futurethink

In much the same way you track the performance of your financial portfolio, it’s important to regularly look at and evaluate your innovation portfolio.

Take a look at all the new offerings you’ve launched in the past 12 months – both big launches and small improvements – and tag each one as one of four things:

• Business as Usual: Projects and innovations you had to do in order to remain competitive or satisfy customer demands.
• Incremental: Projects and innovations that are small (low risk, low investment) improvements over your previously existing offerings.
• New to Us: Projects and innovations that were completely new to your organization and allowed you to better meet the needs of your customers. These projects brought you into new competitive territory.
• Breakthrough: Projects and innovations that were new to your company, and new to the market – those things that have never been done before that have the potential to change your industry.

Once you’ve tagged each of the projects you’ve launched, count up the innovations you had in each of these four categories. To manage risk effectively, make sure you are making both big risks and safe bets. A good innovation portfolio has a mixture of breakthroughs and incremental improvements.  Are you balanced?

One of the easiest ways to stay on top of innovation is to subscribe to the wealth of free e-newsletters and blogs on the topic. These newsletters can help you constantly build perspective on innovation, as well as provide you and your team with ideas for growth.

Apart from futurethinking, our own monthly newsletter, there are many other thought-provoking newsletters that can deliver innovation insights straight to your inbox on a regular basis. Check out trend watcher sites such as Springwise and PSFK, and innovation specific sites such as Innovation Tools and Innovation Watch to start.

You might then consider creating your own internal newsletter to ensure your entire team or organization is constantly being fed with fresh inspirations and insights that will keep innovation moving forward. Internal newsletters are a great way to not only keep people on top of the world of innovation, but also to communicate your company's innovation goals and to send out a call for ideas or direct employees to an internal innovation website where they can submit new ideas.

To help your organization more effectively communicate its innovation goals and strategies, it's important to begin by establishing a consistent vocabulary. By giving your team a clear lexicon to use to discuss innovation goals, you will not only enable more effective communication, but also more action around innovation initiatives.

There are many different approaches to innovation. We advise clients to break innovation down into manageable, understandable pieces that tie into their own business processes. You can gain some insight on a simple and proven innovation framework you can adopt from us (STRATEGY - IDEAS - PROCESS - CLIMATE) here.

Once you've established a basis for conversing on innovation topics, it's important to set an understanding for your organizations innovation "vision." In just a few sentences, try to encapsulate what innovation means for your organization. Pass your "Innovision Statement" around to colleagues and encourage them to help refine it. Once you’ve arrived at a clear, concise statement, communicate your vision in multiple forums so that everyone is on the same page and the ideas that you and your team generate are aligned with your goals.

What do your customers really think? What do they really need?

To answer this, many organizations often rely on packaged research reports and focus groups to gain customer insights. However, the former limits you to customer reactions on something you've already created; the latter can often be too broad for your specific market. While such data can be valuable, they also keep you at a distance when it comes to truly understanding your customers' latent needs.

Make a point of regularly interacting with your customers firsthand. You can do this by instituting ethnographic studies, in which you "shadow" your customers in specific situations to observe how they behave. By doing this, you may discover new uses for your product or uncover new solutions.
 
You can also hold “Voice of the Customer” sessions or individual customer interviews. Both are useful ways to learn about your customers and help you define what you can do to better serve them. The key is to avoid structuring your interactions too much. You don’t want to “lead the witness” and drive the conversation to particular conclusions—you want to hear your customers talk freely, openly, and honestly about certain situations so that you can apply your expertise to make that situation better.

Work with your team to identify the existing barriers between you and your customers, and then make a point of scheduling at least a few opportunities each year to break down these barriers and really listen to your customers for the sake of innovation.

What companies out there do you envy? Why? Innovative organizations know that they don’t always have to "build" innovation from the inside; they often leverage ideas and best practices from other leading innovators and adapt those ideas to fit their own needs and objectives.

Pick five companies that inspire you—the companies you think your organization should emulate. Try to include an assortment of companies from both your industry and other industries that you have little in common with. These should be your innovation role models. Every month, do a little research on these companies. Read a few articles about them and what they are achieving. Most importantly, try to uncover how they do it. How might these learnings apply to your organization? Can you partner with your role models in any way?

Having a set of key role models gives you a finite set of companies to track and study, which will give you a deeper understanding of how these organizations function as a whole. With that knowledge, you’ll arm yourself with countless insights and ideas for building your own organization.

One thing that "innovators" tend to have in common is their ability to look at ordinary objects, situations, or processes and see something extraordinary. They look at the world through a different set of lenses and see opportunities for innovation where others do not.

Here’s a fun exercise to help your team build this important skill. At your next innovation meeting, bring a grab-bag of ordinary items with you—a stapler, some rubber bands, paper clips, old CDs, some scissors—and set the items out on the table. Divide your team up into small groups and give each group a single item. Ask them to rethink the object: Rename it, describe what it does, who should use it, and why. The only rule is that teams cannot simply fall back on an existing use for their item—they have to rethink the item completely.

Give teams 20 minutes to brainstorm their ideas and write down their notes, and then go around the room and have each group present their new inventions. At the end of the exercise, discuss the activity. Was it difficult to rethink these ordinary items? Why?

Herbert Spencer was certainly on to something when he drew parallels between his own economic theories and Darwin's biological theories of "survival of the fittest" way back in 1864. Only the strong survive—that applies as much to organizations as it does to amoeba. How can your company remain competitive in order to survive over the next five, ten, or twenty years? More importantly, how is it going to evolve and grow? Start the year off strategically by trying this exercise with your team to find out:

Invite your team together for a Kill the Company brainstorm. The challenge: brainstorm as many ways as possible to ‘kill’ your company (put it out of business). Prior to the brainstorm, have your team members come up with a few answers to the following possible scenarios: What might your competition do to steal all your customers? What decisions might ultimately lead to your downfall? What could happen in the larger marketplace that would crush your operations?