Larry Downes and Paul Nunes
Advancing Innovation: Galvanizing, Enabling & Measuring for Innovation Value!
- Surround yourself with a great team. Get the right players on board and enable them to do great things. Don’t wait too long to swap out players that don’t fit from a skill standpoint or a cultural perspective. Hire slowly and fire fast. Build trust and motivation in your teams consistently, and prepare to be surprised at the speed of innovation.
- Ensure that you have good advisors. Every entrepreneur, no matter how experienced, will benefit from a personal board of directors or advisors to guide them in facets of their business. Good advisors will tell you what you need to hear, while friends will tell you what you want to hear. You need both in business, with the insight to tell the difference.
- Recognize that customers care about the whole experience. People pay for a great user experience, in finding the right product, buying it, using it, and getting support. Today they demand it or walk to competitors, who are not far away. When is the last time you listened to customers and clients directly, and acted on their feedback immediately?
- Target a portfolio of solutions, not just one product. A startup may start with a focus on one solution, but long-term growth and success requires a range of solutions, with annual innovations on every one. Sometimes the hardest thing for companies to do is to retire a cash cow product, before its declining market is reinvigorated by a competitor.
- Incent everyone on the team to be an innovator. Normally the best innovations come from the people on the front line, rather than a top manager or designer. Yet most of the people who count are often paid to make things work the way they have always worked. Remove fear of failure, then demand and measure innovation as key to job performance.
- Give customers what they want, even if they don’t know they want it. Good people listen intently to customers, apply a knowledge of the industry, and imagine a better experience, based on insights and talent applied to unspoken customer needs. Great innovations always seem obvious and simple to customers, after the fact.
- Align the interests of partners and other constituents. In many cases, those that appear to be your competitors can actually be your allies, and through partnerships (co-opetition) and agreements you can create more value together than you can achieve separately. Aligning interests fosters growth and innovation from all constituents.
- You can’t improve something if you can’t measure it. Use the Innovation Value Score® approach described in the above book, or any relevant yardstick, to measure and compare with other companies and achieve more innovation value. It’s all about results, benchmarked against strategic plans and a vision of what is possible.
