6 Building Blocks for Successful Innovation

How Entrepreneurial Leaders Design Innovative Futures

Massimo Garbuio, Moritz Dressel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000012422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Innovation is about ideas that make life better. But what does it really take to deliver innovative propositions? And what separates companies that drive their industries forward from those that simply talk the talk?

This book takes you inside the minds of the world's most effective innovators to answer these questions and more. In real stories from industries as diverse as healthcare, finance, technology, and telecommunications, business leaders reveal what it takes to bring new products and services to life. They weigh in on the big debates: how to design an innovative organization of diverse voices, how to protect and grow ideas so they succeed, and how to tune corporate radar to inspiration and turn the signals received into new value.

An essential resource for leaders, aspiring leaders and students of entrepreneurship, business management, HRM, technology and innovation management, and design thinking, the book enables the reader to:

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• Hear from leaders with direct responsibility for innovating in a wide range of industries and learn how they do it

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• See how to structure for innovation, gain momentum inside an organization and use ideas to shift companies and industries

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• Gain insight into what innovators look for when they sense the environment and learn to avoid common pitfalls and misconceptions that stop great ideas coming to life

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• Approach innovation in a more balanced way with the 6 Building Blocks helping you prioritize execution and value delivery from inspiration to implementation

PART I

Innovation: getting started

1

Introduction

Wherever you look, there is change. But not change of the evolutionary type. We are talking about change that is fundamentally shifting how the global ecosystem works. Exponential growth of new technologies, as well as the near dissolution of time and space, has created a competitive environment unlike any other. Disruption through innovation is the name of the game.

And given the choice between being disrupted and being disrupting, most would opt for the latter. A potential death threat constantly in sight, the pursuit of innovation has become not just a wise business strategy but a necessity for organizations large and small. For leaders everywhere the catchphrase is adapt or die.

But when we talk about innovation, what do we really mean? In your pursuit of innovation, where do you start? How do you “do” innovation?

There is no shortage of concepts. Practitioners and scholars alike are designing frameworks, processes, and theories to make companies more innovative, to make sense of innovation ecosystems, to get people to work together in new ways, and to “do” innovation. If you are in business, you have probably come across terms like disruptive innovation or radical innovation. You might have firsthand experience in design thinking or human-centered design. Lean start-ups and agile might be bandied around at your organization. No longer the province of the young and entrepreneurial, innovation has gone mainstream, and both practice and academia promise ways to deliver innovation across your company. Innovation approaches are myriad and range from incubators and accelerators to hackathons and TV shows like Shark Tank that are aimed at the broader public. The chapters and interviews in this book will help you to understand both what innovation is and how it is done; further suggestions appear in “Resources” in Part 3.

In our experience, the variety of different yet similar approaches for developing something new is confusing. Whenever we engage with clients, they ask, “What is everyone else doing in terms of innovation? How did they start their journey? How did they make it a company-wide thing? What should we focus on and how?”

There is a wealth of academic research on innovation, but it doesn’t have all the answers. Research, by its very nature, cannot always be up to date with what’s going on in the real world. While research looks retrospectively at what has happened, disruption from clever start-ups is challenging industries such as banking, insurance, and retail as well as real estate, healthcare, and beyond. Where both research and practice agree is that innovation is no longer an option, it is a necessity. To stay relevant a company must innovate. And to innovate, you need to find a novel solution to an existing problem or create a vision for a bright new future.

If you’re reading this book, it’s likely that you want to know how to “do innovation.” How do you avoid the mistakes other innovators have already made? How do you learn from their experience? Should you hire a consulting or design firm to help you jump-start your innovation journey? Or do you try to go it alone in implementing the idea you read in a business magazine you picked up at the airport?

6 Building Blocks for Successful Innovation: How Entrepreneurial Leaders Design Innovative Futures provides the answers.

6 Building Blocks for Successful Innovation is unique in its combining of firsthand innovation experience from various fields with a strong scientific foundation. Armed with years of academic research and consulting experience, we make our case for how to be more innovative. Moreover, we illustrate this with the experience of successful leaders who have championed innovation in their fields, and we tell you what worked and what didn’t work in their innovation journeys (see Part 2).

The choice of some interviewees may seem obvious, while others are perhaps less well-known advocates of innovation. However, all of those interviewed for this book are uniquely qualified to contribute. Whether it is the entrepreneur who has been building and scaling his venture from the ground up or the corporate veteran who has continuously kept her organization (and, in fact, the industry) at the forefront by repeated paradigm-shifting innovation, each one has provided his or her candid view on the keys to innovating successfully and what pitfalls to avoid.

While you might think you have a good idea about what innovation is and what it looks like, when you ask a range of people, a plethora of views emerge. The same can be said for our interview partners. Despite answering the same set of questions, their responses could not have been more varied and intriguing. Their responses suggest that innovation is new products, services, and business models. That sometimes it is driven by technology. That it’s about business processes – internal and external. That it’s all of these things and more.

Who should read this book?

We have aimed this book at an audience of entrepreneurial and innovative people within established companies. We attempt to shed light on the questions we have been asked over the years by those starting an innovation journey within their organization. We also try to provide answers to questions raised by those who have started an innovation journey but have hit a plateau or roadblock.

