It Takes a Village to Innovate

We Need Innovators, Not Heroes

When innovators succeed within a company, they do so against the odds. Complex bureaucracy, detailed documentation, and the need to convince multiple different stakeholders to back an idea are frequent challenges innovators face when trying to get their ideas off the ground. This not only makes success much more difficult, it also takes a huge personal toll on innovation professionals themselves.

“We evaluated a company where the innovators spent more time on documentation than doing the work,” Tendayi says. “Innovation was more about satisfying internal stakeholders than it was about meeting customer needs.

I remember having a conversation with one of the guys there and he hated it - he said to me, ‘you can only innovate if you're like me, and you don't care about your career.’ We actually called the innovators there ‘hero innovators’, because it took so much effort for them to actually become successful. But nobody was having the conversation about why it was so hard to innovate in these companies.

We don’t want our innovators to be heroes, what we really need to do is just to lower the barriers for them to collaborate. Because if we can’t there's no chance for innovation to succeed. If you're working on your own, you have zero chance of success.”

The Core Business... And Its Superpowers

When organizations do begin to evaluate why they struggle with innovation, they often find that it’s extremely difficult for innovators to work with their colleagues in the core business. Whether it’s sales directors preventing innovators from talking to customers, or IT teams putting projects at the bottom of the backlog, innovators can quickly become frustrated at a lack of support for their work.

Yet instead of seeing these people as obstacles, Tendayi recommends taking a different perspective.

“In innovation, ideas are a dime a dozen. What really matters is turning those ideas into successful businesses out into the world. So the human beings that are going to do the work are really, really, really important.

You can view all of these collaborators within the business as obstacles if you want, but if you really think about it, you can also think about them as superpowers. This is the psychological reframe I would love for innovation folks to start to have in their minds.

Why? Just think about the comparison between a startup and a large organization. A startup is like a mosquito: you get all the agility in the world, but you die easily. But when you're a large organization, you have some advantages.

One advantage is the brand. You can leverage your brand, if you get permission to do it, of course. You have resources in terms of human talent, and support from key functions. Your financial resources are sometimes larger than those at startups, and then finally, when it comes to going to market, you actually have access to customers that you can start testing with. These are all superpowers.”

And as for organizations that fail to seize the benefits of these superpowers?

“If you're an innovation team inside a large organization, and you're not leveraging the superpowers, then you're a startup in chains,” Tendayi says.

“This is a phrase that was coined by Alex Osterwalder. It means that you don't have the freedoms of a real startup, and you're not leveraging the benefits of being inside a large organization, so you're literally in the middle of nowhere. The only thing that unlocks these chains is the village - collaborating effectively with people in different functions in the core business.”

How to Work With the Core Business

For Tendayi, working successfully with the core business is all about tapping into the human side of things, which can only happen through open conversation. Here’s his advice on how to collaborate more effectively with finance, legal and compliance, and human resources leaders in your organization.

What You Need From Finance

• Remove the requirement to have a business case in the early stages of innovation, giving teams the ability to explore their initial ideas. Agree at what stage you’ll need to provide a business case, and how you’ll work with finance from this point onwards. This will help you demonstrate that while you need freedom in the early stages of your work, you are willing to collaborate with finance as a whole.
• Set up a system for allocating metered funding - or incremental investment - in innovation ideas. This should include funding limits, and what evidence innovators need to provide to demonstrate their idea has traction and unlock further investment. Putting the right system in place will reassure finance that investment in innovation is based on the feasibility of ideas and their likely success.
• Consider implementing EBITDA relief - where any money invested in innovation is not included in EBITDA calculations. This will give leaders the freedom to invest in innovation activity without worrying about how it will impact their financial performance, and boost innovation activity within your organization.

What You Need From Legal and Compliance

• Remove barriers to testing ideas by applying the appropriate compliance criteria to the right stage of innovation. This involves explaining to the legal team what activity you will undertake at each stage of the work, from discovery to launch, and understanding its implications. For example, if at the discovery stage you’re only speaking to customers to understand their needs - which legal and compliance considerations apply? Then what happens when you launch and scale with real customers? Having the right legal considerations in play at the right stage will make sure you don’t stifle innovation efforts with too many hoops to jump through.

What You Need From Human Resources

• Make innovation a legitimate career path inside your organization, by building systems and processes that incentivize innovation. This means building systems and processes that help people collaborate across teams and across functions within the business. Organizational hierarchy really comes into play here - where does the Chief Innovation Officer sit within the organization? Who do they report to? If innovation is a priority for the organization, then as a function it needs power and legitimacy, ideally with close proximity to the CEO.
• Work with HR to help you build the right team. This might be starting with a small team, and adding more members as your innovation progresses. It could be incentivizing innovation by giving employees a stake in the ideas they’re working on. Or it might be reallocating people to new roles so they can explore a new idea, and providing funding for their temporary replacement.

Find Your Inner Politician to Facilitate Conversation

Fundamentally, effective collaboration with core functions comes from understanding each other’s needs and priorities. Yet large organizations don’t typically bring the right people together, at the right time, and in the right way, to facilitate the right kinds of conversations between innovators and the rest of the business.

If innovators understood their role in this way, as facilitators of conversation - or as Tendayi puts it “politicians”, rather than ideas generators - there would be greater alignment on priorities, people in the core would be far more supportive of innovation work, and innovation activity as a whole would likely be much more successful.

So when you’re thinking about the success of your innovation activity, don’t forget the importance of harnessing the village you have around you within your organization. It's your responsibility to set up the town square that brings all stakeholders together and facilitate ongoing communication and effective collaboration.