In the past month, I was interviewed by CMSWire, a leading online magazine, around my views on helping companies improve their innovation capabilities.
Their particular question:
How can companies innovate faster than their competitors?
Click here to read the article on CMSWire.
My primary insight in the article is that if you empower your people to actually have the authority and resources to try out a new idea and experiment, it will substantially speed up the rate at which new ideas are refined. Yes, you will also see a number of these ideas fail quite early on, and that is a good thing as I outlined in my last article on Adobe’s new Kickbox initiative. But overall, building this sort of capability in your company will result in a much shorter timeframe in between developing new ideas and having the best ones end up delivering value to customers.
In addition to myself, the article also asked three further innovation thought leaders to provide their views on the question, which were:
Solomon Darwin, Executive Director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at UCB’s Haas School of Business:
We need to create processes through which the outside knowledge flows in and the knowledge you create flows out. We create a strategic advantage by building bridges to build an ecosystem in which we are faster at collaboratively delivering product to the market as the product lifecycles become shorter and shorter.
Jeffrey Baumgartner, Innovation Author and Speaker:
In too many organizations, a creative concept must jump through numerous approval hoops before it can be developed. At each hoop, the concept can be rejected, but only at the final hoop can it be approved and developed further. Rather than have committees ponder ideas, let engineers, technicians or product developers start testing and implementing ideas as soon as possible.
Scott Anthony, Managing Partner, Innosight:
Good innovators take the time to carefully document what it is they hope to do, carefully separating out facts from assumptions. They evaluate the evidence that they meet the three criteria connecting every successful idea: it targets a real need, it delivers against that need better than current and potential solutions, and the numbers work.
It’s been a busy month for me, having been interviewed by a wide variety of organisations, so look out for those coming your way in the next few weeks.
What do you think is the best way to encourage FASTER innovation? Let me know in the comments below, and don’t forget to follow me and share the article.
I would like to add a quote from Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph
“Companies that can’t adapt to this rate of innovation are doomed. You have to disrupt yourself, before someone disrupts you.”
Read more in an interview with Marc Randolph: http://innoboard.de/innovation-management/netflix-marc-randolph-co-founder-entrepreneurship/