Thought Experiment #20: Less focus on innovation, more focus on experimenters

Update: What your colleagues are saying:

• "Great article. Fits right into my anti-bullshit campaign for '17" Chief Innovation Officer
• "This is THE approach for action esp. in innovation policy!" Deputy Director agency for enterprise
• "Good New Year inspiration for how to freshen up the Innovation game" Director, customer, digital and innovation for a bank
• "(you're) bringing visibility to a conversation that needs to be had, and often isn't...this need for honesty, transparency and collaboration in innovation. What you're publishing is great, spot on, so thank you." Innovation strategist

The writing is the easy bit, the hard bit is getting it seen by others. Therefore, please like or share IF you see any value in this blog, so others in your network may come across it.

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Through designing and delivering different innovation support programs for diverse clients, we summarise some of our learnings from 2 perspectives - what intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs really want and need less of/more of - and what innovation managers should do more of.

6 design principles of good innovation support: cut out BS support, design an innovation support funnel, escape "idea politics", shorten the distance between innovators and customers, create a community of more cocreators and fewer mentors, and write down explicit permissions to play.

1. Cut out the BS support (said more than a few intrapreneurs)

• Less of: Accelerate innovation.
• More of: Incubate experiments (create a systemic and systematic approach to experiments). Incubate outcomes. Incubate employees. Incubate customer. Why incubate? because it simply takes time to produce value.

Innovators need help to carry out the right experiments and do them faster, better and cheaper. The right being, aligned to strategy, rooted in problem and purpose, and bound by creative constraints of value.

An experiment is a humble attempt to put 'value' out there, measure how the world reacts to it, and then iterate or kill-off based on the subsequent learning.

By calling it 'experiments' we are making it accessible to more people, across the breadth and depth in our organisations. An experiment conveys -"I don't know if it will work for sure, but let's put it into action and just see what happens". An experiment naturally creates a constraint on you to 'act small' and sits firmly in the realm of marginal gains. Don't confuse an experiment with incremental improvement, even billion dollars ideas have started off as experiments.

Experiments don't carry as much baggage as 'innovation', are more accommodating of failure (because we've all had failed experiments), allows us to be judged on our learning and not just on outcomes, and inherently allows for greater individual ownership. The alternative is 'innovation', a term that is owned by the whole organisation (or even industry), where we're judged on outcomes way too quickly. Innovation is a marathon, an experiment is a sprint - and we're all capable of sprints.

As innovation managers, our job is to create the right environment by creating the rigour (balance speed with efficacy), a community of cocreators, the permissions, the accountability, the safe space to allow innovators to radically change the definition of the problem they're solving, and to manage a portfolio of many different types of experiments (from new business models to new customer growth experiments).

2. Support Funnel

• Less of: A hackathon here-a workshop there, which does not provide pre- and post support. Events serve a purpose at the organisational level, but at the individual entrepreneur/intrapreneur level, they are largely a waste of time. Caveat: unless potential customers/cocreators (see principle 5) are attending the events too.
• More of: creating and optimising your support funnel, that moves people (not just ideas) down the funnel.

One example of (our) support funnel:

An organisation should run hundreds of experiments, with the goal of "searching for new value". Then, you select the successful experiments to go through a greater level of support through [outcome] incubators, whose goal is to "create new value" in the form of first customers, first savings/revenue/funding, first team, first pivot, and first solution. Then, use these outcomes to create a case to incubate new roles. It's only by creating new roles that are we going to be able to scale these outcomes into new capabilities, capacity, systems and impact.

Zooming into [Experiment] incubators they are just one way to start building a culture of experiments. There many use-cases to these experiment incubators - for example, to help solve for a selection problem - finding, validating and investing in the right people across the organisation. The best selection is not done by jury or an online application process. It's best done by working with the individuals at the micro-level and seeing how they react to failures in their hypotheses, how much of getting out of the building they do, how fast they move, and whom they take along with them on their journey.

As Samad from Accenture neatly points out, "time" is the biggest barrier. In my view, this time should be stage-gated. As innovators progress through the support funnel the innovators time commitment increases. For example, experiments (less than 30 days long) are done on people's own self-carved time. [Outcome] incubators require at least 20% of their time, one a day week, where they choose one central outcome they wish to achieve in 8-weeks. And [role] incubators are when they become full-time to scale their outcomes to further heights.

Of course, the speed at which the ideas move forward depends on the type of experiments, appetite for risk, and many other organisational factors. One of the biggest issues we see is that ideas become programs way too quickly - they should move from an idea (or hypothesis, problem, need) to an experiment first before becoming a project, programme, feature, or product.

3. Escape "idea politics"

• Less of: focus on the idea in its current incarnation, micro-manage which experiments get approved or not, or build an ideation platform.
• More of: simply back the right people to carry out the right experiments

As soon as you focus on ideas, they quickly become a hot political potato. Managers often jump many steps ahead to second-order questions -whose budget will support this idea? Where does this idea sit within our existing business units? No matter how hard you try, the idea is exposed to prematurely formed emotions and biases. This at a time when the innovators haven't even figured out the first-order problems of whether this idea will work or fail.

Focusing on people, the emerging leaders, who've shown some progress with their experiments, are the best people to bet on. Focusing on people in your organisation means you can access the annual training budgets that have to be used every year and are nearly always wasted on conferences, workshops, e-learning - stuff that rarely produces results. Focusing on people gives them the creative freedom not to have to be rooted in the idea they originally proposed. Focusing on people, allows them to fight, and fight they must for what they believe in.

4. Shorten the distance between innovators and customers

• Less of: deliver programs in an office on the fifth floor just because it says "innovation lab" on the outside. Or create workshops inside the building.
• More of: deliver your innovation support virtually when and where the innovators need it.

The only thing that matters is helping the teams shorten the physical and emotional distance between themselves and their potential customers. Everything else is an artificial construct.

5. Fewer mentors, more cocreators

• Less of: consultants or mentors
• More of: create a community of cocreators

Innovators – entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs – don’t just need mentors, who come in once a month and provide a brain-dump of expertise, successes, failures and new ideas, they also need cocreators. These are people who can provide frequent interaction for a limited period of time. They help to solve a specific challenge or achieve an outcome that the team is working on; for example, getting the first ten customers. The role of cocreator differs from that of a mentor in many ways, not least in the way cocreators actively help the innovators with course correction. They not only offer a new hypothesis but also help with its execution, through experiments.

6. Explicit permissions to play

• Less of: giving the advice "better to seek forgiveness than permission"
• More of: Identify a barrier and then write down (and communicate the hell out of it) explicit permissions that help to negate that barrier.

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Call to action: I would love it if you would hit the share or like button, so others in your network may see these musings.

And, if you're interested, let's do a 30-minute call to explore further these learnings or others - please email at zevae@co-create.org