You’ve excited your company’s war room and chosen your company’s new growth innovation. This is your one great idea having the potential to significantly increase your revenue and create separation from your competitors.
Now what? How do you turn this idea into a reality?
Large innovative companies like Proctor and Gamble, Intuit, Apple, and General Electric have developed elaborate systems turning innovations into successful products and services. While most companies do not have the resources to create their own complex innovation centers, they can use many of their best practices on a more moderate scale.
Fortunately for us, these best practices have been documented in many places over the last decade, and they can be gleaned and applied by any organization with a motivation to innovate.
The idea of applying known best practices for innovation to small and medium size companies is the basis for Scott Anthony’s work at Innosight. His minimum viable innovation system (MVIS) is outlined in the recent HBR article we’ve been discussing.
I can’t do justice to the whole process in this post, but here are three important concepts worth noting when trying to make a new growth innovation a reality.
Focus Talent on Your New Growth Innovation
You may think you can layer a new innovation execution process into your existing organizational structure. Anthony warns against this:
Consider this: About 75% of venture-capital-backed start-ups fail to return one penny to their investors. Fewer than 50% of start-ups make it to their fourth birthday. These are businesses with dedicated teams whose members are pouring every ounce of their souls into succeeding. What hope does a group of part-timers have to beat the odds?
Even a MVIS requires that at least one person to get up every morning and go to sleep every night thinking about nothing but [your new growth innovation]. That won’t be you, though it should be someone who reports to you. As the executive sponsor, you presumably have other responsibilities as well.
Focus Resources on Your New Growth Innovation
After getting a talented person to solely focus on your new growth innovation, you’ll need to dedicate resources to the effort. Since most companies have limited budgets, he suggests focusing on freeing up resources in your existing organization.
The odds are high that they include “zombie projects”—walking undead that shuffle along slowly but aren’t headed anywhere. Sometimes companies unwittingly spawn zombies by setting up redundant teams for core initiatives. Sometimes new-growth zombies lurk in an organization’s dark corners in unsanctioned efforts.
Finding the bulk of your zombies is a straightforward process: List all the innovation efforts that have the equivalent of at least one half-time employee working on them. Try to identify which market each idea targets. Estimate the size of the opportunity, and inventory the resources currently devoted to it. Which efforts enhance your core strategy and which focus on strategic opportunity areas? It should be fairly easy to identify the projects that are neither and are frittering away your resources.
Measure Progress of Your New Growth Innovation
The final step in the MVIS process is to create a mechanism to shepherd your project. The process is organized slightly different than your normal executive oversight functions.
[Form] a group of senior leaders who, from then on, will have the autonomy to make decisions about starting, stopping, or redirecting new-growth innovation projects.
Don’t just replicate the current executive committee, however. If you do, it will be too easy for group members to default to their corporate-planning mindset or to let day-to-day business creep into discussions about innovations meant to fulfill long-term goals.
Remember, new growth innovations operate at a different pace. An initiative designed to produce a substantial return will, by nature, not produce quick cash flow and flashy short-term results. A wise group of senior leaders will recognize this, but at the same time insist on seeing metrics that demonstrate progress towards the end goal.
As a final point, I would recommend reading the short case study in the HBR article (it’s under the Day 20 to 70 section) about the new growth innovation for the 100-year-old Settlement Music School in Philadelphia. It is a great story; (here is another article published on the school) it has some direct connections to the types of issues a real estate company would experience in using the MVIS process.
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