This article examines the question: which powerful impact can innovation coaches bring to your business and how to choose the right coach?

“It’s tough when markets change and your people within the company don’t.”

(Harvard Business Review)

Innovation coaches can help any company, entrepreneur or business person in the areas of business set-up, acceleration, development, and goal setting.

One of the main goals of innovation coaching is to better ensure that a company meets or excels in the demands of its clients and markets - to keep growing, adapting, and progressing each day. They can help you maintain a strong focus on what you, your company and your team do best, where you have the most impact, and how to deal with both closed and open doors. The coaching process also helps you understand where your business fits into the market - how you can best develop your skills, services, and processes to succeed.

In contrast to consulting services, where a company authorises a consulting expert or company to deliver solutions, which is usually the transfer of a similar solution implemented elsewhere. A coach instead co-generates knowledge and solutions between the company management or team and the coach. Solutions happen on the process-side of the question or problem.

One of the main strengths of innovation coaches is to help you understand what it is that you need to do to define and establish your company’s or your personal goals and objectives. Getting answers often requires that you clarify the thing you’re seeking to achieve and ask the right question in the first place.

However, innovation coaching is difficult work. This is because it involves teaching people new behaviours within an organisational context that is not set up to support those behaviours. So you are not just teaching people to innovate, you are also teaching people how to do this successfully within the constraints of your company.

Also, it is difficult to scale innovation as a repeatable process if companies continue to rely on external coaching and training for their innovation teams. A healthy way to think about innovation capabilities is to treat it as an organizational muscle. You need to keep it in shape so that the company can quickly respond to disruption when it occurs. 

How to choose the right coach?

When selecting innovation coaches you are looking for a combination of two factors. You are looking for someone with a significant and demonstrable interest in innovation methods such as design thinking, agile and lean businesses. But they also need to have a significant and demonstrable interest in training and coaching other people to use these innovation methods. 

Which behaviour do you want to see in a coach?

• Challenger: This involves challenging people's preconceived ideas about what works in the context of innovation. In innovation coaching, you have to throw what Alex Osterwalder calls “diplomatic hand grenades”. You have to show teams the mirror without fear or humiliating them.

• Facilitator: Even as you are challenging teams, you cannot be the one telling them what to do. You have to somehow get teams to take bold and unexpected directions without telling them what to do. Being a great facilitator is the innovation coach’s superpower.

• Provides practical advice: Innovation coaching is not about giving motivational speeches. You have to get people inspired without the blah blah. What people are looking for are practical tools to use in their day to day work. You don’t want people to walk away from a session with you feeling inspired but having no idea of what they need to do next.  This is where choosing the right tools to use when coaching teams becomes important. Innovation coaches should master the right tools to inspire great value proposition and business model design. They should also master the right tools to help teams identify assumptions and test their business ideas.

The potential of innovation coaching will save you time and money as it will focus on how to reach your goals and objectives by setting up the right foundation to shape your future success in a sustainable way.

Heitland Innovation Coaching - Let’s speak today and connect the dots of innovation!

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