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Innovation Outlook 2022

BlueCallom is officially a year old now. In the past three years, before we started, we learned so much from neuroscience that it turned our perspective of innovation upside down. In 2021 we hosted several Innovation Thought Leader Roundtable events and learned about how innovation is done in most enterprises today. We learned about the struggle to be more innovative and heard from many that the lack of innovation culture is a considerable challenge. Also, in 2021 we completed our first version of BlueCallom DEEP, our cloud-based neuro innovation management solution, and conducted our first Deep Innovation Design training. BlueCallom has released two critical white papers: “Innovation is a CEO Mandate” and “Innovation Master Plan.” Now it is time we look at the innovation outlook for 2022.

From randomness to strategic innovation

One of the biggest frustration for CEOs is the random experimentation with no results. The fact that all enterprises have the same challenge doesn’t set anybody apart. But that is the goal for several enterprises for 2022. Most innovation centers today end 2021 with several improvements but no genuine innovation. While almost all of today’s innovation methods help manage ideas to get to the prototype stage, non have reached the market. In a few cases, it did but died within a few months. It’s time to get strategic. There are 800 unicorns, bolstered with a billion $ or more, ready to disrupt whatever market they are looking at. One CEO asked, “Why did I never see a unicorn in the making? I saw hundreds of startups, but most didn’t make it.” An excellent question. We answered: “Because you saw only those who ran around from startup event to startup event, trying to raise capital.” A unicorn is far more strategic than most people think. They are relentless executors, have brilliant talents, and run faster than any other business. Many enterprise leaders have yet to learn what it takes to bring innovation successfully to the market. But there are several who just now do that – with a dedicated innovation development strategy.

From improvement to genuine innovation

Another early shift we saw for 2021 is that enterprises realize that improvement is not innovation. Improvement has been made for 200 years in every R&D center. Some enterprises have already learned the hard way: an R&D center is not an innovation space and cannot be just “tasked” to be done. Using improvement as a step-by-step path to innovation is like a sailor using a lake to prepare for circumnavigation. One major force to make a clear decision to engage in innovation is the CEO. Without a clear direction from the CEO, innovation cannot happen in any enterprise. That shift to genuine innovation bares the question, “Should that innovation center remains a department, be a business unit, or even a separate company?” The trend is already seen by companies like Kärcher who separated the innovation activities into a legally separate unit which is still owned by the mothership. There is a slew of advantages included above and beyond the risk mitigation. Those separate units don’t have to be integrated into the massive bureaucracy of the main enterprise, they may have different legal contract frameworks and more.

From Students to top-level teams with exceptional cognitive abilities

Another interesting trend comes actually from the innovation consultant space. Very often, students had been hired to innovate for a company. The task was simple, “find a great idea”. It has been that way for quite some time because innovation was associated with a brilliant idea. Only now do we understand that a brilliant idea is always coming from solving an existing or in the future envisioned problem. Today we know that a human is producing thousands of ideas every year. We are even drowning in ideas. Ideas are of no value. Solving a problem is a hard and complex task and the solution may be considered a brilliant idea. When Elon Mask hires people, he still focuses on people with exceptional abilities. When Amazon employs people, they spend more time on soft skills than hard skills. The search for people with exceptional cognitive abilities for the innovation job is on the run. Several software companies emerged from this trend, like Pymetrics, which exclusively focuses on a hiring process for those soft skills.

2022 Summary

In the past two corona years, businesses of all sizes learned to be far more agile or suffer enormously, if not pushed out of business. Innovation has shown its positive effect on some companies where it resulted in innovation efforts that brought even significant improvements to the market capitalization on the stock exchange. We see even a trend of amplification in innovation efforts as the past growth also encouraged investors and the capital market.

In 2022, we will see

  • More enterprises investing in intelligent and strategic innovation, away from random experimentation.
  • More explicit use of the term innovation by refraining from using “gradual innovation” as an excuse.
  • A big challenge is finding talents with innovation-related soft skills.
  • A surge in upskilling teams to gain innovative thinking and become more entrepreneurial.
  • Finally, by the end of 2022, we may see some significant innovations created by enterprises.

We, the BlueCallom team, wish you all a happy, healthy, and innovative 2022.

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Key Thoughts: Innovation Thought Leader Roundtable | November 2021

In November BlueCallom hosted its fourth roundtable where the primary goal was and still is, making innovation a better-understood practice. The whole idea of the Innovation Thought Leader Roundtable is the exchange – dive deeper into the innovation processes. 

Axel Schultze opened the roundtable with a topic that has been current for some time among the BlueCallom community: Innovation is a CEO Mandate. What do CEOs need to do to empower their teams to become truly innovative? 

In the first place is clear communication between the C-level managers and innovation teams i.e. define the innovation goals, directions, and methods. We have already mentioned several times the importance of identifying team members with unique abilities to move the team and project forward. 

How to identify innovative minds? 

When we talk about successful innovation, execution is a part of it. As Christian Weh, Senior Director Innovation & Global Projects at Johnson & Johnson, said: “all successful innovators are playing an important role in the execution process.” The Maverick traits of a person are always visible through their independence, creativity, and experimentation. Truly talented individuals exist and they are the ones who always tend to be the best performers in the organization. Christian also mentioned capability building training as a part of human resources management, where organizations provide talent programs, incorporate continuous learning and improvement which is focused on specific capabilities. This tool is used to identify innovative talents. Ambition is another powerful trait and its impetus for success and achievement since ambitious people are goal-oriented and always strive for the next achievement.

Luuk Houtepen, Director of Strategic Partnerships and Innovation at SThree, sees exponential thinking as one of the important factors when it comes to recognizing talent. Individuals who possess this trait can envision the future and reveal new opportunities. We need to start visualizing the future to harness the potential of technology and positively impact our lives, not just in five or ten years, but also in a few generations.

“If you are really driven to make a change, to prove yourself, you won’t just settle down. You will be ambitious enough to push forward, to identify problems, and opportunities,” said Christian. He gave us an example, “Amazon did disrupt the book industry with audiobooks and Jeff Bezos can be described as an ambitious leader who set his targets and went beyond the next business plan.” 

