Axel Schultze
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Stop idea hunting for innovation

Stop idea hunting for innovation

Creating breakthrough innovation is still the holy grail or even a mystery to most innovation teams. It is perceived as random, serendipity, and accidental. Hoping to get innovative solutions that transforms markets from some magical “ideas,” means waiting for a coincidence, but winning the lottery would have far more chances to succeed than “finding” the right idea. Is this the end of an innovation center? Yes, already in many corporations. But it would not have to be that way. It is only the end of idea hunting, trend scouting, startup observation or acquisition, and similar activities. 

REVISE YOUR INNOVATION APPROACH

Every market, every ecosystem, and every target audience has large amounts of unsolved problems. Solving those problems is what most unicorns do today. Lack of understanding of problems and needs is also a prominent reason less than 10% of startups make it to their initial round of funding.

Imagine you have a great idea that just popped into your mind and want to create a business with it. You craft a concept, maybe a prototype, and try to get funding from an investor. Any decent investor will ask these is first two questions: a) Who is your team? B) What problem are you solving?

Idea hunting

Problem-solving
1) Who will be your customers? 1) You will understand almost immediately who the potential customers are
2) Why should they buy your product 2) The solution to the problem is why they should buy your product.
3) Why will they want it? 3) They want it to improve their work, life, or entertainment.

 
4) How many people will want the solution (market size) 4) You size the market by knowing who and how many have the problem.

 
5) How big is their appetite at the moment? 5) You can directly ask them how big their appetite is to buy it.
6) Do they have to change their behavior? 6) You can explore if there is any behavior change they need to make.
7) How significant will the impact be on your customer? 7) You can ask your current customers about the impact.
8) What would be their current or potential alternative? 8) You can explore your competitive advantage.
9) What would be your value proposition? 9) You can define a value proposition even before prototyping.

 
10) What would be your business model? 10) You can have a unique business model when you go to market.
HIgh uncertainty
Low likelihood to get product market fit
Very high failure rate
Very low likelihood for innovation financing 
High certainty for a needProduct market fit can be quickly tested
Much reduced failure rate
High likelihood getting finance




Innovation Center Decision
While entrepreneurs may still try their ideas whether they get funding or not, for an enterprise, it is almost irresponsible to go on an idea hunt or idea-scouting to find random ideas. The probability that the “idea” is helping transform markets, transforming organizations, and bringing a significant elevation in how people or customers do things is extremely slim. Why bet resources on the least likely path to success?

Instead, when focusing on significant existing problems, most of the top 10 questions are answered based on the fact that there is already a consequential problem identified.

 

INNOVATION RISK PREVENTION

Shifting from idea hunting to problem-solving is essential to innovation risk prevention.

Why spend time, money, and resources to find a market that possibly doesn’t even exist or not know if the idea solves a problem? Focus on solving already existing significant problems.

Why you and not others?

Because usually, companies from all corners of the earth are not interested in solving problems but in selling what they have. Startups, on the other side, don’t want to build another existing solution but solve problems nobody is addressing. And as such, most successful startups grow into enterprises by doing precisely that. And on their way to the top, they displace older enterprises that were created before them.

The risk to get one day being disrupted and displaced is larger than the risk of failing to invent new solutions. But the remaining risk of failing can be significantly diminished when moving from idea hunting to solving existing and known problems.

Known problems can be managed – ideas cannot.

Moreover, once you have identified a significant problem, the anticipated outcome will be initially unknown, but the goal is so clear that you can strategically manage the innovation process. Market research, problem identification, ideation, concept validation, etc. Such an innovation process dramatically reduces the risk further. Neuroscience and Neuro Innovation help us understand how ideas for solving problems are composed; it helps us market into early adopters and finally re-invent so you will never stop innovating.

CAPITAL MARKET SHIFT

The capital market is a significant driver, shifting companies to embrace innovation, product and business model advances, and competitive advantages. Highly innovative companies like Tesla have a valuation allowing them to buy the Mercedes among all automobiles: Mercedes Benz. And this is one of the key motives for the C-Level to turn their otherwise well-running business into an innovative enterprise. Executives know that one of those random ideas will never create a billion-dollar market. They also believe that an idea, no matter how cool it may sound, cannot provide a significant competitive advantage to move the needle of their market cap.

