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How do innovation managers survive an innovation project?
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From the lesson
Creating an Innovation Strategy
In this module, we will evaluate innovation portfolios and compose innovation strategies that are best aligned with the implementation potential within the company.
Taught By
Dr. Thomas J. Mierzwa
Lecturer of Technology Entrepreneurship
Every innovation project needs a manager.
And we want to ask the question how do innovation managers actually survive in
innovation project.
And so, we have some rules of thumb.
So we'll look at each of these.
The first is to manage risk and reward, it's a general idea.
But it's very important to know when the innovation ideas actually feasible or not.
What's the upside gain, the downside risk, and
does the idea fit within the organization or could it be made to fit?
And that's a judgment call and so, what you don't want to do is
pursue an idea unless the potential reward justifies the potential risk.
That's the balance of risk and reward.
Getting an incremental approvals is always better than waiting for
full approval of something.
And so, you don't always expect to get full permission for something.
Sometimes you have to act on your own, and beg forgiveness for
things that might be forgivable.
And you want to leverage the potential input of suppliers,
because sometimes they can be helpful.
They can provide the resources and, sometimes,
the materials that you might need for your innovative idea.
You get customer endorsements.
That's another form of approval.
And they all build up.
All these different sources of approval build up.
And then, they develop support step by step by step and
then beg, borrow and scrounge for resources.
You're actually fine getting resources any way you can.
And so, what you want to do in terms of approval is just you ask for
the smallest possible commitment at each stage of development.
And when you do that, you don't ask for too much.
And you make progress incrementally, but you do it basically under the radar.
You want to leverage the support of your allies.
Within the firm and outside the firm you have allies,
people who could support this innovative idea.
You want to identify who those people are, people with the knowledge and
the skills and the ways that they can contribute.
You want to identify people with influence.
They may not have knowledge or skills, but if they influence in the organization, or
they have financial influence, you want to identify them and get them on your side.
You want to build relationships with high-level executives in the organization.
If you're working in a larger organization and so the tip here is you find and
use allies especially an executive sponsor of some sort.
You have to be open to criticism you want to prob for
hidden assumptions that are embedded in the innovation strategy.
You want to know what the fault lines of your innovation idea are.
And if you know what those are, you can defend them.
If you don't know what they are, somebody will surprise you.
And so, you want to expose the flaws and the shortcomings of the innovation to
the hard light of reality, you want to be aware of those things.
You want to keep the best interests of the organization, and
the innovation team, uppermost.
So you want to be open to criticism, but you want to protect the corporation,
you want to protect the innovation team.
And so, the tip here is to be your own first and most rigorous critic,
as you modify your plans, and as you work through the innovation project.
You want to recognize weaknesses understand the nature of the skill and
job requirements needed for this innovation.
And so, sometimes you might have an innovation that has demands or
skill requirements that you don't have and
you want to recognize that those things exist, you want to be able to delegate
responsibility to those people who have competence.
And you want to recognize the need for control by top level management.
Where it is important.
If you think you can do these things on your own, do them.
If you recognize that it takes top level support, top level management support or
maybe protection you need to recognize that too.
So the tip here is to recognize your own weaknesses, and decisively act to
compensate for them so that you aren't putting yourself, and the team, at risk.
Another aspect here is to limit unneeded public exposure.
Sometimes you want to fly under the radar, and recognize that the degree of actual
progress Is made in an innovation project very much under the radar.
And sometimes careless public exposure of the innovation fuels the competition so
you don't want to reveal something that you think is very valuable and
important that has intellectual value.
You want to postpone any celebration and really party or anything that associated
with celebration until there is some real accomplishment in the marketplace.
You don't want to do that prematurely because you may not be ready for
it and you may reveal something to a competitor.
So the tip here is to avoid premature publicity both internally and externally.
Internally is important because it may not be a obvious as externally
because you got competition in the out side but
internally you want to make sure that you are going to position to
have a very strong innovation project before it gets expose internally.
Bouncing profit with market share, what you want to do is avoid
focusing on early market share gains at the expense of profit.
And so, sometimes what happens is you can have an innovation
that has an early market attractiveness.
But then, you may dry up the profit potential in the long run.
And so, why you recognized it.
Some profit is essential for continuity of the innovation.
You don't want to burn out that profit potential right away.
So you want to match to your strategy to some defined terms of success.
So the tip here is, don't arbitrarily decide to sacrifice profit and
cash flow for market share.
So you want to get market share, you want to get profit,
you want to get cash flow all these things need to be in balance so
you want to adapt to lifecycle stages.
And you want to recognize when change an innovation project is needed and
what it matches the opportunity is actually presented in a lifecycle.
So you want to match, and
recognize where the lifecycle and your innovation project are aligned.
And you want to recognize when the needs and
the requirements of the innovation project change with a technology cycle change.
So sometimes you're going to see the technology cycle
change right while you're working on a project.
And so, you sometimes maybe need to adjust what you're doing in that project.
And so, the tip here is to adjust a project strategy
to adapt to stage of the competing product's life cycle.
So when you want to promote the value of an innovation, you want to overcome
the inertia of established policies that might harm the innovation project.
You want to sell the value of relaxing strict control
measures that inhibit an innovation project.
So the tip here is to convince top management of the need for
different procedures, flexible procedures that would accommodate
the unique nature of an innovation project.
So which one is flexibility and so you protect the value of the innovation by
buying some flexibility with top management.
You want to provide can do leadership.
This is optimistic leadership innovation managers must be both a manager and
a leader and so you're not just have management skills,
project management skills, but leadership skills.
And along with those leadership skills comes a degree of
skill that conveys optimism,
conveys motivation, conveys leadership to the team that you're working with.
And so while you delegate tasks rather than individual actions,
that is a way that you can organize.
That's the management part of what your leadership is.
And you want to leverage outside resources to ensure some sense of objectivity so
outside resources actually help give credibility to every innovative project.
And so, the tip here is to provide both leadership and management competence.
Leadership for motivation, leadership for credibility and management competence for
managing the tasks so, the take aways here for
surviving an innovation project is to under commit and over perform.
It's easy to say but hard to do.
But it's really important to not over commit to and
over promise what any innovative project could do.
And you want to act as if this is your own money at stake in the project.
You want to get to your team to understand that as well.
They're the ones that have a lot of stake here, you want to leverage all form
of alliances, both inside the firm and outside the firm.
Customers, suppliers, whatever.
And you want to only use publicity when it will help the project.
Sometimes you can use publicity once your project is done.
But if you have something publicly exposed during the project,
sometimes people will pick it apart internally, or
sometimes externally a competitor is well take advantage on that.
And finally, be the first to recognized when the innovation projects needs to be
stop or redirected.
You need to recognized that here at the leader of the innovation project and
that something that you really need to handle.
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