Innovation is not only the CEO Mandate, it is also a CEO Task

Instead of having more and more innovations, most of the organizations are just followers with no concrete business plans. And this is the reason Luk said that “Innovation is not only the CEO Mandate, it is also a CEO task to open people’s minds up to where the world is going.”

Axel Schultze agreed that innovation is a CEO task, but when we look at their daily life, which includes political ambitions, involvement in the investor industry plus running a company, there is very limited time left for an extra assignment. But if innovation becomes the core of a business, the CEO has to give his/her best to encourage the innovation team and support the innovation project. 

As Luuk already said, exponential thinking is important, I would like to point out the following: 

Exponential thinking brings us to innovation and the BlueCallom Equation, G = I * E² (Groundbreaking Innovation (G)  = Ideation (I) * Execution(E)²), where the brilliant ideation plus exponential execution describes the foundation of any innovation process. 

Culture of Failure

A culture of failure is something that should be present in most organizations. Failure also means learning and if we want to make a change and personal progress, we need to be willing to identify our weaknesses and maximize our strengths. Luuk explained that we, unfortunately, don’t have the “Culture of Failure” and therefore most people are afraid to make decisions – it is less risky not to make decisions at all. 

What Axel has noticed is when it comes to large organizations where the CEO makes decisions, there is a risk that some decisions are not good which can result in job loss. On the other hand, making no decision because of the risk is a good idea.  It turns out that making no decisions is the best thing a CEO can do. Unfortunately, this is a common practice in the western world. 

Even when we look into the eastern societies, Asian countries, the decision-making process is also a long process. They might be faster in the decision-making than Europeans and the reason for that is that the whole team is included in the decision-making. Also if it turns out the decision was right and the first results are visible, employees are getting the rewards. 

The biggest advantage of startups over enterprises is that the decisions are made by people who have invested their own money. As soon as you hire a CEO, very rarely that person will become a decision-maker. 

When a company is determined to make groundbreaking innovations, that division has to be extracted as a separate legal identity. In this way, the innovation team has, so to say, “free hands” to do things and make decisions without being controlled. 

Summary

When it comes to the innovation process the most important is to have the right team on board. Innovative minds can be found in any organization and the CEO’s task is:

a.) recognize innovative minds 

b.) nurture innovative minds

c.) encourage innovative minds 

People with an innovative mindset think ahead, are creative, are likely to experiment, and are visionaries. These professionals involved in the day-to-day running of an organization can overcome obstacles, idealize, and generate truly disruptive processes, products, and services.

If you are interested in joining our next roundtable by-invitation-only event, please send us an email: tanja@bluecallom.com

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Team Assembly – Importance of Innovation Dream Team

When enterprises acquire startups to get to innovation

The last topic of the BlueCallom Podcast, Navigation of Ingenuity, focused on the importance of building an innovation dream team.

To find out more about the innovation team assembly, BlueCallom invited Luuk Houtepen, Director of Strategic Partnerships & Innovation at SThree, as a guest speaker of the fifth BlueCallom podcast episode. 

SThree is a leading international staffing company. They provide specialist contract and permanent recruitment services in the STEM sector. If someone knows what the recruitment process looks like and how to create the best selection of talented candidates for a company, it’s Luuk with his rich experience at the SThree company.

The importance of the Innovation Dream Team Assembly 

Since ideas are created from past experiences it is extremely important to have a diverse team. Why is that so? Providing diversity within your company creates a conducive environment in which employees can learn from and about one another and as a result, we get a comprehensive team that can handle any project. Just like educational background, the possession of soft skills is vital for the organization. 

It is not easy to define what innovation talent is but Luuk describes it as the doers, thinkers who get things done and dare to go for their dreams. They have to be driven by passion, be courageous, creative, collaborative but at the same time with extensive knowledge behind them. Innovation talent can be recognized only if they get the right nurturing and the right foundation to grow. 

Soft skills are becoming more and more important and employers recognized that. Thanks to soft skills one can grow its network, gain confidence and maintain relationships – grow a career. Luuk also mentioned that new management methods lead to having more collaborative skills since they are essential for success in the workplace, and ultimately the company’s success and productivity. For innovative talent, one thing is crucial – believing in the long-term goal which has to be clearly defined to attract the right people. 

From Luuk’s experience, candidates are looking for purpose-driven roles that are not only financially motivated. Once people notice their job really matters and their significant work can only motivate them better. 

A good example of this is a consultancy business where in the past this was one of the most desirable jobs because it offered material benefits: the usage of the company’s car, PC, mobile phone, etc. This was in a way a measure of business success. Luckily this has changed and today most organizations are purpose-driven whose employees are highly engaged and passionate about making a difference.

Career in Innovation

We ask Luuk, what is important to have a successful innovation career? Open-mindedness and broad interest come first on his list. These skills are difficult to train and it gets more challenging if your educational background is old-fashioned – in order to be acknowledged, you must become a specialist. Also, we have to keep in mind that innovation is unpredictable and it doesn’t always mean success. And here is where The 8 Cs of innovation talent come into play: Curious, Courageous, Continuous, Collaborative, Creative, Communicative, Confident, and Connected. 

Recruitment Industry Problems 

Other than the lack of talent available, the other problems SThree company is facing are home office efficiency, online hiring process, legislation regarding the working hours (working in a more flexible way), and legislation in terms of tax obligations, social securities, civil obligations. The positive side is more openness. Countries that were more local-oriented when it comes to recruitment, are now accepting foreign candidates. 

Digital testing of soft skills is very limited and can be helpful in the preselection process but it can also cause a counter-effect: how do you know people are answering honestly? Face-to-Face interviews still offer a higher level of engagement and you can get a better sense of someone’s interpersonal skills. 

Groundbreaking innovation in recruiting industry 

We asked Luuk which groundbreaking innovation would truly impact their business. Here is what is said: having a recruitment organization whose main business is advising not selling with an emphasis on the trusting relationship. 

Summary 

An innovation dream team is always a diverse team, with different backgrounds and experiences. By bringing different skills, talents, and unique solutions to the table, diverse employees strengthen creativity and innovation. 

There are many benefits of having a diverse team: 

  • superior problem-solving 
  • increase productivity and motivation 
  • attract top talents 
  • Increase profit

If you would like to listen or download the whole episode of the Navigation of Ingenuity podcast with Luuk Houtepen please visit: https://bluecallom.com/podcast/

 

Authored by: Tanja Sopcic

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Axel Schultze

Cognitive abilities to groundbreaking innovation

It takes unique cognitive abilities or so-called soft skills or talents to get you to groundbreaking innovation.

