Founder and CEO of Arrisio, an innovation strategy and implementation firm based in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont.
Seeing whiteboards with doodles and sticky notes all over them in corporate offices is quite common these days.
These are typically the result of an organization integrating innovation practices like design-thinking with the hope of driving new growth or instilling a customer-centric approach to problem-solving. The problem is that organizations get caught up in the theatre (the aforementioned hoopla of putting sticky notes onto a whiteboard) of these practices and mistake that theatre for being innovative.
Let's be honest with ourselves; going to an experiential workshop to learn a way of thinking that gets you out of your chair and in front of customers while building a mountain of sticky notes is a lot more entertaining than a seminar on optimizing the efficiency of your supply chain. That's the problem. Managers get drawn into the surface-level tools (the frameworks, sticky notes and whiteboards) of these practices without recognizing that being innovative requires more than just tools.
From my experience on the front lines of corporate innovation in Silicon Valley, I've identified these three requirements for the successful implementation of innovation practices.
Adoption of innovation practices needs to be a company-wide initiative
Change at any organization is dead-on-arrival without buy-in and prioritization from leadership, as well as a willingness to participate among the employees.
Leadership needs to clearly articulate to the organization what innovation means, how it is practised, and where to focus innovation efforts. Without a common language, practice and focus, there is a strong probability for confusion to take root. When confusion starts to seep in, employees become disillusioned with leadership and new initiatives are viewed with skepticism.
Once employees see that their leaders are championing the new practice, they will feel comfortable utilizing it themselves, which in turn spurs comfort with bringing their own ideas forward and a willingness to participate in something new.
The tools need to be directed at meaningful problems
Further to the point that your innovation efforts need a focus, the problems you choose to solve also need to be meaningful to both your customer and the organization.
Organizations need to recognize that if the solution you're pursuing, whether entirely new or an improvement on an existing one, isn't solving a meaningful problem for the customer, it's just a waste of resources. Why is your customer going to care about the new widget you bring to market or a new whiz-bang feature if it's not helping them?
On the other side of the table, your innovation efforts need to solve problems relevant to the organization. Figure out what keeps leadership up at night and what their strategy and goals are, because it's far easier to garner buy-in for a new idea or change if you can remedy an organizational challenge.
One last point on this: It is always better to start with a problem and build a solution, than to start with a solution and find a problem to solve with it.
Use innovation practices to facilitate deeper thinking
Most organizations are outcome-focused and view going through a workshop as an outcome, equating that with progress. Unfortunately, a single workshop only touches the surface of a problem and doesn't drive the hard work of thinking deeply about organizational challenges and envisioning future solutions.
View a workshop as a first step, something to spur your thinking and imagination. The most important thing is to come back and iterate on your thinking. Take the outputs from the workshop, whether ideas of what the problem might be or potential prototypes of a hypothesized solution, as assumptions that need to be proven true by testing them with customers.
Remember, you need to be solving meaningful problems for your customers, and the only way you'll know if you are is by testing your outputs with them. Once you've learned something from customer testing, revisit your thinking from the workshop and iterate using the new information.
Successful innovation requires more than the theatre of sticky notes and whiteboards. These are just tools to drive deeper thinking on meaningful problems and their success is reliant on company-wide buy-in of the new practices.
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