How do you align innovation with your company's vision?

Innovation does'nt necessarily need to start by thinking of alignment of vision. It should rather begin with - how to do think different, think better, think newer ; ways which has not been thought of before. This gives the best chance to really embark on true innovation & down the line figure alignment with new product/market discovery & then align to vision of company. Vision also are typically very topical, broad and a catch-all phrase in most large corporates, so innovation should simply get on with it & get things done. As far as innovation helps acheive -change of thinking, take the company fwd, adds newer industry/ revenue streams, brings in startup culture, in my opinion we have got what we want from innovation.

Simon Sinek, David Mead, and Peter Docker's "Find Your Why" provides practical guidance for walking through defining your own personal, team, or organizational vision. They lay out a step-by-step guide that you can use with a leadership team to find what drives you.

A good way to ensure that your innovation and project are aligned with the organization’s mission, vision, and strategy is to incorporate a balanced scorecard. It has the ability to link a strategic plan with the objectives of the company. When you have alignment, all levels of the organization are able to add their support, roadblocks and challenges are reduced, a coalition of team members and leadership are supportive, and resources are made available.

I agree with this viewpoint. Having a clear understanding of your company's vision is essential for aligning innovation with your goals and objectives. The vision serves as a guiding light, providing clarity and direction to your innovation efforts. It helps identify strategic priorities, assess alignment, and ignite creativity. When employees truly grasp the vision, they become motivated and engaged in generating innovative ideas. This shared understanding fosters a strong innovation culture within the organization, promoting collaboration and effective communication with stakeholders. Ultimately, a deep understanding of the vision ensures that your innovation initiatives are purposeful, focused, and in harmony with your long-term goals.

A vision should be more than just a slogan or a marketing gimmick. It should be a statement of why your organization exists, the values it embodies, and what it contributes to the people working within it. A vision inspires and aligns people across different functions, geographies, and cultures. It also guides decision-making and innovation, while serving as a source of resilience and motivation in times of uncertainty and change. In the future of work, the vision cannot be separated from the core business strategy and operations. It should be integrated into every aspect of the organization, from product design to customer service, from employee development to stakeholder engagement.

I am often asked what advice I would give when it comes to rallying people around a vision. My advice is simple and can make a difference for anyone leading through a transformation, regardless of the level or industry. 🎯 Sharpen your communication skills. It's as simple as that. How you listen and how concisely you articulate your vision are crucial factors in explaining clearly what is in it for stakeholders and ensuring buy-in. Use the right words and tone. Words can mean different things to different people. Learning how to articulate a message that resonates and has a clear impact is one of the greatest skills you can achieve in your lifetime. It may sound simple, but it requires incredible work and practice.

I’m finding now, particularly with the junior generation that communication is not just about the what, but the why. It’s not enough to simply say “this is the vision” the thinking and reasoning behind must also be communicated, along with the role the workforce and individual staff have to play in achieving it. Transparency is absolutely key, along with recognising the value that each person can individually add.

Skilled leaders understand the importance of tailoring their communication strategies and vision to their audience. The way information is presented to senior leaders differs from that of junior leaders. In addition, organizational leaders must possess the ability to effectively communicate their vision to motivate their team members to put it into action. With the diverse backgrounds of individuals in today's world, it is crucial for leaders to employ a range of communication strategies to ensure that communication is continuous, effective, and adds value to the organization and its people. Doing so puts individuals in competitive positions to be successful and execute the vision.

One’s vision should be shared and understood by everyone involved. Communication should be frequent, consistent, and utilize diverse channels and formats. Tangible and measurable goals should be set, showing how innovation contributes to the vision. Collaboration and involvement should be encouraged, while leadership should lead by example. Overall, effective communication requires active listening and continuous feedback loops. Encourage two-way communication and address any concerns or suggestions that arise along the way. By aligning innovation with the vision and communicating it effectively, organizational leadership can foster a shared understanding and commitment towards achieving their innovation goals.

Encourage Dialogue and Feedback: Foster an open and inclusive environment for dialogue and feedback. Encourage individuals to share their thoughts, concerns, and ideas related to the vision. Actively listen to their perspectives, address their questions, and incorporate their feedback when appropriate. This promotes a sense of ownership and engagement, making them more likely to embrace and support the vision.

When fostering innovation, one can't stress enough the importance of team involvement. Every team member brings a unique perspective, offering valuable insights that can be pivotal for innovation. In my journey of understanding the interplay of technology and human behavior, I've observed that the most profound ideas often come from the most unexpected sources. Encourage open dialogue, cultivate a culture where ideas are freely shared without judgment, and reward creativity. This not only amplifies innovative ideas but aligns them seamlessly with your company's vision. Engage, empower, and evolve together!