Talents or Soft Skills matters – in some cases, even more than hard skills. One of those cases is with Innovation Development. Creating a groundbreaking innovation needs a new perspective, open-mindedness, creativity, courage, and other cognitive abilities deeply ingrained in a person’s mind. We prefer ‘Talent’ over ‘Soft Skill’. A skill is something people can get by training on. Talent is something that has evolved early in a person’s life, beginning as a newborn. For the sake of this post, let’s use talent as something we are looking for when attracting innovation team members.

Cognitive abilities as a Critical Success Factors of Innovation Teams

About ten years ago, we asked ourselves, what critical skills an innovative mind should have? After many long discussions, we realized: No skills at all. We learned that 20-year-old innovators with no developed skills could quickly create unique ideas and form a company. An early reaction was that age is a crucial factor for innovators. Startups should be run by young people that are unbiased and can change the world. Later on, we all learned that 50-year-old Elon Musk unfolded his full potential in the mid-30s. Regardless, all highly successful innovators have a few things in common, independent of age, skills, or educational background – TALENTS.

Those top innovators are without exception highly curious, very courageous, continuous, or relentless in their execution and exceptional collaborators. While looking deeper into the fabric of the innovator’s talent, we discovered eight key aspects: Curious, Courageous, Continuous, Collaborative, Creative, Communicative, Confident, and Connected. You may wonder what about PASSIONATE? We put it consciously out. Passion is not necessarily a specific talent or wiring in one’s brain – it is a result of a particular neurological trigger. Any person can be extremely passionate about something. Passion is undoubtedly a success factor for innovators but not a talent.

The 8 Cs of innovation talent

Curious, Courageous, Continuous, Collaborative, Creative, Communicative, Confident, and Connected

Curious - important talents or cognitive abilities(1) Curious

We learned that new ideas are composed of past experiences. Unrelated experiences to solve a problem or create a new solution are especially valuable. People who are curious above average have more and broader spread experiences than others. Curiosity is also an essential talent when learning how customers work today and what it may take to make a significant improvement. In some cultures, curiosity has a slightly negative connotation as it is used for people snuffing around other people’s private life. However, curiosity is a key driver in knowledge acquisition driven by an interest and not so much by an external force to learn something. That mind-driven curiosity makes a person find out things to satisfy the overall interest or the interest in the context of a purpose.  Why want people to get faster with their car? What distances do they go? How important is it to be on time? What do they do while driving for 5 hours? What are the alternatives? What would be the most convenient way? Even if we don’t have fast trains, would they use it if ……? In the innovation space, innovation teams need to ask questions that may have never been asked. They need to construct their own paths to acquire knowledge that may not be available in that form. What is the max width of a train trace to make narrow curves at 300 miles an hour? This is not about having ideas – but all about asking related or connected but unrelated questions.

Courageous - important talents or cognitive abilities(2) Courageous

When radically new thoughts get created, it takes a lot of courage to share them with others. It takes courage to stand your ground, despite others laughing at you. In an enterprise, it takes courage to push for a change and, at the same time, take the risk to get fired. Courageousness is the basis for bold thoughts. It allows to break any rule except the law. And if the law is hindering innovation it takes courage to make all efforts to change the law.  Innovation is not just inventing new products but also building new business models. Should it be necessary to question the current business model, then it needs to be discussed. If the company’s structure is in the way to bring radically new processes forward, it takes courage to say so and not only mention it but make every possible attempt to make it happen. Genuine innovation is touching many people; employees, customers, partners, vendors, alliances, unions, and possibly many more. It takes courage to not stop at this overwhelming undertaking but to work through all the groups, interests, and aspects that may need attention. Enterprise employees are typically best when they follow the rules, don’t question the set structure, and get great results fast. Courage is not part of the recipe to success – but it exists in many people without using it in business but in sports or hobbies.

 

Continuous - important talents or cognitive abilities(3) Continuous

Brilliant ideas are just an episode in the entire innovation effort. Relentless execution makes innovative ideas and concepts a genuine innovation. Missing that duality between ideation and execution is why so many innovation projects failed. Successful innovation is the entire work from pre- ideation market observation to a multi-year engagement to scale the new solution globally. Innovation teams, therefore, need to be continuous in their work. Never give up and never surrender. Once an idea is found the innovation team will want to validate the idea, make sure to finance the project and then bring it successfully to market. There is no known case where the existing organization was able to bring an innovation to market. The only exception may be if the company is virtually dead and has nothing to sell anymore and the innovation is their last hope. The innovation process is a 5 to 10 years marathon. Look at any significant innovation created in the past 50 years; you won’t find a single one that became globally successful in less than five years. It simply takes time to make a dream a reality. It isn’t because all the teams so far were slow – it is the adoption time of conservative buyers, which represents the most significant part of almost any market.

 

Collaborative - important talents or cognitive abilities(4) Collaborative

Sharing ideas, not owning them, is part of a strategic ideation process component called Idea Confluence. Working with others to extend the brainpower and accumulate more ideas is critical in the ideation process. Also, when ideas are realized or brought to market, the innovation team needs to be highly diverse but also collaborative in every aspect of their work. When in exchange mode, ten brains produce more than ten times as much value than just one time ten. The time of solopreneurs or isolated researchers or engineers is over. Not that they cannot come up with good ideas, but they won’t outperform a diverse team of ten amazing brains. And a well-assembled team is usually 5 times faster in the market than a single expert – no matter how smart he or she is.

Moreover, collaboration is far more than a team sport. Innovation terms need to know their limits and quickly pull external experts, science, research into the operation. If an innovation team member is not collaborative, their knowledge and experience would not be shared, discussed, extended, and so forth, and therefor that team member is far less valuable in an innovation team.

