Corporate innovation needs three governance layers: a C-level sponsor who bridges the innovation team and organization, an internal board that reviews ideas like venture capitalists at identification, validation, and scaling stages, and an advisory board that manages skeptics and spreads the innovation agenda across functions.
Chapters
Most corporate innovation teams that we speak to have really poor governance surrounding them, from sponsorship to go/no-go decision-making on specific ideas, and creating like a soft landing zone for successful propositions within the organization. You're never going to build a successful corporate innovation capability, much less an engine, unless you have a C-level sponsor that acts as the conduit between you, the Mothership and the Innovation Engine board, which we'll come to in a second. The second thing that you need is to build a board made up of pretty influential executives from across your company who are capable of behaving like top-tier venture capitalists. And by that, what I mean is that they review your progress at each critical juncture, from identification through to validation through to scale, and they make decisions on progressing between each of them based on the evidence that you're uncovering and providing. They have to be able to let you leverage the IP, you know, access to customers and new markets that exist within the firm. The final thing that you need is an advisory board. Now, an advisory board is a really great place to put the naysayers within your organization, do some serious stakeholder management with them. But moreover, what you're trying to build here is a group of advocates that are there to provide expert advice, which could be on anything from manufacturing to supply chain to compliance, but they're also there to engage the rest of the company in what we're doing and taking the gospel back into their functions and units, essentially becoming evangelists for our corporate innovation engine. So that's component 4: get your efforts sponsored by a C-suite executive, obtain enthusiastic support of the broader leadership team, get Get some of them to sit on your innovation advisory board, and make sure that there's an established procedure for how you interface with other business units and functions.