Summary

  • Reducing innovation risks by moving innovation from idea hunting to strategic and targeted breakthrough innovation efforts that are solving existing significant problems makes all the difference. 
  • Methodical innovation not only teaches how to make the start of an innovation effort smarter but also how to manage many other aspects including team assembly, innovation strategy development, concept validation methods, innovation financing, and much more. 
  • Modern innovation frameworks additionally increase manageability and success predictability not only in the solution creation phase but during the equally important innovation-to-market and scaling phase.

Making Of

How did we get here? Our own, previous companies and the hundreds of companies we accompanied in their startup phase, later on, were determined to solve one problem – and one problem only. In our research, we could not find a single company that hoped to realize an idea, then find a market for it, and become successful.
The most successful VCs in this world invest only in companies that solve a big problem – for a reason. Our learning: Only when understanding the entire innovation journey from early innovation opportunity discovery, all the way to global scaling, success is very probable. Experimentation is the least intelligent way to innovate.

Axel Schultze, CEO BlueCallom
AI-Driven Neuro innovation solutions 

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Axel Schultze

When enterprises acquire startups to get to innovation

When enterprises acquire startups to get to innovation

When venturing out for ideas on how to create innovation, enterprises may explore the idea of acquiring startups to get innovative minds and a complete team. It seems like a quick way to get innovative ideas that can be integrated into the corporation. Essentially the old make or buy decision. However, of 1,000 acquisitions, less than five have been successfully integrated. And none delivered the sought-after genuine innovation. So, is it a bad idea? Maybe not, but let’s look at this as a whole. There are a few very strategic steps to be considered that most enterprises did not think through.

1) THE INNOVATION MANDATE

Independent of acquisition or not, enterprise leaders want to ensure they have a clear innovation purpose for their organization. Some companies let their teams experiment randomly because they believe in magical random ideas. But that thinking failed with nearly 100%. The Innovation Mandate aims to help the leaders of innovation teams understand the significance, scope, and magnitude of the innovation effort, its expected long-term results, and how they can be achieved. Moreover, successful innovation should be in the context of the company’s long-term development strategy, values, markets, and ability to deliver. Those innovations must be defined by their Significance, Scope, and Magnitude.

Significance

The significance of innovation for the company.  I.e., We experience a massive shift in the XYZ industry and need to…
Or we see an opportunity in the rising TBD-Market and want to play a leading role there – and so forth.

Scope

The SCOPE of the innovation effort. I.e., we expect our innovation teams to create a solution and bring that solution successfully to its designated markets. Our existing resources are unavailable to bring new, possibly competing products into our market. Or our team is fully utilized with our existing business and won’t be able to be entirely focused on disruptive innovation.

Magnitude

The MAGNITUDE of innovation
The new solution should bring € 8 Billion in the next seven years and be able to replace our declining 5 Billion OMG Business. Or, the new solution should generate € 1 Billion in new business and ensure our strong market leader position in this market segment. In any company north of a billion in revenue, having a new product with a 50 Million potential would not make a difference – and the innovation team or startup needs to know.

TO-DO:
A so-called >>CEO Mandate for Innovation<< needs to be documented independently of any innovation effort. The bigger the enterprise, the more relevant that mandate is. It explains in detail the Significance, Scope, and Magnitude of the expected innovation engagement. This mandate must also be accompanied by an innovation strategy to get there. Innovation teams struggle with their effort without it, and investing in startups without a clear mandate almost never gets any positive outcome. In one of the following blog posts, we will discuss those mandates in more detail.

ORGANIZATIONAL CONSIDERATIONS

The organizational considerations are very similar when enterprises acquire startups to innovate or build from within your organization.

