Why your innovation team will fail: Innovation in Theory vs. Reality

In recent discussions, I have mentioned that I never want to work with innovation again. Truth be told, I said the exact same thing 4 years ago. And then kept on doing it for an additional 4 years… so why is that?

We all know that innovation should not sit by itself as an organization or team. Innovation should happen anywhere. I wholeheartedly agree with this. Like, who doesn’t agree with this? It’s like saying the sky is blue sometimes. There is simply no value in this statement.

Then comes the reality. In my experience, the lack of innovations in many organizations does not mean they lack innovative ideas. On the contrary, I have never met an organization without great ideas. What they lack, is funding, vision, and the ability to take risks.

Most organisation think they lack innovation. The management consultants, managers, and ‘Innovators’ will come with a low hanging idea: Let’s do a hackathon!

This is the worst idea ever. In short, let’s get the coworkers thinking and acting freely for a few days, or let them do it in the evenings, and then select a winner. After this, let the staff go back to their endless backlogs of work.

Proceed to do NOTHING with the winning idea. Or any other idea for that matter. Also don’t provide feedback on the work after the announcement of the winner. Project closed.

No, to fuse innovation into the company you need to create focus, funding and the ability to take risk. In my experience this is where the innovation function often is created. I have been leading multiple. And I can also tell you why that won’t work either. It is probably the second worst idea. And I have spent many years trying to fix it.

Here I will cover two aspects that will keep you from winning.

The first: Territorial thinking.

Suddenly, you have this innovation thinking that does not abide by the grinding wheel of backlog death. A number of opinions will then be formed:

Why is this team not following our normal sucking-the-life-out-of-me grind?

Why don’t they comply with our totally insane architecture guidelines?

Why can they choose to deploy when they want – while I need to adhere to this ‘automated pipeline’ that never works. And I don’t even have access to the logs to see why.

Are they the only ones allowed to have fun?

Am I not allowed to innovate now?

Trust me, I can go on forever.

You will probably establish the innovation team outside your domains, to make sure they cover all aspects of the company. Like sales, b2c, b2b, legal etc. Sadly, this also means you are now a direct threat towards the leadership of any function you happen to create value for. Because the ideas were not created or developed inside the senior manager’s organization, it will not survive. “Not invented here”. You will simply have no way into production to meet the customer. Which means you cannot succeed.

And now, the real death sentence: ‘We can’t have this team on the side here doing stuff without short-term clear ROI.’

The second: Ability to understand and take risk.

In short, it’s about believeing in value even if it cant be measured beforehand. Most companies today are working with the Product & Engineering structure. My observation is that Product management has more and more become a center of metrics obsession rather than customer obsession. The initial thinking with product organisations is healthy, the evolution of it is not.

Low risk product management are at risk of killing most companies. Companies are going stale. Turning into a slow-moving target achieving incremental growth with products that will be disrupted and demolished by competition. Some companies solve this by merger & acquisitions to keep them afloat. This is a short-term strategy that will only bog down the movements that are actually needed.

So – how do we create innovative companies?

After working with this for many years I can say there is no catch-all for creating innovative organizations. At the very least, innovation needs to start at the top of the company and then be strongly influenced downwards into the organization. It’s about taking risks, understanding emerging trends, funding work that might not achieve the outcome you want.

The only ingredients I have are funding, vision and top-level commitment to taking risks.
The recipe needs to be unique for each company.

To thrive, you need to do the hard work. You cannot patch your organisation with hackathons or innovation teams. Work with your organisation, hire leaders with EQ, lead with trust and kindness. See beyond the latest trends of steering and decisioning. I have much to say about this.

Stay tuned!