as innovating become difficult if not impossible. Researcher Armenio Rego says, “Hope is important for innovation at work because creativity requires challenging the status quo and a willingness to try and possibly fail.  It requires some level of internal, sustaining force that pushes individuals to persevere in the face of challenges inherent to creative work.”

2. Give them Voice: Giving your employees a voice in matters boosts their creativity. Research shows that, over time, procedural fairness (giving people the opportunity to express their views) has a positive maintaining effect on creativity whereas stifling their views decreases creativity. Be consistent over time.  Don’t let distractions or a crisis cause you to change the rules. Give them a chance to speak about anything related to the innovation challenges you face – focus, methodology, budget allocation, team formation, and so on.  Most importantly, let them speak about the nature and value of their own ideas.

3. Give them a chance to Get Even: When managing individuals or teams, the time will come when you have to say ‘no’.  In that moment immediately after rejecting a person’s viewpoint, you want to let it sink.  Don’t try to minimize the impact by rationalizing the decision or by other means of making the person feel better.  Assign the rejected person right away to a new and important task.  Put them on a project where they can prove themselves and “get even.”  Let their creative juices flow.

4. Give them Accountability: Hold people accountable for what they do to improve innovation activities.  It is tempting to judge employee performance and reward them for innovation output.  This leads to the unwanted rivalry between employees.  Avoid this trap by looking at how managers set up “cockpit indicators” and use those indicators to make changes.  Have they created a closed loop feedback process to improve innovation continuously?

5. Give them a Method: For thousands of years, inventors have embedded five simple patterns into their inventions, usually without knowing it. These patterns are the “DNA” of products that can be extracted and applied to any product or service to create new-to-the-world innovations. Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) is an effective, repeatable, and trainable innovation process for organic growth.

6. Give them Constraints: Research in cognitive psychology confirms that creativity is enhanced by constraints, not freedom.  By limiting the number of variables under consideration from infinity to a finite number, we amplify our potential to come up with a creative solution. To throw away all constraints would be to destroy the capacity for creative thinking. It may sound counterintuitive, but giving employees too much freedom of thought leads to “idea anarchy” and a poor level of inventiveness.

7. Give them Skills:  Innovation is a skill, not a gift.  It can be learned by anyone regardless of where they are on the creativity scale.  If you want a more innovative company, you must have more innovative employees.  Train them in innovation as you would train other skill such as leadership, six sigma, or business ethics.

8. Give them Teams: Innovating takes teamwork.  Properly selected teams using a facilitated systematic method will outperform ad hoc teams using divergent, less structured methods such as brainstorming.  Create innovation “dream teams” with diverse talent from the commercial, technical, and customer-oriented parts of your business.

9. Give them Strategy: Innovation that is linked to strategy is seen as more realistic and supportable.  Innovating is efficient because you avoid creating ideas that are out of scope.  Companies get better results from innovation by targeting initiatives at the right places.

10. Give them an Innovation Culture:  An innovative corporate culture is one that supports the creation of new ideas and the implementation of those ideas.  Leaders need to help employees see innovation in the right light and create support systems to make it stick.  As fellow blogger Jeffrey Phillips notes, “A culture that sustains and supports innovation is one that encourages reasonable risk and uncertainty in the goal of larger, more profitable products and services.”

Let Me Speak!

Published date: December 27, 2012 в 4:11 pm

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Giving your employees a voice in matters boosts their
creativity.  New research shows that,
over time, procedural fairness (giving people the opportunity to express their
views) has a positive maintaining effect on creativity whereas stifling their views
decreases creativity.

Bernhard
Streicher* and his colleagues assigned twenty three University students randomly to one of two groups: treated fairly (getting a chance to voice their ideas) or treated unfairly (not given a chance to express themselves).  Students were given a different creativity task over four successive weeks.  They were told that a committee would rate their results.  After the completing each of the tasks, the students in the “fair group” were given the opportunity to explain their ideas and that the committee would consider this information in the evaluation.  The “unfair group” was not given this opportunity.  Ideas from both groups were evaluated and scored (blinded) using standard assessment techniques.

Over the four weeks of the study, students in the fair group maintained their creative output while students in the unfair group declined.  Interestingly, there was no difference in creativity between the groups in week one.  Over time, however, the effect of fairness kicked in.

For leaders of innovation teams, letting your employees express themselves helps maintain a culture of innovation.  But the key is to be consistent over time.  Don’t let distractions or a crisis cause you to change the rules. Give them a chance to speak about anything related to the innovation challenges you face: focus, methodology, budget allocation, team formation, and so on.  But most importantly, as the study points out, let them speak about the nature and value of their own ideas.

 
*Berhard Streicher, Eva Jones, Günter W. Maier, Dieter Frey, and Anneliese Spießberger, “Procedural Fairness and Creativity: Does Voice Maintain People’s Creative Vein Over Time?” Creativity Research Journal, 24(4) (2012): 358-363.

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