  1. General Integration
    Your existing organization is highly optimized for what you and your team have been doing for years. Employee utilization of all your thousands of employees is above 80%, and there is no room to do something entirely new – like an innovation. When Google acquired YouTube, it was wise NOT to integrate the company until it was big enough to have found its structure and culture. Today everybody is happy that they never did.
  2. Innovation-Specific Sales
    Innovation needs to follow a specific audience pattern of early adopters to succeed. Also, initial orders are small, and your existing sales force is tremendous, so they have no room for extras. Moreover, they are unprepared to deal with early adopter customers within your existing customer base. At Tesla, the early adopters were not clearly defined until the first cars were ordered, almost exclusively by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
  3. Innovation Financing
    Innovation is all about growth financing. Growing by 100% and ramping after a few years from 100 Million to 200 Million is a challenge for every CFO. The innovation team needs to manage their own financing with the knowledge of all the unique aspects. Nespresso was a new era in the coffee business and a financial business model novelty within Nestle.
  4. Innovation Marketing
    Marketing innovative solutions are profoundly different than conventional enterprise marketing. The team must understand how to evangelize a new solution and keep customer behavior changes at the forefront.  They must understand advocacy development to bring those solutions to the market successfully. Also, the innovation team needs to deliver a different marketing concept that doesn’t need to align with the extensive brand marketing. Remember, “The biggest advertising company in the world never placed an ad – Google.” Tesla, Vorwerk (Thermomix), and many others use unique direct marketing techniques far from advertising and promotion. Mostly marketing is embedded in the whole business model.

The deeper we look into those aspects, the clearer it becomes that integrating an innovative product into the conventional organization for production, sales, marketing, and finance is a considerable risk and a big mistake. Innovation cannot grow inside a massive and highly optimized organization with rules and regulations that do not allow experimentation and ignore those rules and processes. On the contrary, an innovative team NEEDS to change rules, build new processes, and find new ways into markets to expand its innovative footprint.

TO-DO:
Take Innovation as a holistic process that starts before ideas are created and finishes when the innovation is successful in its designated market. Think through all aspects of organizational development, team skills and talents, team selection and compensation, culture and motivation – BEFORE you make any decision on how this will be happening.

When enterprises acquire startups to get to innovation

COMPANY & TEAM QUALITY ASSESSMENT

There are a few strategic questions to ask the founders before even considering investing time to go into more details. Professional Venture Capital firms ask those questions one way or the other before even letting them pitch.

  1. How is your leadership team structured?
    Make sure it is a diverse team of subject matter experts, business minds, and marketing creatives who all can think boldly and execute fast.
  2. Why did you start? What drove you to do this company?
    Make sure it is more than an idea that a few angels possibly found. Ensure there is some subject matter expertise behind it. Moreover, ideally, the founders experienced a problem they are now solving.
  3. In what way are you genuinely unique, globally
    Understanding their innovative character or at least the uniqueness of their solution. Know what the competition looks like and what the difference is.
  4. Are all founders fully invested in the company
    Solopreneurs are a show stopper for any professional investor. They would never get funded and may see an acquisition as a nice exit. But they are still a single founder organization that may not be stable or holds for the future.

Acquisition specific questions

Ask the founders:

  1. Are you willing to sell?
    If your business concept is bold enough to bring it to Unicorn status, why not do it yourself?
    Why should we not do it ourselves if you need a partner like us?
  2. Do you understand enterprises?
    We are successful by streamlining organizations to the max. Perfect processes, no risk, no change. When being integrated into our enterprise, what will you do to prevent being absorbed by our structure of rules and regulations?
  3. Do you think large-scale innovation?
    Will you and your team be able to build a billion $ operation in parallel to our existing organization?
    And if yes, what is your plan to get there?

99.9% of enterprise innovation attempts fail because nobody took the time to think through all its aspects – and the invested millions and even billions did not help.

TO-DO:
Make your detailed list of interview questions. Remember the Significance, Scope, and Magnitude of what you expect from the team. Hire a team you can see building a billion €/$  business operation.

