Design Works by Heather M. A. Fraser

Author:Heather M. A. Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2019-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

Building Your Innovation Pipeline & Enterprise Capacity

There are several things to consider when building your capacity to innovate through design-inspired practices like Business Design: sourcing innovation expertise, building internal capacity, and ensuring the right support systems and process are in place, including rewarding people for contributing to innovation success.

Figure 22 shows some options to consider in building your innovation capacity and pipeline:

Fig. 22 Sources of Expertise

Hire an outside consultant to do it for you: For those that simply don’t have the capacity to take on a big innovation quest, hiring outside innovation experts is an option. There was a time when organizations were paying a lot of money in retainers to outside consultants to come up with the “next big idea.” However, complete outsourcing has some drawbacks: it can be expensive, may not translate into activation because ideas don’t plug back into the organization, and may not cultivate a deep sense of ownership inside the enterprise. That’s why more and more enterprises are looking to build internal talent.

Tap into external innovators and entrepreneurs: An extension of outsourcing innovation is to collaborate with external sources of new ideas from start-ups and “disruptive” inventors and entrepreneurs. Procter & Gamble realized the value of tapping into external innovators decades ago through its Connect & Develop program, in which it worked with inventors to commercialize new technologies. More recently, many organizations have established a more formal alliance with entrepreneurs. By tapping into fresh ideas to accelerate and scale ideas that fulfill the corporate ambition, they create a model in which everyone wins – the start-up (through access to scalability), the enterprise (through creation of new value for the market and the enterprise), and most importantly, the consumer (for whom unmet needs are addressed in a new and novel way).

Set up an innovation lab as a center of in-house expertise: Innovation labs and incubators have been set up in organizations all over the world in recent years, with great intentions. Centralized labs can be highly productive, as is the case for Fidelity Labs, but often fail for a few reasons. First, they are often disconnected from the rest of the enterprise and are ineffective in bringing about enterprise-wide innovation because of lack of visibility and enterprise engagement. I am shocked by the number of executives I meet who have no idea what is going on in their central labs. Second, they are not aligned to the overarching enterprise strategy or business-unit goals. Third, they fail to deliver a return on investment. These are the “trophy labs” that might look impressive to investors and media but can’t demonstrate business impact.

Create an internal pool of skilled facilitators or “catalysts”: In this approach, you train skilled facilitators to go out into the enterprise to help teams unlock fresh thinking to design and deliver new ideas to the marketplace. Ambitious people don’t often like wasting time on theoretical exercises. For example, while Procter & Gamble established a team of facilitators with deeper skills, they also brought the entire enterprise along on the journey to demonstrate how new approaches could apply to their business.

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