We’ve talked a great deal recently about the importance of having an InnovationOps approach to drive innovation at scale. Such an approach seamlessly connects people, processes and the innovation jobs they do, making innovation predictable and repeatable. The result is an environment promoting better communication and connectivity — critical foundations for enabling innovation at scale.
However, a successful InnovationOps approach isn’t a bolt-on solution. For InnovationOps to drive innovation at scale, you must have an innovation-based culture. It starts with operationalizing innovation, letting groups work the way they work best, focusing on the jobs to be done and embracing the idea of failure (especially early on) is okay. Let’s take a closer look at each.
It would be great if a CEO could issue a memo and an innovation culture magically appeared. But, as we all know, a culture of any kind takes time to develop, and that requires operationalization. An emerging trend in the software and hardware development sector is security by design. Security is at the forefront of every decision from the beginning and is naturally baked into the final product. Taking that same approach to innovation is one way to help create an innovative culture — call it “innovation by design.” Every action and decision, no matter how big or small, considers how the outcome will drive the organization toward its innovation goals.
Innovation at scale requires organizations to adjust quickly when sudden market changes dictate change. By operationalizing innovation, organizations weave it into its DNA and have the flexibility to make whatever pivots are necessary to not only maintain market viability but to continue to succeed.
Forcing the use of specific processes and tools for the sake of uniformity stalls innovation. Standardization makes a lot of sense on paper, but it isn’t a best practice when attempting to create an innovation culture. For example, manufacturing may find more success with phase-gate, while the software development team thrives with Agile. It’s the traditional “square peg in a round hole” juxtaposition.
Some will argue that these teams need to innovate new ways of working because the efficiency found in standardization is too great to ignore — meeting deadlines is critical to reducing time to market. But forcing teams to work in unintuitive ways can actually increase the risk of critical mistakes, which can erase any efficiency standardization can offer. Further, in an InnovationOps approach, the methodology teams use doesn’t matter. Instead, the emphasis is on each team communicating and collaborating on a singular platform that brings disparate teams together. In this environment, how they do what they do isn’t as critical as how they’re able to interact.
What’s important is to make sure that all groups use the organization’s innovation mission as its North Star, are working toward the same goal and have the appropriate tools to do so.
As mentioned, innovation must be predictable and repeatable. This is especially true when viewing through the lens of jobs to be done. However, executing on the innovation jobs to be done (e.g. managing discovery, managing governance, etc.) can be difficult when organizations become too obsessed with the scope of getting from Point A to Point B.
In an innovation culture, the jobs to be done are the same, whether working on radical or incremental innovation. They key idea is this: innovation thrives when everyone involved has the muscle memory to understand how their role fits into the overall success of a product or project. Then, you have the baseline to begin scaling innovation.
Failure is inevitable. Of course, you want to reduce the risk where you can, but it’s counterproductive to have a zero-tolerance policy for missteps. And companies with an innovation culture embrace this reality.
This isn’t to say they push their chips in the middle of the table with a bad hand, but they encourage an open exchange of ideas and take risks that align with their mission and could yield high rewards. With an InnovationOps approach, departments can communicate more quickly and collaborate with ease, which helps to identify potential friction points and move toward a solution. And, perhaps most importantly, companies can more quickly see when a risky initiative is no longer viable and kill it before investing additional resources.
And if a product doesn’t pan out — which will happen eventually — the best organizations quickly pinpoint what went wrong and determine ways to prevent those issues from making a return appearance.
An innovation culture that enables InnovationOps and innovation at scale isn’t easy to cultivate. But by creating conditions for such an environment to emerge, companies will prepare themselves to increase their winning percentages over the long run.
Learn more about the benefits of an InnovationOps approach by watching this webinar from Sopheon’s Mastering InnovaitonOps series.