Summary

When enterprises acquire startups to get to innovation, an extensive goal development, planning, and strategy how to get there is mission critical. Because of the significance innovation has for the company, the scope of organizational development, and the magnitude of capital and time needed to be successful, the CEO is the only person who can decide to engage in any form of innovation. When buying a startup, remember what it takes to bring a young team with crazy ideas that nobody has tried before to succeed. If not exquisite investors working with them to help them to get all the way to the top, it will be you who needs to take over that role. When acquiring a startup, enterprise leaders must first understand the Significance, Scope, and Magnitude of their innovation effort. Then making professional considerations about the organizational structure and guidance of those teams who usually never saw an enterprise from the inside. Only then diving into the sea of startup acquisition makes even sense. At that point, the question of whether it even makes sense to buy and integrate a startup. So far, more than 1,000  startup acquisitions have failed, and not a single startup helped an enterprise get to innovation adds to those considerations.

Alternative

The alternative of building such a startup inside the organization is much more promising. Considering all the above aspects, you will find people familiar with your business, particularly interns and people who have been with the company for two or so years. You will not be able to win or afford your top teams for innovation, and you will need them to keep your current business alive. In our own experience, the most effective way is to assemble an internal Innovation Dream Team that is 100% dedicated to the job and stays there for the next few years. With the proper selection, assembly and onboarding method, motivational aspects, and culture development, they will stay and make the impossible a reality.

 

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Axel Schultze
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Innovation Market Dynamics

Innovation Market Dynamics

Before starting to innovate, it makes sense to understand the general market dynamics for innovative solutions. For decades, enterprises struggled when their innovative solutions did not take off within 12 to 24 months and killed the projects. Little was known about innovation diffusion. Everett Rogers coined the term in 1966 but the actual timeline of an end-to-end innovation was too long to even measure accurately. Today we know that any innovation takes and took 7 to 15 years to become mainstream. Obviously, that was a stretch for any enterprise executive. Yet, telephony, TV, personal computer, Internet, Social Media, 3D-Printing, and electric vehicles took, on average, a decade to become mainstream. A normal consumer however does not see that timeline. In 2012 Facebook was a big talk when it went public with horrendous valuations and no profit. “Already” in 2016, just four years later it became an acceptable mainstream platform. People tend to forget that they started in 2004 and took 12 years to become “mainstream”. And Tesla took much longer.

Hoping to have an ROI in 3 years is virtually impossible – why is that?

Why conventional enterprises fail to innovate

It’s not the innovative solution that takes so long to build – it’s the market that takes so long to decide. Agile leaders or agile consumers start to give almost anything interesting a try. It is what keeps them at the forefront of things. The large majority of conservative buyers wait and see and move only when the “New Thing” is tried and tested. Usually, in the early days of a product researchers, analysts and experts see great danger in the new products and delay the market acceptance even further. But when the late majority decides to buy because it seems to be “a good idea” the market opens up to mass markets and volume. It doesn’t matter if it is B2B or B2C. It is the human factor – no matter where they sit.

Leading businesses keep staying on top – time and time again

The people that represent such a leading company are typically early adopters. Just a little more risk-takers. Their experiences with new technology keep them ahead of the competition. When years later the competition catches up, the leaders are perfectly set and experts in the respective technology. And in the next few years, that same game repeats itself.

Why conventional enterprises have a hard time

Of course, they are not stupid, so they could make a leap and catch up with leaders fast. The problem is the composition of people. You cannot jump on every opportunity because who knows what is really successful in the end. Why did the Nokia executives not jump on modern technology? Why did Sun Micro not see the writing on the wall? Why did Nixdorf not adopt in time? Why did Digital Equipment merge with HP and almost both failed? Why did…. the list is long. But the answer is easy: They just did not see it. Far too busy with their own organization instead of having eyes and ears in the market. Trying things that make logical sense instead of waiting until others found it out for them is a terrible price to pay. And that is not only for NOT EXPLORING THEIR OWN SITUATION. IT IS WHY THEY CAN’T INNOVATE and develop a long-term view of what the market needs.

Innovation Market Dynamics Considerations

1) Make yourself familiar with the idea that your innovation will take 5+ years for notable impact in the market.

2) Understand the full scope of an innovation engagement to keep the time to innovation as short as possible. Meaning your innovation team has no time to rest.