 

 

Creative - important talents or cognitive abilities(5) Creative

Creativity has very many faces. In the innovation space, creativity is not only creative ideas but also creative business models, creative ways to produce things, creative ways to finance development, get to the market, and more. Creativity in the innovation space means going ways nobody else went. Creativity is the talent to connect many unrelated things, thoughts, or experiences, construct them in their head, and come up with a structure, shape, process or anything of that order that has just not been done but at the same times provides a significant advantage over what exists today. Creativity to be different is of no help in the innovation space; however, when created in a collaborative effort, it may trigger new ideas and new structures in somebody else’s brain. Creativity, in a collaborative process, is what makes innovation work. An innovation team member lacking creativity will very quickly feel uneasy, not contributing, and not successful.

 

Communicative - important talents or cognitive abilities

(6) Communicative

Compared to other biological life forms, one of the most significant advantages of being human is communicating thoughts and visions for the future. That talent is needed in every phase of innovation, every collaborative event or meeting, every ideation session, and every other collaborative engagement. The more communicative a person is the more content of their thinking gets across. A big innovation dilemma is that the human brain can think extremely fast and has a large number of thoughts and ideas within milliseconds but can’t communicate them at the same speed. Communication talent is key for every innovation team member. The best thoughts, ideas or brain constructs are rather limited of value when they cannot be communicated. Communication talent is not only important during the ideation processes. Communication becomes extremely important when it comes to involving others. Those “others” include early customers when it comes to idea validation, the management team when it comes to approval financing of the concept, business partners when it comes to the early building and production validation, the market when this radical innovation needs to attract its early adopters.  

 

 

confident - important talents or cognitive abilities(7) Confident

Confidence is needed in communication, motivation, investment phases, and in the interaction with the market. Confidence is derived from very well-thought-out solutions and concepts that have been explored from hundreds of different aspects. Confidence is not about convincing others but transforming a vision into a realistic model that others can adapt as well. Confidence is needed by every innovation team member as the new “thing” needs to be explained with confidence to attract others. Confidence is an essential connection in the brain between a variety of aspects of a brand new solution. In particular, knowing it will help many people, realizing it is possible to build what is shown, and knowing that even if not everything works today, it will be possible to make it work in the coming years. Confidence is a form of being visionary by translating all that is known about that envisioned future today will be possible through certain actions that are yet to happen. At the same time confidence is not being afraid to say that there is no guarantee about the anticipated outcome.

 

 

Connected - important talents or cognitive abilities

(8) Connected

And finally, a strong networking ability connects a person with relevant people from all backgrounds and levels. Connection skills are critical when unique expertise is needed to augment an innovation team. Ideaconfluence sometimes requires very rare experiences or skills that are not present in the innovation team. Making those connections in timely order – typically on the same day is a talent that every innovation team member should have.  Well-connected people are inherently open and open-minded, involving others in whatever needs to get done.

Isn’t Passion a Cognitive ability?

So what about passion? Being passionate is not a soft skill to qualify for an innovation team member in general. People can be passionate about anything – they can even be obsessed about anything. We learned that passion or obsession kicks in if a specific action or environment, religion, or people captivates one so much that they can’t stop being engaged. Suppose everybody can develop passion about what they care about most. In that case, it is not a soft skill to probe for – but – it is utterly essential to find out in an interview process if innovation in your space would be a passion for the candidate.

Open-minded and other traits

In our research, we found that people with the above eight Cs are inherently open-minded. Openness is a relatively fast identifiable characteristic of a human but doesn’t necessarily include our talents. But to the contrary, people with the 8 Cs are always open-minded. Otherwise, those specific abilities would not show. This is true for many other soft skills that seem to be important in innovation but indicate some of the other talents we mention here. However, we want to clarify that we are just at the beginning of understanding the brain’s ability to compose ideas and what it takes to get there. We continuously research behaviors during innovation processes and learning as fast as possible, including using tools like AI to improve our work and results.

Testing Talents /Cognitive Abilities

Unlike well-trained and adopted hard skills, it seems that testing soft skills or cognitive abilities is not so easy. Exploring the soft skills of a job candidate is far more difficult today as there is only little experience. Hard skills are trained and the person will need to repeat what they learned or applied and then get tested on the results. Those repeat/linear jobs are rather easy to test while lateral activities like being curious, communicating, being creative, and so forth have no exact outcome as they have no exact input.

Here are a few tips for testing a candidate for specific soft skills. Instead of having multiple-choice questions or questions that you expect either a right or a wrong answer, try to understand how they behaved in certain situations by asking questions about their experience in various situations.

  • Ask them to remember a situation or time where they had to solve a problem that they never had or don’t know anybody who solved it.
  • Ask them to remember a scene where they had to help another college while they were under stress themselves.

We will publish a separate blog post just on soft skill testing and probing.

Where to find the best talents?

Most business managers tend to hire their innovation dream team from the outside. Reasons may include that they don’t trust their own culture, don’t know anybody who has the right profile, or fears that the organization already blinds them. However, our research indicates that most enterprises that desire to innovate have the top talents already in-house. We have seen amazing creative and ingenious people in all kinds of departments within enterprises. Attracting talents from within the organization has various advantages. It would help if you did not fear that they may already be blinded by the way things work in the company. If they have the 8 C’s as soft skills they will make a better organization and culture faster and with more intensity than newcomers.

Summary

  • Make yourself familiar with the value of the 8 C’s
  • Look inside your own organization first
  • Make sure you have a very compelling offering
  • Be aware that you will deal with exceptional talents that other companies will try to hire away.
  • Don’t protect your talents, give them a dream environment
  • It takes teamwork to make a dream work

Looking for a career in the fast-growing innovation space. Take the Innovation Talent Test to see if you have the 8C’s to start your innovation career opportunity.

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Innovation Culture

Tackling a main corporate “Innovation Blocker”

When we talk about innovation culture, the first thing that comes to mind is a work environment where people can develop their ideas. To hear more about this topic, I would like to share amazing insights from Erik Wirsing, Vice President of Global Innovation at DB Schenker, the latest guest on the Navigation of Ingenuity podcast. 

What is Innovation Culture? 

Innovation culture is all about bringing new knowledge into the organization. As Erik pointed out knowledge has to be shared among the people, let them learn something new, and encourage them to create new ideas and solutions. 

One thing DB Schenker is proud of is their innovation department – a place where they bring experience to the right people, train them, empower them and let them be creative. When you create an environment of constant change, networking, agility, and collaboration, employees’ motivation brings increased productivity and higher levels of output that will help organizations reach their important goals.

