We look back at a fruitful second week during #Innov8rs Connect Unconference.

We discussed:
- what opportunities emerge from a stronger focus on social impact with Anthony Ferrier and Patrick McIntyre
- how to create psychological safety for high performing teams with Laura Delizonna
- how to balance execution and exploration, and what role innovators can/should play to support the core business with Brant Cooper
- what makes for a thriving innovation ecosystem with Tendayi Viki
- how we could driving a dual path strategy approach with Brian Christian
- what we can do in times of layoffs and uncertainty with Richard Turrin
- how we can roadmap based on future trends with Andy Wynn

If you missed the sessions, here’s a glimpse of what we discussed.

Psychological Safety for High-Performing Teams

What differentiates high performing teams from average teams? They have psychological safety, which unlocks team members’ best thinking, ignites bold creativity, and elevates collaboration and the risk taking that leads to innovation.

The problem is that most leaders lack insight into their behaviors that foster and unintentionally undermine psychological safety. Laura Delizonna shared key behaviors that drive trust, the link between psychological safety and innovation as well as the main obstacles to psychological safety.

In this snippet, she explored the link between diversity and psychological safety, in relation to high performance. To access the full session recording, sign up for the Unconference here.

To Innovate For Real, Disrupt The Core

In his talk, Brant Cooper shared the specific steps required to move our organizations forward  leveraging the 5E’s of Disruption Poetry: Empathy, Experiments, Evidence, Execution, and Ethics and advised how to balance execution and learning throughout the organization.

When asked what role innovators can play to support the core business, in times of massive uncertainty, here's Brant's answer. To access the full session recording, sign up for the Unconference here.

Pirates In The Navy

Building on the key principles from his book Pirates In The Navy, Tendayi Viki addressed some of the obstacles that innovators face inside their companies; and also some of the mistakes they make, and most importantly, how we can overcome these obstacles and develop a thriving innovation ecosystem.

Because that is really what the role of the innovation leader entails - creating a thriving ecosystem, not just championing a particular idea. Part of that role requires constant alignment with business and staff leaders - including our "friends" from legal and compliance. Here's how to do that. To access the full session recording, sign up for the Unconference here.

Dual Path Strategy

Brian Christian introduced the notion that companies need to embrace a dual-path strategy approach: today-for-today, as well as today-for-tomorrow, both at the same time.

To do that, and do it effectively, a company's innovation function is going to be instrumental as their toolkit enables robust option development.

Here's a short snippet from his session. To access the full session recording, sign up for the Unconference here.

 

Reverse Engineering the Future: How to Ensure your Innovation Portfolio is Truly Aligned With Market Needs

There are many types of Technology Roadmap in use, but most simply summarise where current innovation programs are heading, rather than truly trying to interpret the future. For this reason, Andy Wynn has been developing his MTR (Market-led Technology Roadmap) technique over the last 10 years, and has refined the process across hundreds of workshops, helping a diverse range of industrial companies all over the world to more closely align their innovation programs with the future demands of their markets.

In this session, Andy explained how to run an MTR workshop. Here's a short snippet from this session. To access the full session recording, sign up for the Unconference here.

What Can (Innovation) Leaders Do To Push Social Impact

In recent years an increasing number and scope of organizations have been taking active social, environmental and political stances, in response to demand by their customers, and (more recently) investors. This has been a growing theme in recent years, but that was in boom times.

The question is, in a time of COVID do organizations continue to position themselves around these issues? And if yes, how does the new COVID environment impact those decisions and actions?

Anthony Ferrier and Patrick McIntyre had a refreshing conversation about what (innovation) leaders can do to push social impact issues.