I would take this one step further and say it is important to celebrate the learning from their failures. Having worked in a task-driven environment, I saw innovation clash with the need to succeed and achieve. While we have to meet certain goals and deliverables, we also need to build in space and time to fail forward and celebrate the learning we gain from failing in order to get true innovation.

In addition to empowering your team to be creative, curious, and collaborative, it's crucial to foster diversity and inclusivity within your team. By assembling a diverse team and creating an inclusive environment, you can tap into a wide range of perspectives, knowledge, and problem-solving approaches, leading to more innovative solutions. Encourage open communication, value and consider every team member's ideas and opinions, and provide training to address biases and promote respect. Embracing diversity and inclusivity not only enriches the innovation process but also enhances team dynamics, driving innovation that aligns with your vision.

In my own leadership journey, I've found that the most powerful innovations often come from within the team. The secret to unleashing this wellspring of creativity is involvement—creating a culture where everyone feels they have a stake in the innovation process. In fostering this culture, I've learned that providing resources and tools is not enough; you must also foster a sense of psychological safety. A safe, supportive environment emboldens team members to share ideas, take risks, and learn from failures. Recognition and reward are also pivotal—they validate your team's efforts, encouraging further innovation.

Additionally, foster a culture of continuous learning by investing in your team's professional development. Encourage cross-functional collaboration to leverage diverse expertise for innovative solutions. Clearly communicate goals and expectations to align efforts towards desired outcomes. Grant autonomy and ownership to team members, allowing them to explore and take risks. Embrace diversity and inclusion to tap into unique perspectives. Seek external collaborations to access fresh ideas and resources. By embracing these approaches, you empower your team to contribute their best and create a culture of innovation that drives meaningful progress.

Make sure you've got a clear vision and set those strategic objectives. Give priority to projects that actually help bring that vision to life and take a good look at innovation opportunities that line up with it. It's important to have a diverse workforce around you because when it comes to finding that one brilliant idea, you need different perspectives, experiences, and fresh thoughts. Build a culture that encourages collaboration, provide the necessary resources and support, and regularly check in on progress to make sure everything's on track or make adjustments as needed. Always keep those communication lines open between projects, innovation, and all the stakeholders involved in your vision.

SKUNK-WORKS This is something i don't see most companies really do, in other placces its called - hacker lab, tinker lab, experience zone, incubation space etc. It's also not just a physical space, but something to circle around, bring people together, condition people to think different when they are in that zone... but back to our point.. its not merely about the space, its about a trait, culture and a strong leadership/mgmt belief to keep trying out new & diff things & not really have a structured appoach or an RoI centric mind set... let some of the folks just experiment whatever they like in the broader agenda the company is running towards... you'll be surpised with what can come out & could become a defininf moment for the org !

Sometimes innovation comes from scheduled projects, but more often than not, it comes from someone pursuing their own passion project (unless you specifically have a skunk works team). People need slack time for creative ideas to bubble to the surface.

Evaluating projects against your vision criteria and goals is indeed crucial for maintaining alignment. By ensuring that it contributes to the realization of your vision, aligns with desired outcomes and values, and follows the established direction, you can maximize the chances of achieving your long-term goals. This approach helps create a focused and purposeful project portfolio, increasing the potential for meaningful innovation outcomes. It's important to regularly assess and realign projects as needed to stay on track with your vision and objectives.

Innovate or die. This applies to products, systems, technology, etc. Innovation should be part of every business's business. Even updating systems to avoid catastrophic disruptions should be considered as innovation. Businesses should create an environment that encourages and rewards innovation y fostering a culture where employees are empowered to generate and explore new ideas and encouraged to collaborate across different teams and departments.

Listen to the feedback from your team, customers, and stakeholders—they're the ones experiencing the impact of your innovation efforts. They can provide invaluable insights that no data can capture. Be prepared to adjust your course based on what you learn. The path to your vision is not a straight line—it’s a journey of discovery and adaptation.

Regularly checking in on progress, ensuring everything is on track, and making adjustments as needed are your lifeline. There are numerous ways to keep track of progress, and in my humble opinion (IMHO), the most crucial factor that holds the glue together is to always keep communication lines open between projects, innovation, and all stakeholders involved in your vision.