The biggest obstacle to innovation is having too much guidance and instructions that have to be followed. Put all this aside and give employees the freedom to work independently. This is the recipe that makes DB Schenker successful in their industry – logistics. When empowering team members it is important to provide them with resources, funds, time, and place but keep in mind that this might fail. 

How do you encourage your team to be innovative?

Team members and employees need to feel confident and comfortable to express their thoughts. Therefore the right communication style is the answer to this question. 

We also have to mention the importance of team diversity since their varied backgrounds and experiences allow them to bring broader ideas and new perspectives. Curiosity, openness, and emotional intelligence are crucial when it comes to empowering. It’s not all about monetary incentives and the best way for empowering your employees is to enable them to reach their full potential. Just like Erik said: “Help them to shine”. Erik tells us the story of how DB Schenker’s sparked innovation within their organization:

When Eric joined the company, he was responsible for global innovation and all the innovative activities. Since he had no idea how to run this globally, one of his team members came up with the idea of an innovation magazine that collects stories from colleagues and their experiences. Since everyone wanted to be a part of this magazine, the idea was very well accepted and the storytelling approach got more popular over the years. With time, the sales team recognized the value of the innovation magazine for their customers, which resulted in the new format – an external magazine. With the approach of bringing people together and promoting their success through the “Innovation Champion of the month” column, DB Schenker continues to be a leader in supply chain management and logistics solutions.

What was your last innovation?

As Erik stressed, it is not about establishing something completely new but adopting from different industries. 

His last innovation was not planned, it just happened accidentally at one event he participated in. Talking to one of the attendees who work in the roofing industry he found out about a special paint which keeps the roofing firm. Erik realized a potential use for the paint and adopted it in the logistics industry. As a result, we have a transport vehicle whose floor is coated with this paint to prevent the movement of cargo while driving. Now customers are using it for the forklifts. Such an easy and spontaneous idea provided benefits for different industries.

Creating the next groundbreaking innovation

We also asked Erik if there is one thing he wants to invent or see invented, what would it be? This is what he said: having one device (ie smartphone) with the possibility of the screen adjustments just like we do with Windows on the PC. He wants to stop traveling with his phone, tablet, and computer, one device that can expand or contract based on the use. Other great things he would like to see in the future are self-driving vehicles and space tourism available for everyone. 

Bringing different innovative minds together and being able to manage a big global innovation culture it is important for all the team members to know that within organizations there are people who are going to support their “crazy ideas”. Structured organization, developing a business model, and taking into consideration customer feedback is the foundation for tackling a main corporate “Innovation Blocker”. 

We thank Erik Wirsing for being a special guest on the Navigation of Ingenuity podcast. With certainty, I can say we all learned a lot from his experience in the innovation world. To listen to the episode please visit: https://bluecallom.com/podcast/

Authored by: Tanja Sopcic

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Innovation is a CEO Mandate

Rethinking innovation from the ground up.

Enterprises around the world have been challenged with becoming genuinely innovative, trying to elevate their effort from improvement to innovation. With over 90% of groundbreaking innovation coming from startups, enterprises are trying to understand what startups do differently. Turning an enterprise into a truly innovative business has been globally one of the biggest challenges across all industries. It is time to completely rethink the act of innovation from the ground up – starting at the very top. Innovation is a CEO mandate because only CEOs together with their board can make the important decisions about TIME, CAPITAL, and STRUCTURE.

Time

The time it takes to get to new innovation. This is a paradigm shift we all need to be aware of. With the new data and processes, we know that in five years from now, you will need to completely start from scratch again, referred to as the innovation continuum. Think of discovering the next innovation opportunity, and find again new ways to satisfy customers. It is a continuum for building one innovation after the other and becoming a Generation Project that is set forward for the next leadership generation. Each time it takes five years to achieve broad market acceptance. That means you have a maximum of five years to innovate and compete or be out. The new mantra: innovate fast or get out. Once that innovation hits the market, there is a five to ten-year timespan, from idea to recognized market leadership. Important long-term decisions to continue investing in those innovations and the innovation continuum require the CEO and their board.

Capital

The capital market has radically changed in the past ten years. Companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, and Uber were considered overhyped but then achieved global market domination. Competitors could not compete because they did not know why those companies took over their market share. It is becoming more and more difficult to catch up with the market. Conventional companies are trying to fight their competitors with legal attacks, just because they don’t know how to compete with their innovation. The old game was competing with new improvements, which no longer works. Capital markets, its savvy investors, analysts, and fund managers have long understood that fighting innovation, when not even knowing how innovation works and how much is required to invest, is a very bad position to be in. Hundreds of millions of investments are necessary to get an innovation from early concepts to success in a global market. Successful innovations consumed more than $100 Million in funding. Unicorns, per definition, consumed roughly a billion dollars, some reached into two-digit billion-dollar investments. Only the CEO together with the CFO and the board can make financial commitments of that magnitude.

Structure

The pressure to innovate has risen dramatically in the past 10 years. Managers look at startups and think they can learn how innovation works. Innovation centers ended up becoming kindergarten-like playgrounds, an esoteric group of “thinkers and tinkers’’, hunting for the inspiration they hoped would come their way. Random experimentation and hoping to find a great idea never leads to groundbreaking innovation. Innovation is an outcome – not a desire. Without exception, the most innovative solutions were created to solve a specific and very present problem. Innovation success is not about an idea creation team and taking it to market by the existing organization. It is about creating an innovation center independent of the corporate organization that is responsible for identifying a viable innovation opportunity and bringing it successfully to market. This independent innovation center requires a highly diverse team of exceptional innovation talents that will get the job done. The team and a decision to create a separate innovation center independent of the corporate organization can only be made by the C-Level.

 

In conclusion, the innovation mandate is the strategic decision from the CEO to become innovative with certain guidelines regarding the long-term goals and designated audience for the innovation. The mandate is typically addressing innovation management and other corporate management functions with time, capital, and structure all taken into consideration.

 

For more information and how to set innovation in motion, download the latest whitepaper, “Innovation is a CEO Mandate.”

Enterprises around the world are struggling to create groundbreaking innovations, watch the latest Innovative Minds Event from Thurs. Oct. 21 “Innovation is a CEO Mandate” and hear from leading organizations about their struggles and why they feel it requires a top-down approach to be successful. Available to watch here.