3) Have a very robust strategy in place to be able to manage such a long-term engagement with all its changing landscape underway.

4) Never even think of integrating the innovative solution into your conventional sales and marketing operation. The go-to-market approach is far too different.

5) Make sure you have a complete picture of your innovation engagement and the fact that if you need innovation to transform a business unit or an entire business, your innovation will need to produce NEW Billions of Euros to make the transformation successful.

6) Ensure that innovation is led by a Chief Innovation Officer, not by the CEO or any other executive as a side business.

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Axel Schultze

A glimpse into the future of innovation, AI and human ingenuity

Allow me to start the year with a perspective on the future of innovation.

Despite everything that went on in the world, BlueCallom had a great 2021 and 2022 started with a big boost.

LINEAR VERSUS LATERAL THINKING

It is no news that linearly managed business process transformation like digitalization or creating breakthrough innovation, has never really worked out. Linear thinking for any type of complex structure is not really a good idea.

In the fall of 2021, we worked feverishly on finding better ways to visualize the difference between linear and lateral thinking. At the same time, I was asked by our data scientists and engineering team to visualize the data flow in each innovation process episode that feeds the AI system. All charts I’ve seen of lateral processes were hopelessly convoluted visuals where virtually every piece of a process was connected with at least half of all the other processes.

To visualize the complexity we had to build a bridge to a linear model. Once I looked at the process connections, I realized a pattern of parallelity – some actions ran in parallel, and some even in different directions. While a core process is active, a few processes can break out and run outside the core and some even in different directions.

AI is the first technological way
to build laterality with a computer.

Laterality could be shown in a linear manner, visualizing the lateral process. When looking at the AI from autonomous driving, we see a very similar mechanism. 

The chart below compares a linear process on the left column with a lateral process and its many columns to the right. How it works and how this can serve the human mind is described further down.

BlueCallom Lateral Business Process Network

Managing complexity is a very difficult task – no matter what. And if we need to ask teams to creatively innovate but also manage highly complex processes we will either lose the creativity or the manageability. Is that the end of managed innovation? No – not at all. We decided to use Artificial Intelligence for managing almost infinite complexity and all we need to do is to train the system in a way that guides their human companion through the maze. GPS? Compass? Stars? Yes, nothing new but in a very different world transforming the future of innovation.

HOW AI CAN SERVE THE HUMAN MIND – NOT DISPLACES IT

With the above learning we made two important decisions:

  1. We will not ask anybody to become a lateral thinker – instead, we decided to build solutions that do what humans are not so good at, like following complex lateral processes. We are using AI, Neuroscience, and Genetic Computing as the first Human Intelligence Augmentation solution. It is designed to help people stay on top of processes no matter how complex they are. This is freeing the brain to do what it can do best, including innovate, create, socialize, identify meaning, see opportunities, work on unique things, entertain, and countless other talents. 
  2. We will focus on making those innovative and creative jobs highly predictable so they can be judged, assessed, and analyzed before making major investments and giving long-term commitments. Therefore, we developed a unique and very powerful Innovation KPI Framework with 1 core KPI: “Success Probability”. Roughly 200 “Contributing KPIs” and approximately 20,000 data points are used by multiple algorithms to compose the one, ultimate Innovation Success KPI. The BlueCallom KPI Framework is a novel design of cascading KPIs leading to one “Mother Of All KPIs”.  

Human Intelligence Augmentation was an original idea from Douglas C. Engelbart, documented in October 1962. It was Engelbart’s hope that very intelligent machines will help the human mind to perform tasks of nearly endless complexity. However back then this was technically not yet possible. Today we are stepping on his shoulders and are introducing what he has envisioned.
Deep Innovation Design-based innovation processes consist of 10 episodes, with approximately 12 major tasks each and approximately 10 activities in each task. More than 70% are creative, ideation-related tasks that work with stimuli and patterns that we learned from neuroscience. With an innovation team of 10 people, we are dealing with approximately 1,200 thought, research or feedback objects. With reviews, considerations from previous episodes, predictions into new episodes, we reach a staggering 20,000 aspects to consider in such an innovation project. Far too much for a normal human brain to keep in mind while being in a creative process. Either you work more creatively than you can’t manage administrative work at the same time or you follow the rules and never create any substantial innovation. Our laterally organized AI system however can take off all the administrative and coordinative work and let the ingenious minds flow freely, Reports, worrying what the next steps should be, process orientation, and other administrative works are taken care of by the AI system.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM BLUECALLOM IN 2022

VISION – Our vision remains unchanged, we exist to build the most predictable innovation and business transformation solution helping teams elevate the way people do things.

