Innovation management

Use cloud to develop new, and improve existing, processes, products, and experiences.

The ability to innovate is at the center of the most enduring organizations in the world. Failing to innovate means stasis, and over the years leads to irrelevance, decline, and ultimately the failure of many organizations. Therefore, it is vital to build organizational capabilities to accelerate innovation (from ideation to implementation) in the cloud and invent ahead of customers' rapidly-changing demands.

Well implemented innovation management requires the right team structure, capabilities, and culture to foster innovation from all edges of the organization, realize the digital innovation vision and successfully use technology to solve customer problems. Successful innovation programs organize around four interdependent elements: culture, mechanisms, architecture, and organization.

Innovative cultures don't look to develop technology for technology's sake but start by listening to the ever-changing customer needs.

Hire builders who are driven to invent on behalf of your customers and empower them to build fast. Develop processes and mental models that help turn good intentions into action and facilitate high-velocity decision-making and implementation.

Establish a technical and business structure that supports rapid growth and change, reduces dependencies, and allows greater access to the technology that helps your builders build.

Form small, autonomous cross-functional teams that own what they create, with the right resources and agility to support rapid innovation, nimble experimentation, and a single-threaded focus on their customers.

Cloud can help reduce your time-to-value and innovation-related cost and risk by allowing you to instantly provision and shut down resources. To fully take advantage of the potential for increased business agility that comes with cloud adoption:

1. Develop an innovation strategy that includes optimizing your existing culture, mechanisms, and organizational structure.

2. Take a long-term view on how you consider the future of your business and identify opportunities to delight your customers.

3. Develop new ideas and products to solve your customer needs. Test and learn through quick experimentation before validating and scaling them to maximize the impact.

Start

At the start, focus on aligning your innovation plans to strategy and outcomes and discover and validate novel, customer-centric approaches.

• Your first step is to identify why you want to transform your organization into a more innovative one.

• Identify the goals of your innovation program, create an innovation charter and define your metrics to measure success.

• Learn from other companies that have built a successful innovation practice, listen to your customers, and identify future market opportunities for your business.

• Build out a vision for innovation that delights your customer and has downstream impact on your business.

• It is essential to establish senior-level support early. List out potentially influential executives that could sponsor your innovation efforts. Start by proposing a pilot project that requires only a small investment to gather data and metrics to prove its value before scaling. An excellent first project is to assess your organization's current innovation capabilities. The goal of this audit is to gather data to understand how innovation is happening today and assess the current state of different parts of the organization.

• Ensure that you capture input from both leadership and other teams in your organization. Look to capture people's perceptions of the current culture and ask if they feel it fosters innovation. Ask about existing mechanisms that help or hinder innovative thinking and question organizational structure to assess structural blockers. Once done, synthesize the data and insights, identify blockers to innovation, and diagnose possible causes.

• Create a roadmap for the next steps by defining improvement goals and identifying high-impact interventions.

• Look for opportunities to kick-start the change with small interventions to remove the blockers to innovation that will deliver significant impact and create quick wins.

Advance

To advance your innovation management program, start to build, launch and continuously improve solutions, from products to services and ecosystems. The best way to get more innovative is to start innovating.

• Identify innovation mechanisms that can help strengthen your organization’s ability to deliver digital products and support thinking differently to meet your customers' current and future needs.

• Identify a few key customer opportunities or big ideas and start implementing innovation mechanisms to facilitate bringing the idea or product to market.

• Start with the customer, identify their key challenge, invent on their behalf, and create a minimal lovable product (MLP) that will delight them. Experiment, test often, and get feedback early.

• To support your innovation efforts, invest in building cross-functional teams that can help you scale your innovation mechanisms beyond yourself. Teach them how to put innovation principles into practice and enable them to develop their ideas to solve business problems. This will allow more team members to learn by doing.

• Another way to push your innovation program forward is to engage with the environment external to your organization through open innovation collaborations with partners, suppliers, customers, experts, universities, start-ups, and the community at large. Be externally aware, and look for new ideas from everywhere.

• It is vital to communicate your innovation charter often and clearly. Customize communication for different roles, personalities, supporters, and detractors. Share your efforts frequently and celebrate teams that take risks and think big vocally and publicly.

• Failure and invention are inseparable twins. Start shifting the culture to promote a fertile environment for creativity and innovation, and encourage learning. Build an environment of psychological safety, where failure is seen as a by-product of thinking big, and the focus is on learning from previous attempts.

• Ensure executives and managers are aligned, support your innovation charter and tenets, and enlist them as champions of your innovation program.

• Encourage them to be vocal about both wins and failures, to build an environment where the ups and downs of inventing are spoken about openly and freely without repercussions. If required, invest in training on creating a climate for creativity and weave innovation into the business strategy and culture leaders.

Excel

The ultimate goal is to embed a culture of innovation into your organization to drive innovation at scale. Transformation at this scale takes time and often goes hand in hand with large-scale technical and organizational change. Be patient and keep going; the shift will happen in small increments.

• To enable change, look at your formal organizational structure, your organizational values, reward systems, and repeatable mechanisms and ensure they all support your innovation agenda.

• Review your organizational structure and question whether it supports a product-driven, innovative enterprise.

• Identify opportunities to create self-sufficient teams with single-threaded owners who don't rely heavily on dependency from other parts of the organization to build their products.

• Review your hiring mechanisms and align them with your innovation principles and values.

• Build innovation principles into your company values and create artifacts and mechanisms to reinforce your values.

• Ensure that you reward innovation efforts that drive long-term value rather than rewarding short-term results. Over time, formalize critical components of your innovation program, such as how to validate ideas and develop a Minimum Lovable Product.

• Create traditions designed to drive collaboration and knowledge sharing within the organization.

To scale your innovation mechanisms across the organization:

1. Identify internal innovators and change agents and enroll them to become champions for your innovation program.

2. Train them to be experts in your innovation mechanisms and turn them into trainers to facilitate large-scale training.

3. Establish a program to continuously enable teams across the organization to adopt your innovation mechanisms.

Lastly, develop a practice of continuous improvement.

• Capture input and feedback on your innovation mechanisms, values, mechanisms, and artifacts and use them to evolve them.

• Continue to watch out for blockers to innovation and remove obstacles.

• To sustain the innovation program, develop a standing, organization-level annual budget for ongoing funding of innovation initiatives.

• Continue to invest in or acquire new technologies, develop new business models, free up capacity for employees to innovate, and scale up new ways of working in all corners of the organization.