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Rethinking the Act of Innovation

Most innovation centers failed to genuinely innovate – Now let’s fix it

What worked for startups can now also work for enterprises. While the innovation process, purpose, and reasoning should be the same, the leadership structure is very different. Over the past four years, we learned so much about the difference between innovation in corporations and in startups that today realize: Enterprises had no realistic chance to be innovative – even when acquiring a startup. That difference requires an understanding of how innovative ideas are created, getting your c-level involved in crafting an innovation mandate, and redefining your innovation process to focus on your customer’s true needs and dreams. It’s time to rethink the act of innovation and pursue genuine groundbreaking innovation. 

How ideas get created

Neuroscience had the single biggest impact on our modern understanding of innovation. One key aspect is the realization that ideas don’t come randomly and there are no “magic ideas out of the blue”. The brain composes ideas from past experiences and those compositions represent the power and the limit of our creativity. We cannot have ideas about situations that we have never experienced. Every successful innovation started by observing and understanding an existing problem. If there is no problem to solve, there is no success to be gained. When we know how innovation is created, we can request certain results, we can request insights, and measure and manage the effort. Most importantly executives, now know what they can expect or request from an innovation effort. This understanding drives an entirely different ideation process and calls for a very different innovation process in general: it requires CEO and customers involvement.

Innovation is a CEO mandate

Genuine Innovation is a long-term engagement. It usually takes less than six months to create an innovative solution, but on average 5 to 10 years to be recognized as an innovation in the market. Innovation is the duality of brilliant ideation and relentless execution. Even the fastest startups took 7 to 10 years to become market leaders. Moreover, most of today’s innovations of significance consumed more than a billion dollars to become successful. Capital requirements of that size cannot be decided by an innovation department. With today’s knowledge of how innovative ideas can be stimulated and how those ideas could be brought to market, repeatability, the act of innovation is changing profoundly – even for startups. With that, another key consideration needs to be made: An innovation team that comes up with a new idea must also bring it successfully to market. The existing sales, marketing, production, and logistics departments do not offer any leverage – it’s the opposite; they cannot bring a highly innovative solution to market and sell conventional products to conventional buyers. It’s about Time, Capital, and Structure decisions that CEOs together with their boards can only make.

For more information and additional insights download the “Innovation is a CEO mandate” Whitepaper.

It’s all about the customer

By working with thousands of startups, we learned that innovation success stemmed from a deep understanding of the customer’s problems. This knowledge, combined with our understanding of how innovative ideas are composed, made us realize there was a need for completely rethinking innovation. While corporate innovation labs either spend lots of time finding ideas, experimenting or randomly ideating, the top unicorns developed brilliant ideas based on their research and moved on to relentless execution. Corporate innovation labs try to solve problems they believe exist. They follow the model of “wouldn’t it be cool if we could…” and they love to play all kinds of “thinking games”. They heard about “fail and fail fast”, “pivoting” and “experimenting” without ever questioning if that is actually delivering results.  They copy the 90% of startups that fail without even knowing. 

Successful entrepreneurs look intensely into what their designated audience is doing, what they like and dislike, what they think, and how they see their future. They may not build what their customers asked for, but develop and deliver a solution that is in their dreams. 

Stop looking at what others do

find out what your customers are dreaming about.

Solve the problems they have that others could not solve yet.

 

You can catch up with the market to survive by following what others do. But the financial market will recognize it accordingly. A follower won’t beat the innovator. Rethink the act of innovation – define the innovation culture at the top, listen to your customers and stop being a follower.

Authored by: Alyssa Wengi

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Main Innovation Challenges

The business world has gone through a drastic change in the past few years, boosted by the Covid-19 pandemic – a whole new world full of opportunities, changes, and challenges, especially innovation challenges. To be able to reach or to stay on top of the market one thing is key – groundbreaking and genuine innovation. The pressure to innovate has risen dramatically in the past 10 years. The term innovation itself is used in many ways, as a mantra, as working style, or simply as a marketing campaign. Bringing disruptive innovation to life has always been a challenge, but what exactly are the main hurdles you and your team must overcome to successfully innovate?

During the past 6 months, we were able to chat and interview influential innovation leaders from companies such as ROCHE, DB Schenker, Sony, LG Electronics, Siemens, Coca Cola, and many more. Obviously, every innovation team has different subjects and issues they are facing, but comparing the general conflict, each company has similar problems in the innovation space.

By being able to speak to these different innovation team members we concluded that the overall main “innovation blocker” is the so-called innovation culture, better said, the missing innovation culture.

Innovation Culture

When talking about innovation culture, we are talking about norms, values, ​​and attitudes, shaping the behavior of all employees, especially those who are involved in the innovation process. Since the innovation process is not limited to the core innovation team and this process is cross-sectional, the innovation culture as such can be described as a cross-dimensional culture.

Describing the key points of the culture is easier than establishing this value system. So,  when talking about innovation culture – what are the main challenges why innovation gets stuck? We defined four challenges:

(1) Top-down approach

Successful, groundbreaking innovation is determined by the ability of the team and their culture. To bring out the best you have to push and give room for these norms, values, and attitudes to grow and to become the standard. Therefore, Innovation is a CEO mandate. Only the CEO and their board can take the much-needed decision in time, capital, and structure.

“Innovation success is not about an idea creation team and taking it to market by the existing organization. Creating an innovation center independent of the corporate organization that is responsible for identifying a viable innovation opportunity and bringing it successfully to market can only be made by the C-Level.”

– Axel Schultze

(2) There is no time to innovate

In many cases, the cross-dimensional innovation team, from the CEO to the working student, is fully stuffed with finding new ways of improving current products or services. They are too busy to think of innovation in a way where opportunities are discovered, reviewed, developed, and validated. Unfortunately, innovation has even been outsourced quite a lot to universities or startups.

(3) Fail and fail fast

Obviously, the pressure to innovate and stay relevant in the market has risen in the past years. Managers tried different techniques, took closer looks at the startup world and how their management is innovative. This led to experimenting with playgrounds, where innovation team members are hunting for inspirations and the next big thing; pivoting, brainstorming, and massive prototyping. These newfound Innovation Hubs, which tend to go back and forth with ideas – prototyping, idea – prototyping, and so forth with every little long-term success. By changing the process into a more structured way, combining research and customer feedback before prototyping, the team is able to save a lot of time, money and is not limited to just “experiment”.

