Jacob DuttonCorporate Innovation | Venture Building | Value Creation

Building a Corporate Innovation Engine - Component 8: Clear Communications

27 Feb 2023 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

2:05

In this segment Jacob Dutton emphasizes that corporate innovation teams often keep their discoveries and experiments hidden, missing the strategic advantage of sharing them. He proposes a structured communications plan that serves both internal and external audiences. Internally, the plan should act as the organization’s “eyes and ears,” capturing market trends, linking with M&A teams, and disseminating best‑practice insights across business units. Externally, the team should become the go‑to source for investors, public‑relations, and media, highlighting how innovation is driving growth, showcasing new propositions, and reinforcing a narrative of a growth‑oriented stock. By consistently broadcasting stories about team members, challenging problems, and event programming, the communications plan fuels a flywheel that attracts, develops, and retains top talent while amplifying the impact of innovation across the corporation.

Chapters

The next thing is kind of linked to experience, but I think when you work in corporate innovation, you do some really cool shit, right? You know, that's why I work in corporate innovation. I assume it's why you work in corporate innovation. It might be because you love learning new things every day. You know, I know, I know I do. And what do most of us do with all of the cool shit we see, with all of the things we learn? We lock it away. We don't really talk about it. Like, we don't really share it outside of the team. Whereas in reality, what we should have is a communications plan that helps tell the stories both internally and externally of what cool shit we're doing and what we're learning. I would think about it like internal and external comms. You know, internally, you know, you should be the eyes and ears for your corporation, capturing and disseminating interesting market trends, you know, working perhaps with your M&A teams to connect them to interesting startups that you see, maybe sharing best practices from, from other industries and different areas, both internally and externally. This kind of straddles both. What your communications plan should do is support the recruitment and retention of really great people, not just in your team, but across the business. And you can do that by sharing stories about your team members, broadcasting the interesting problems that you're working on, Talking about the event programming that we just touched on and how that contributes to ongoing development. And then externally, you know, you should become probably the favorite source of key stories for your investor or public relations team, talking about how you're disrupting from within, dialing up that you're a growth, not a value stock, and spelling out what your investment in innovation looks like. And also obviously talking about the successful new propositions that you're working on scaling. I wouldn't overthink this, but it does help to create this really nice flywheel. So that's component 8: share those successes inside and outside of the organization, capture and share learnings with colleagues and sponsors, and use these stories to recruit, develop, and retain top talent.