Get management buy-in and formulate a clear vision
Without a sponsor from the top, it will be a game of hit-and-miss. The innovation journey always starts with a clear vision with transparency in everything that follows–setting goals, creating value, measuring impact, and collecting feedback.
Form a winning team and give them the right tools
It’s crucial to help everyone across silos understand the often complex process of innovation end-to-end, and make it clear how each team stands to benefit.
“Flexible-enough structures in organisations can help to bridge silos and create open lines of communication and collaboration between teams.” says Noemi Rom, Head of Digital Consulting in Zühlke Asia. “One simple yet powerful approach is to speak a shared, inclusive language, with the goal of bringing people together and aligning their objectives.”
By creating an environment where eager talents want to try out and explore new tools and methods, we create a safe space to learn collectively. The future belongs to businesses who are able to pivot fast. Failing fast and learning fast will be an essential capability for upcoming challenges.
Invest in customer research
Customer focus and research are necessary if you want to produce effective innovations. You need to have a real problem you're trying to solve, and then you start ideating with customers in mind. That customer might be an internal stakeholder, a client, a buying centre, and so forth.
Data is the bedrock of the research process, offering the foundation to pinpoint growth opportunities and create measurable goals. Being data-driven enables you to clarify your objectives, measure your innovation's value to customers, produce cutting-edge solutions, and track your success.
At Zühlke, we involve customer feedback at every relevant touchpoint and share this feedback with the management. In one company I worked with, we developed a pilot cohort and performed a series of feedback loops. Once we launched the project to a larger audience, we had already refined it with valuable insights from the test-and-learn experience of the pilot cohort.
Encourage a mindset of continuous learning
Cultivating a growth mindset can help employees replace the fear of failure with a focus on constant learning and curiosity, allowing them to take calculated risks and embrace both successes and failures as opportunities for growth. Failure, after all, is an opportunity to grow. For instance, when you receive market responses after the launch of a new product, it’s crucial to integrate the feedback into your next launch for continuous improvement.
DBS Bank is one such company that embodies a passion for innovation. From launching Singapore's first ATM in the 1970s to becoming India's first mobile-only bank in 2016, the bank has been riding high on its successful digital initiatives. Harvard Business Publishing found it worthwhile to study the bank's “purpose-driven transformation” throughout the decades, from overhauling its systems to upskilling employees.
Separate radical innovation from daily operations
Radical innovation is often viewed as unrelated to day-to-day tasks and short-term goals, making it vulnerable to being sidelined when a budget or resource crunch hits. To safeguard long-term commitment to innovation, consider setting aside a separate budget and space to nurture ground-breaking ideas.
Typically, companies achieve this by building a different entity, such as an innovation lab. Alternatively, you could work externally. As mentioned in my discussion of an internal innovation ecosystem, you could create a new entity with other partners in the ecosystem. This could be helpful in securing buy-in and commitment for the long term.
Kickstart change with allies
Spark innovation in your organisation by enlisting a small group of open-minded employees to experiment with new ideas and serve as ambassadors of change.
"This is a community-based kind of learning, where we let select employees go through the experience of new ways of looking at the world and experimenting with new tools and methodologies. Once they learn and grow, they will spread the word," Noemi explains. "So change becomes a movement coming from the bottom up with the blessing from the top"
Another method of starting small is to carve out a sandbox, where employees can fail without fear of repercussions. "I think if we talk about innovation or trying out new things, permission to fail needs to be there. That's how you learn," says Noemi. Once you validate your idea, then you can transfer it to the business and scale it up."
In his book Digital Darwinism: Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Business Disruption, innovation leader Tom Goodwin writes: “The most successful companies today are the ones with the courage to challenge rules, who build themselves on different assumptions… but do so based on the next paradigm, not the last. It is companies who hope to survive by making small incremental changes that now lose out to the ones that bet big on radical innovation and change.”