(4) The initial value of an idea is zero

Your idea or my idea?  We are living in a world where recognition for something is key. With this value in the back of your mind, people tend to keep ideas secret because they are scared that somebody is stealing their intellectual property. BUT in a successful and inspiring innovation culture, it should not matter who had the idea first.

“The innovation team must know that all ideas come from past experiences and are composed of millions of impressions, often co-produced by other people. […] Teammates should be rewarded for ideas but also equally rewarded for building new ideas based on previous ideas from other teammates or anybody else for that matter.”

– Axel Schultze

Groundbreaking innovation is not only about the original idea, it’s about what you and your team do with this idea. The value of the idea is created through relentless execution and open innovation by taking into consideration what your customer wants.

Despite these main challenges, genuine innovation can still be created with the right innovation culture and innovation mandate. Rethink innovation from the ground up and discover why innovation is a CEO mandate in our latest whitepaper, “Innovation is a CEO Mandate.”

Authored by: Anna Ranke

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Innovation, its flavors and why they exist

Innovation Flavors

The different innovation flavors and terms are confusing and oftentimes are only used to distract from an inability to innovate. But what is the meaning and how can you focus on genuine innovation.

Groundbreaking vs. Disruptive innovation

Those two flavors of innovation are rather close. Yet, when looking under the hood, there is a slight difference.


1) Disruptive Innovation assumes creating a new market that will eventually disrupt existing players in related existing market segments. Indomie noodles for instance created an all-new market in Africa. The automobile is another example of disruptive innovation, creating an entire market that displaced coaches and other transportation. On the one hand, the opportunity to create a new market is becoming smaller and smaller. On the other hand, disrupting existing markets is exponentially growing as most technologies or products reached an age that it is time to completely rethink what is out there.

2) Groundbreaking Innovation does not necessarily create a new market but breaks new ground in an existing market as well as possibly create a new market. Groundbreaking Innovation is always disruptive whether it is in a new or existing market. Tesla is a great example as the car market existed but is newly defined by Tesla. Same with Space-X. It existed and was developed by NASA and others, but was newly defined through disruptive technologies by Space-X. Apple’s iPhone is another example. The phone market existed but Apple disrupted that market with groundbreaking innovation, the iPhone. Groundbreaking innovation is always disruptive. Groundbreaking innovation is simply not limiting innovation to a specific case but genuine innovation in general. The personal computer did not disrupt the computer industry, even though it thought it would. Instead, it created an all-new computer market. Groundbreaking innovation addresses innovation needs to disrupt a market or create new markets. A nap cafe for a 20 min sleep for instance would not disrupt anything but create an additional and new groundbreaking business segment.

Groundbreaking innovation is not limited to new or existing markets. Radical innovation is similar to groundbreaking innovation but is focused on addressing existing markets.

Fake Innovation Flavors & their Risk

There are floating many more flavors of innovation such as gradual innovation, architectural innovation, and improvement innovation. Breakthrough innovation is described as an innovation from within a company that pushes something to the next level and can be considered similar to gradual innovation. These flavors of innovation are a big risk to innovation because all it is just an improvement. Gradual innovation, improvement innovation, or architectural innovation do not produce genuine innovation. Moreover, they bear a high innovation risk because they make those who are trying to innovate believe that the result is a type of innovation. However, if a competitor develops a genuine innovation, stays under the radar for a while, and disrupts that market segment, the fake innovation will implode immediately and the disrupter enters the market without any problem.

Most consumers cannot differentiate between innovation types and they do not care – there is no reason to even look at it. They chose the best product for them. With large business customers, it’s a bit different but still like consumers they are not impressed.  The financial market however looks more closely than ever before at what the innovation effort is, as they calculate valuation based on the long-term effects of innovation. Fake innovation is not only immediately uncovered, it leads to extra distancing from the brand because the company either does not understand what innovation is or purposely faking innovation. Both have very negative connotations.

Recommendations

  1. Stay away from using gradual, architectural, improvement, or other fake innovation types. It does not help in any way and is not really innovation.
  2. Ask yourself what would be a possible disruption to your business and how can you pre-empt a possible disruptive attack? The answer is simple: Be the one who moves first and don’t allow a position of following others.
  3. Learn more about ideation, deep innovation design, the innovation duality of brilliant ideation, and relentless execution.
  4. Develop an innovation strategy that addresses the terminology, how to achieve innovation, c-level empowerment, team composition, budgets, and more.
  5. Reach out to the BlueCallom team and ask for free advice or even better participate in a free Innovation Readiness Assessment.

 

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Building an Innovation Culture

In this post, we want to go beyond the typical aspects of innovation culture-building. We simply assume you know that innovation is one of the most demanding jobs, and it needs extraordinary talents to make innovation happen. Many aspects of Motivation, Empowerment, Inspiration, Failure as a way of learning, and a clear innovation mandate are prerequisites to get results and have been discussed countless times. On the contrary, all the many playful ways to inspire people with internal hackathons, innovation days, creativity workshops, pitching contests, and many other activities have not brought a single genuine innovation forward.

Who is an innovation culture for?
Brilliant talents are not interested in playtime; they are interested in making a difference, achieving something nobody else has achieved yet, and making the impossible a reality. The goal to “make the impossible a reality” is not only a goal of intelligent innovators, it is also the dream of the CEO, the hope of early adopters in the market, and even expectation from investors. When those people say innovation, they mean it. They don’t even think of conventional improvements.

It’s all about making the impossible a reality

To make that dream a reality, you should start with a culture that can make it happen.

1) C-Level Involvement

Discussing innovation culture, innovation success, motivation, results-orientation, job satisfaction, and alike topics with innovation managers and executives, it turned out that the most ambitious and most creative people request a clear mandate from the CEO. Most people’s experience has been, that if the C-Level is not actively engaged and sees innovation as a strategic effort, nothing will get done and the career as an innovation manager is in jeopardy in those companies. The CEO does not necessarily need to be a visionary person but needs to ensure that groundbreaking innovation is happening. Highly innovative people look for companies and teams that have a high probability of creating extraordinary outcomes. Grass-roots efforts to build more innovation in a business have so far failed as far as we could see. Highly talented innovation team members, rather join insecure startups than companies that see innovation just as a marketing message and not as an effort to make a difference. And therefore, the innovation culture starts at the top with a clear mandate for groundbreaking innovation, backed by its board.