If you are a student of innovation, 6 Building Blocks for Successful Innovation will bring to life many of the theories and frameworks you hear about in the classroom, complementing the cases that you discuss in class with experiences from other contexts. And you will encounter very different perspectives, because our synthesis of research and practice acknowledges the drawbacks of theories and frameworks in the real world.

Everybody starting out on an innovation journey will find something of interest in these pages. Likewise, seniority is no precondition to benefiting from this book. It may be easier to set a baseline for your innovation journey if you have autonomy. But as you will learn from the interviews, hierarchical levels (or age, for that matter) are largely irrelevant when it comes to making an impact through innovation. Young upstarts may have to work harder to have their ideas accepted. But equipped with the lessons from the innovators in this book, even the most junior prospective innovator should be well positioned to cause disruption. Those more senior, to which new ideas are presented, will be empowered to provide guidance to their colleagues. Through the lessons of amazing innovators ‒ those actually engaging in innovation ‒ we want you to unlock your individual innovative capability and help you empower the people around you to do the same.

How to read this book

We suggest you start reading with Chapter 2, “Innovation: A Definition,” to gain a useful overview, and then look at Chapters 3‒5. This should give you the big picture. Then read the interviews. They don’t have to be read in order, as each has a unique flavor while also confirming and complementing each other.

Once you’ve read through the interviews, we recommend you return to Chapters 3‒5 to reflect on what it means for your own journey. Where are you now? What should be next? What is standing in the way of where you want to be? What fixes can you implement today in your company? Sometimes even a small change in attitude or mindset can have a substantial impact on your company’s innovation potential and, eventually, bottom line. This book aims to guide you to make the best choices. Ultimately, your first choice should be to take action.

In order to support you on your innovation journey, we have included a selection of tools and concepts from the world of innovation in “Resources” in Part 3. There is no shortage of concepts – and that is precisely why it’s easy to lose your way on the road to innovation. Informed by both the interviews and our academic research, we hope this road map to innovation will make the journey smooth and rapid.

2

Innovation

A Definition

Imagine the following scenario: you have been asked to drive the innovation agenda within your company. This is the opportunity you have always wanted. But you also have a great idea for a start-up. What should you do – the opportunity your company is offering will give you visibility with the C-suite and put the company on an unprecedented transformation path, but you are also excited about branching out on your own. Should you take a huge risk and start something new that will see you living like a student for the next five years until you turn a profit? Or should you create something amazing within your current company?

While you are tempted by creating your own start-up, you are also excited that you have finally been recognized as an innovator and asked to build and lead an innovation team. You decide to take this opportunity within your organization because it allows you to be creative, to think outside the box, and to empower other people to do fun stuff that will make an impact in the organization and possibly beyond.

Then people start asking you: what is your agenda? How are you going to go about it? Do we need innovation? Aren’t we the market leader already? Someone else might say, we are already innovative, why do we need some new program? Others may discourage you by saying the company will never be innovative because it has too much bureaucracy or an inhibiting culture. And how do you get the buy-in of all decision makers? And what is innovation anyway? It all seems a lot harder than you thought it would be.

In 6 Building Blocks for Successful Innovation, we don’t worry about the question of whether we need innovation in the first place. Nor do we provide all possible arguments to counter potential resistance. But we do provide you with nuggets of wisdom and very practical learnings from innovators around the globe that will inspire and guide you along your innovation journey.

Before we get into it, let’s answer one more question though, perhaps the first question you will be asked. What is innovation, anyway?

In talking about innovation, different people mean different things. We all have an idea. You might think that the first iPhone was an innovation. Others might think that Coco Chanel was a true innovator. Innovation is, perhaps, one of the most misinterpreted terms. Then there are all the subsets of innovation such as sustaining innovation, radical innovation, incremental innovation, or even disruptive innovation. What do these all mean?

We do not distinguish between innovating products, services, or business models. Similarly, we don’t focus on technology-driven innovation, user-driven innovation, or the innovation of meaning. ¹ Ultimately, it is really just about “innovation.”

To make clear what we mean by just “innovation,” we refer to a definition we have arrived at based on a systematic review of a multidisciplinary set of studies which, over the years, has attracted more than 1,000 citations and has therefore become one of the most often cited articles in a prestigious journal on innovation. Our objective is to provide a comprehensive view of organizational innovation, including definitions from the different disciplinary literatures of economics, innovation and entrepreneurship, business and management, and technology, science, and engineering. The general and integrative definition of organizational “innovation” that encompasses the different perspectives is as follows: ²

Innovation is the multistage process whereby organizations transform ideas into new/improved products, services, or processes, in order to advance, compete, and differentiate themselves successfully in their marketplace.

We like this definition because it starts to give us a sense of what innovation is. First, it is not necessarily something that happens in a brainstorming session. It takes time to come up with an innovative idea. It can be a solo process rather than a team effort. Even a solo p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the authors
• PART I Innovation: getting started
• PART II Innovation in action
• PART III Innovation: the future
• About the research
• Index