Innovation Leadership GPS
Do you know where you stand with your innovation leadership?
What gets measured gets done?
Measure the things you want to make progress in, is a common unwritten business rule.
If you work in a large company responsible for innovation you will face the following all the time. The Management wants to see progress, and the same successful KPIs fulfilled by innovation initiatives as from all others. But almost never are this KPIs reflecting leadership and culture.
What if you flip things around and take a different approach to measure innovation and afterwards translate it to the “normal way” of measuring things? And maybe, just maybe, there is a change coming which will make the “normal way” irrelevant at all.
Innovation leadership GPS.
Imagine you would have something like google maps to help you navigate through your innovation leadership journey. An easy to use system that helps you find the right things and navigates you through the traffic. Though it sounds like technology this can be a pen and paper version or a whiteboard. There is no need for a high tech version.
How to build your own innovation leadership GPS.
Innovation is a process that requires action.
A 5 step approach to define your Innovation Leadership GPS:
Start with your vision as your future state
Set tangible goals to reach the vision
Build experiments to validate your metrics
Measure the results
Validate your vision and start again
A simplified example of a retail company.
Vision: I want to empower our organisation to innovate our business model
Goals: I empower 20 people per month to innovate. Out of the 20 people at least 5 will empower 5 other people.
Experiment: Set up of Reverse-Mentorship-Program with 10 young people and 10 senior people
Experiment topic: Ways of working beyond 2030.
Experiment vision: Life long employment for everyone
Experiment length: 6 weeks
Experiment budget: 2h per person per week and a big cake and coffee for the final day
Experiment setup: Young and senior person meet 2x1h per week to discuss the vision. Documented by a visual mindmap. Final presentation to all others afterwards.
Measure:
How many people want to join
How many requests do you get from other people to join the next experiment
Enthusiasm and engagement (Sharing of the initiative within their own teams. Your management colleagues asking you about it)
Validate:
Did I reach the goals?
If not, why not? What did I learn?
Is my experiment still valid to reach the vision?
What would I need to change to make my experiment successful?
Multiply this approach by different business areas and goals and you can build your innovation leadership GPS dashboard that gives you KICIs (Key-Innovation-Culture-Indicator)
How to translate your innovation leadership GPS.
If we take the example from above how would you satisfy the board in giving you money for the second experiment and or judge that this is a successful initiative?
You document the progress of the experiment with visuals
You just established the base for an engagement strategy for all senior people in your company
You just educated all junior people by the experience of the seniors
You inspired senior people to engage more often with the junior people to learn their ways of thinking
You track the enthusiasm and engagement of the people involved from week to week
Higher enthusiasm and engagement = Happiness at work = efficiency and impact with their work
Because you have hand picked people you can track their KPI’s in their “normal” job e.g. a Salesperson
What if only one senior sales person increases sales by 5% due to the knowledge gained from the young person?
Depending on your company this could already finance the hours spent by all participants and of course the coffee and cake
Innovating longterm in companies means changing the company culture and consequently the metric system of success. Decide for yourself to be the future innovation leader.