Here are a few more ways: Social media listening enables you to gather insights from public conversations, allowing you to identify emerging trends, customer sentiments, and potential areas for improvement. User testing and usability studies provide direct feedback from users, helping you refine and enhance your innovative solutions based on their needs and preferences. Feedback from partners and suppliers allows you to understand the impact of your innovations on their operations, enabling collaboration and addressing any potential challenges or gaps. And innovation workshops that foster creativity and idea generation within your team, helping you identify new opportunities and address gaps or challenges in your current approach.

Monitoring innovation and evaluating results against the progress towards the vision requires clarity on innovation assumptions. One of the greatest questions to ask any innovation manager or innovation team is to ask them about their innovation assumptions. Shockingly, more often than not this question can’t be answered straight away and the reason for that is a mismanagement from top-down. Innovation units are more often not as free as they should be and are getting dictated by superficial best guesses by the top management. It’s always easy to claim a project successful without a assumption-based, predefined target and the alignment with the overall strategy - not only the vision.

Its not innovation if it doesn't lead to an improved customer or employee experience. Employees and customers buy into your vision. So simply ask them both if they are getting closer to experiencing your vision via this innovation.

For there to be continuous improvement and a growth mindset, leaders need to be vulnerable. One way to do this is by sharing their own failures and creating an environment based upon psychological safety. There must be a clear understanding that success is based upon what is learned from success AND failure. Additionally, teams need to be empowered and trust that if they share feedback, and openly debate ideas opposed to always agreeing with senior leaders they can do so without repercussions. This coupled with everything else shared will lead to wonderful innovation.

AI can support aligning innovation with a company's vision through data analysis to identify opportunities, evaluating projects based on ROI and alignment with goals, vision analysis via NLP to uncover key themes and values to focus innovation on, market analysis to assess where innovation is most needed for competitiveness, and testing innovations through prediction models to iterate and optimise before launch. AI complements human creativity with data-driven insights for innovation.

In my experience, this is at the heart of innovative processes. The ability to set ego and expectations aside - and learning from what is.

A purpose-driven organization does not operate in silos. It actively seeks and embraces the perspectives, feedback and contributions of others, i.e. its stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, partners, communities, and regulators. As leaders, we should listen to and learn from diverse voices, and co-create solutions that address shared challenges and opportunities. Be open and accountable about our impact on stakeholders

In my work around organisational design and the design principles of the “infinite organisation” I describe four key aspects of organisational progress. T hese are: 1. Willingness to learn - Embrace a dedication to absorb new knowledge and follow ideas 2. Empowerment to teach - Encourage to actively share knowledge and ideas 3. Openness to experiment - Challenge to break patterns and explore something new 4. Desire to understand - Foster to seek deeper understanding

Innovation is a iterative creative process and setting a vision is more fixed in time. Be open to reframing your vision depending on where your innovation takes you!

You need a clear understanding of the organisations long-term goals and strategic direction. This will serve as as your North Star. Next you need to ensure innovation is in the DNA of everyone, not just the founders. Establish feedback loops for employees to share innovative ideas and provide them with support to turn those concepts into reality. 3. Align innovation efforts against the strategic priorities to ensure business buy in and maximum impact. 4. Take everyone on the journey with you. 5. Document the journey. Develop a clear roadmap that outlines the innovation and holds people to account. Remember, innovation should be an ongoing process. Regularly review and refine to ensure marginal gains are achieved.

Innovation from the wider team works best when people are given guardrails around what is important. This focus actually enables creativity because it provides a starting point. I've seen and made mistakes around building nice things without being absolutely clear on how they affect the bottom line. Over the years, it's now become a habit to filter ideas based on whether they will impact revenue or costs and exactly how. OKR's are a great technique to achieve this impact. For example, in SaaS businesses, it's often retention rate, and relatedly, upsells/cross-sells. Making this known to the wider team and being crystal clear that their actions need to focus on these goals drives success. People then know how they'll be evaluated.

One of the keys to aligning innovation with company strategy is to get really clear on who your target customer is and niche down as much as you can to support their needs after getting clarity on your ultimate vision for the company. Who are we serving to meet our goal? Be clear, specific, and direct to who you are speaking to. Every offering is something that builds up to the larger vision and overall goals and gives your customer a journey. Engage with your customer base often and be nimble to adjust and flow with your plan as you receive feedback from them. Are you speaking to them in their language? Are you giving them what they ultimately need to thrive? Are these offerings getting you to your bigger vision and the results you desire?

Given the dynamic and sometimes restrictive nature of public administration there's a need for more adaptive and responsive approaches. Balancing the structured strategic planning with flexibility to adapt to public policy changes and administrative challenges is key to effectively aligning innovation with the company vision in such environments. The focus and push must be put on the companies. At present, this push is in the public administration.