Make Elephants Fly: The Process of Radical Innovation by Steven S. Hoffman

Author:Steven S. Hoffman [HOFFMAN, STEVEN S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Entrepreneurship, Management, Industries, Computers & Information Technology, Development, Business Development, New Business Enterprises
ISBN: 9781478992943
Google: PgZrAQAACAAJ
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2017-11-14T23:51:36.158747+00:00

INTERNAL ECOSYSTEMS

In addition to looking outside your company, you should be sending your innovation teams to various divisions and groups deep within your own organization. This includes your marketing department, manufacturing, logistics, R & D, sales, procurement, finance, and accounting. Any corporation that grows large enough tends to operate like many separate entities rather than a cohesive whole. There will be groups separated by geography, language, culture, focus, expertise, and function. You need to treat these groups in the same manner that you’d treat outside partners. You cannot expect them to jump on board when you need them. It takes time, effort, and planning to get them involved.

This is no easy task, especially when you have departments that are used to operating like their own little fiefdoms. They may want nothing to do with your innovation teams, and you’ll have to work hard to make the benefits clear. One approach is to treat each department within your organization like you would an external partner or customer. Your innovation teams should listen to their needs, learn from them, and together come up with the answers. The goal should be to embed innovation teams in key departments across your organization and allow them the freedom to identify problems, come up with solutions, and build a culture of innovation company-wide.

Take, for example, your own HR department. Let’s say you’re having a problem retaining employees. Your best employees tend to jump ship whenever they receive offers from competitors. To address this, you create an innovation team comprised of two to eight key people from HR and other parts of your organization. By embedding this innovation team inside HR, you begin the process of discovery.

Naturally, your innovation team shouldn’t spend all their time in the HR department. They should be out engaging employees from across your organization, listening to their issues, observing how they do their jobs, and asking the right questions. Through observation and open-ended discussions, they may be able to figure out why some employees are not happy, why certain employees leave and others stay, and how HR can be more responsive. Through this process, your innovation team can take issues that would have festered and come up with solutions that can be tried and tested. If you see retention and morale increase over time, you’ll know the changes are working. If not, you’ll need to continue iterating.

The reality is that most of your internal innovation teams will produce small, incremental improvements. They won’t transform your entire business. But these small changes can make your company significantly more efficient and productive. Even if all these internal innovations remain small, the sum total can add up to give your company a massive advantage over the competition. The beauty of internal innovations is that they’re extremely hard to copy. It’s relatively easy for competitors to copy products on the market, but it’s difficult, if not impossible, for them to replicate internal, organizational processes.

Sending innovation teams out across your entire ecosystem, internally and externally, is no

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