All Subscription Economy IT departments, big and small are increasingly under pressure to ‘innovate or die’. While change is welcomed on paper, it takes a scarier form in server rooms and on account ledgers. Consider the following approaches to encourage and enable your team to innovate:
Half of the employees polled in an Accenture study said management support for entrepreneurial ideas was very important. But only 20 per cent said their company support it. When given the chance, employees who pursued an idea that reached success were 98 percent likely to pursue another idea.
The author’s of The Innovator’s DNA, Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen undertook a six-year study, surveying thousands innovative entrepreneurs, executives and individuals who started innovative companies or invented new products. Their research led them to identify five “discovery skills” that distinguished the most creative executives:
The authors say Apple’s slogan “Think Different” is incomplete. “We found that innovators must consistently act different to think different.”
How do we put these discovery skills into practice? Dyer and co-author Nathan Furr advanced those insights in their 2014 book, The Innovator’s Method: Bringing the Lean Startup Into your Organization. The process consists of four steps to solve problems of high uncertainty and turn insight into innovation:
Each step is critical and tests leap-of-faith assumptions in a repeated “hypothesis, test, learn” loop, say the authors.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg founded two start-ups, is the co-author of Innovation as Usual and is a partner in the advisory firm The Innovation Architects. He has spent the last eight years studying the practicalities of corporation innovation. He has seen the jobs Innovation manager, Innovation Director and VP of Innovation created and asks one unifying question. How do they manage their own progress?
“If you’re going to take an innovation job, make sure to buy yourself some time, and then, use that time to make sure you make a difference,” he says.