GROWTH – You may have noticed that we are looking for quite a number of people to join the team and support our vision in the future of innovation. A pretty elaborate hiring process is helping us to find the best possible talents including AI experts and neuroscientists. If you have any connections or ideas to help is get the right talents, we would really appreciate it.

PRODUCT – We can imagine that you want to get your hands on the new system or see it in action. A beta test version and demos for BlueCallom DEEP II are scheduled to be available for selected customers soon. We will publicly introduce it in May 2022.

IN 2022 – We will be able to demonstrate a first step of what was thought to be impossible any time soon: an AI system that will augment human’s intellectual capabilities beyond its natural capacity – and – without drilling holes in the skull. The dream of the late Douglas Engelbart to create Intelligence Augmentation is now becoming a reality. 

HUMAN INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION This year we envision the first customers to work with human intelligence augmentation to run their innovation projects. The BlueCallom AI solution is built so that executives will experience a never-before-seen degree of predictability from complex processes in real-time. Innovation or change management teams will experience a level of intellectual support by getting suggestions, reminders, data, and feedback. Envision using BlueCallom, similar to driving a car with GPS and augmented reality. You will still want to decide where to go, what to see, and where to stay – even to drive if you want. But the GPS will tell you the fastest way to your destination, where to find gas stations, restaurants, and points of interest. It even navigates you around traffic jams or accidents. Also in BlueCallom you will still need to create the ideas, explore the hopes and dreams of your customers and define the purpose of your innovation, But reporting, reminding you on meetings, not forgetting what your previous research indicated, reminding you to consider how to bring it to market or not forgetting to consider a great user experience and hundreds of other consideration for an excellent outcome is managed by the AI system. Soon you will be able to do all that by talking and listening to your team and to your BlueCallom – no more computer.

INNOVATION SUCCESS PREDICTABILITY – BlueCallom’s Human Intelligence Augmentation and its approximately 20,000 data points, aggregated throughout the entire process, is allowing the AI system to calculate a never seen before innovation success predictability. Executives can observe the success prediction in real-time and conduct their own risk assessments, decisions to move forward, and any financing approvals.

WHERE WILL WE TAKE IT LONG-TERM?

To build a better future of innovation, we need everybody to be able to innovate and rapidly resolve complexity. Our contribution is to build a solution that allows almost everybody to build their own future. A future of new materials, new technology, new medical systems, new renewable energy, new medication, new transportation, new mobility, new distribution structures, new education models, and more. BlueCallom will further invest in research and science, both on computer science and on neuroscience getting a deeper understanding of how our brain behaves and how we can interface with its natural “APIs”.

Our future lies in building systems and solutions that can amplify and augment the human intellect. With our learning from Neuroscience and AI, Human Intelligence Augmentation is the core of our own development. By the end of 2022, we will invite all our business friends and customers to the first BlueCallomPredict, a small conference for Innovation Thought Leaders to look ever deeper into that future of innovation. :)

INNOVATION THOUGHT LEADER ROUNDTABLE – If you are interested to contribute and supporting our work from the outside, we will continue to develop collaboration with our customers and Innovation Thought Leader Roundtable members. The next Innovation Thought Leader Roundtable will be in March 2022. You will find more info at: https://bluecallom.com/innovation-thought-leader-roundtable/


This is the most exciting, most compelling, and also the most challenging venture I ever had the opportunity to work in. I’m deeply grateful for having amazing minds support this journey.

I wish you a great 2022, whatever is around us, and thank you for all the support!  Together we can do even more for the future of innovation.

Axel Schultze and the BlueCallom Dream Team

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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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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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