INNOVATION

INSIGHTS Richard Gourlay

Strategist | Leadership | Speaker | Author

• BSc (Hons)

• DipM Fellow CIM

• ROI (Eval)

Richard Gourlay

www.cowdenconsulting.co.uk

Some Clients

Richard Gourlay

VISION is where you are going.

Leadership is about

defining and

communicating your

VISIONAn environment within

which people can

excel

Change is Accelerating

Change is

happening all

the time.

So you cannot

stay still.

Change is NOW

Growth Obesity Aging Population

What’s Driving Innovation?

The Drivers of Innovation

Need For Innovation

Technological Advances

Changing Customer

Needs

Pressure on Resources

Changing Health

Environment

Innovation

• Innovation is driven by rate of change outpacing the

organization's ability to organically adapt.

• Innovation is when people think different and make leap

forward in new approaches to solving a problem.

• Innovation happens at the edges of any market.

Innovation: New and Useful

Successful Innovation has 3 key rules:-

1. Creative Abrasion – Learn how to enquire.

2. Creative Agility – Test and validate ideas.

3. Creative Resolution – Make decision making

democratic

For innovation to succeed leaders must unlearn.

Leaders must make it safe and possible for people to

innovate.

Command and Control is to tell

Innovation: The Fly

Stop Children littering

Pay for your Tube ticket by recycling

Traffic Lights that count down

Innovation Dilemma

• Leadership must drive innovation: making it safe to

innovate.

• A SMART failure culture

But

• Complex organizations by their very nature suppress and

inhibit the trust and freedom required for innovation to

thrive.

• Innovation needs policing – it is a loose cannon

Requirements for Innovation

1. Leadership committed to supporting

innovation• Leaders must be fully committed to innovation, not just

this seasons fad – a long-term vision.

• Leaders can encourage breakthrough ideas not by cultivating followers who can execute but building communities that can innovate.• Creating champions and cross functional teams with authority to

drive change.

• Harness the collectable genius of diverse teams.

• Collaborative efforts must breakdown barriers between departments.

2. Communication: WHY innovation is

vital• For innovation to succeed everyone must know WHY!

1. Why must we innovate, can’t we just evolve forwards.

2. What is wrong with everything we have and have learnt.

• Leaders must communicate the rate and pace of change

is accelerating beyond what the organization knows and

can sustain.

3. Leading from behind

• Hierarchy kills innovation, here’s why:-

• 1. The leadership is too far away from the user experience

• 2. Leadership does not have the time to focus on innovation

• 3. The leadership is too small a population to populate ideas.

• 4. Leadership looks at the big picture, not the ripples of change.

• 5. Leaders are a product of the system, not champions of change.

• The great leader is like a shepherd: he stays behind the flock, letting

the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not

realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”

Nelson Mandela autobiography

4. Strategic Approach’s to Innovation

Traditional Approach

1. Adopt a “present to future”

orientation

2. Assume a rule-maker posture

3. Accept established boundaries

4. Focus on incremental innovation

5. Follow traditional, linear planning

6. Seek input from traditional

sources

7. Seek articulated consumer needs

8. Seek consumer satisfaction

9. Focuses on “one-size-fits-all”

organizational model

Strategic Innovation Approach

1. “Starts with the end in mind”

2. Assumes Rule Breaker

3. Seeks to create new playing fields

4. Seeks innovation: Revolution

5. Marries process discipline with creative inspiration

6. Seeks inspiration from unconventional sources

7. Seeks unarticulated consumer needs

8. Seek consumer delight

9. May experiment with entrepreneurial “new venture”

4. Strategic Approach’s to Innovation

Traditional Approach

1. Pressure of stakeholders to play

safe, resisting innovation

2. Internal power of people to

resist innovation

3. Skillsets within organizations to

innovate.

4. Pulls organizations forward at

the slowest pace they can.|

5. Leadership invests time in

carrying people forward

Strategic Innovation Approach

1. Demand for innovation

outpacing evolution.

2. Leadership to communicate

and lead innovation

3. Process for making

innovation happen.

4. Drives organizations forward

in response to demand.

5. Leadership invests in

supporting innovation.

5. Innovation is an embedded culture not

a rule book.• Results Only Work Environment: Google gave 1 day to

personal projects which delivered 50% of new ideas.

Strategic Innovation Framework

Building a strategic Innovation Framework which supports and drives innovation

requires more than just good intentions form the leadership, a Strategic

Innovation Framework to support and enable innovation as an embedded

culture.

Strategic Innovation Framework1. Managed Innovation Process

Have an externally - focused, exploratory approach that challenges the status quo and creatively inspires new thinking

2. Strategic Alignment

A leadership which drives a collaborative culture that encourages different departments working cross-functionally to identify and develop innovative solutions

3. Industry Foresight

A systematic process for actively monitoring and exploring emerging trends and developing alternative scenarios that represent either threats or opportunities

4. Consumer / Customer Insight

Directly involve consumers (both existing and potential) as an integral part of the innovation process as a means of identifying both articulated and unarticulated customer needs

5. Core Technologies and Competencies

Understand your core competencies and explicitly outlined the linkage between its long-term strategic goals and its R&D investments and technology strategies.

Strategic Innovation Framework6. Cultural Readiness

Demonstrate an innovative mindset, a bias for collaboration, an inclusive, non-bureaucratic decision-making style, a willingness to embrace change, and drive action.

7. Process and Structural Readiness

Has a mindset that develops operational processes and functional structures and allocates adequate staffing, funding and management support to high priority innovation initiatives.

8. Disciplined Implementation

Demonstrate your ability to create measurable business impact by taking a disciplined approach to the implementation of strategic thinking

9. Innovation Goals and Metrics

Has established innovation-related goals and measures for innovation.

10. Capacity for Sustainable Innovation

Take the time to learn from innovation efforts through reflection and be committed to deliberately building an innovation-based culture and instituting a set of innovation-focused methodologies

Cowden Consulting

• I work with businesses developing their strategy

and their people to create leaders of business.

Website: www.richardgourlay.com

LinkedIn: Richard Gourlay

Twitter @richardgourlay

Email Richard@cowdenconsulting.com

For these slides email me

Richard@cowdenconsulting.com