We see best results when both the innovation culture and innovation purpose comes from the top management and flows down into the relevant teams. Many executives have the hope that every employee becomes innovative. Whether this is a good idea or not is no longer important as top-down culture development automatically reaches the entire organization.

2) Team Composition

Already when assembling an innovation dream team, the innovation culture plays a strategic role. One aspect of the culture is the definition of the team composition. While conventional R&D centers were primarily experts, the ideal innovation team is a highly diverse team from diverse backgrounds. The innovation culture should include that diversity as part of the model. You will want an innovation team that comes from customer-oriented backgrounds such as sales, from a broader market background such as marketing, from an operational or administrative background, definitely from a financial background, and also subject matter experts from your industry field. If you have all engineers, you not only are limited by having more of the same but, most importantly, limited background. Understanding how ideas get created in our brain, a diverse background of experiences (not business experience) is of great importance.

Another aspect of an innovation culture and its team development concerns traits or talents; some call it soft skills. There are a few traits that all team members should share: For instance curiosity, fearlessness, abstract thinking, team spirit, competitiveness as a team, openness, and positive thinking. One mismatch can ruin the whole team. Candidates should know upfront what you are looking for and how you assemble the team. Never try to “re-wire” people’s minds that will either fail immediately or have long-term negative effects on the mindset of the respective individuals.

3) Co-Ideation Culture

Your idea or my idea? In a successful and inspiring innovation culture, it should not matter who’s ideas any given concept was from. The co-ideation culture is an essential part of the innovation culture. The innovation team must know that all ideas come from past experiences and are composed of millions of impressions, often co-produced by other people. Meetings, exchanges, and joint ideation are the sum of all brains, and the confluence of content sparks ideas. There cannot be individual ownership, and it would distract the ideation process to an unbearable degree. Teammates should be rewarded for ideas but also equally rewarded for building new ideas based on previous ideas from other teammates or anybody else for that matter. Groundbreaking innovation rarely comes from one genius individual – but in almost all cases in the past century from a group of people. Co-Ideation as a cultural element can be stimulated when the innovation software has integrated gamification and reward equally the ideation and idea confluence based on other people’s ideas.

4) Information Culture

Groundbreaking innovation is a tough but absolutely doable goal. Working in isolation, i.e., only inside an innovation lab, is a terrible mistake. Groundbreaking innovation means change. When those changes, coming out of the blue, 99% of homo sapiens will reject it as a natural process. If the innovation team is not keeping adjacent teams in the loop, success moves far away. First and foremost, the C-Level needs to be in the loop. If they don’t care, all innovation efforts are a waste of time and resources. Have a jour fix meeting with the CFO or CEO once a week or every other week for only and exactly 3 minutes. Don’t dare to make it a 4-minute presentation. You will need internal supporters, those from sales who help you work with selected customers, or from marketing who provide you with research or finance, which help you get some key insights. Keep them in the loop. Provide an update once a month for 5 minutes, for instance, the first Monday at 11:50 am sharp. Include selected customers and business partners into the process and if necessary ask for a non-disclosure agreement. An even better way to ensure success is an open innovation project where you include others from your market and even those not from your market.

For most corporations, Open Innovation is a no-go. However, it is more than worth considering it and take the necessary actions that public companies need to make in order t communicate with the outside and ensure equal information to their shareholders. The extra effort is negligible compared to the value it adds to the process and the shareholder relationship. The open information strategy represents the most visible aspect of the innovation culture and helps the innovation process band prevents copying ideas. Who will say “we too have this idea” when the idea has no proof yet? Who will want to be a follower of something that does not even exist yet? But you, with your genuine idea, can and prove the concept over time, very much like Microsoft, Tesla, Ikea, and in the past Carl Benz, Robert Bosch, Alfred Escher, and hundreds of others.

5) Performance Culture

Assuming you understand how the brain creates ideas, you will not want to wait for the magical idea or wonder if the prototype even works. You know how to compile groundbreaking ideas, how to develop a vision, how to get approval and funding, how to build your first minimum viable product (MVP), and how you get it to market. You know that any groundbreaking idea gives you a headstart of approximately 3 to 5 years. Yes, you will not want to lose a single day. Every successful startup or Unicorn is executing with relentless speed, working for recognition and growth every single day like there is no tomorrow.

In most conventional innovation centers, however, teams meditate, play games, follow all kinds of stimulation efforts, try to find random ideas, experiment, not know if an idea is working or not, and finally come out with an improvement at best. They are no competition to even mediocre startups.

The performance culture is a strategic part of the innovation culture. You and your team are in it for extraordinary results. The performance to do so and the achievement of the respective milestones are as important to that team as it is for any top-class athlete at the Olympics. Performance culture is mainly for highly intelligent people who compete against the best and brightest around the world for a solution that is thought to be impossible – they are hardly motivated by money. Competitiveness is a trait every innovation team member has to have. This culture is stimulated by serious goals and rewards that reflect the extraordinary outcome, a groundbreaking innovation. To maintain a performance culture as part of the innovation culture, team members are wired to go for a long-term effect on society, building something that nobody believed is possible. Some will try to do it on their own, others prefer to make it in a team that has already some profound resources. Innovation is the ultimate competition of the mind.  Those individuals want to be a part of the organization they bring forward. Getting recognized for their outstanding achievement, become a shareholder, have a chance to make the impossible a reality is the main motive and key to performance.

 

During the BlueCallom implementation, we provide an innovation team development program involving HR/HT Management that includes the development of an innovation culture model that will need to be accepted by the CEO.

 

On Aug. 12th, 2021, BlueCallom will host a “Creating an internal innovation culture” event, part of the Innovative Minds Series. In this Innovative Minds event, gain insights into how to stimulate innovation culture-building from the middle up so it can flow down and how Innovation Leaders can best support it. Please visit to see more details and registration: https://bluecallom.com/creating-an-internal-innovation-culture-webinar/

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