Preview video introducing "From Innovation Theater to Growth Engine," a playbook-style guide for large organizations to move from isolated, one-off innovation activities toward a repeatable innovation ecosystem. Sindaya Vicky (Associate Partner, Strategizer) explains the problem space (many disconnected programs such as accelerators, idea competitions, hackathons) and frames the solution as knitting these pieces into a coordinated portfolio, programs, and culture to create repeatable innovation and business growth.
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Like to help large organizations move from doing just one off innovation projects, but actually create an ecosystem that allows them to do innovation in a repeatable way.
Hi, my name is Sindaya Vicky. I'm an associate partner with Strategizer where I work with large organizations, helping them create their innovation ecosystems. What's interesting about innovation is that there's a lot of stuff out there in the world, right? So when leadership sees a lot of the kinds of programs that companies run, you can go into a company, find an accelerator program there with startups in it, you can do idea competitions, you can do hackathons. Nobody's really thinking about how all of those things combine together to create value. And so that's part of the challenge that large organizations are facing.
And so in from Innovation Theater to Growth Engine, what we try and do is help organizations figure out how to knit all of these pieces together so they can create a nice tapestry of innovation programs, portfolio and culture so they can create a repeatable process for driving innovation within their organization.
So there's three insights that we kind of land on Insight number. Number one is you need a really great innovation portfolio. And you need to manage your innovation portfolio in a way that's separate from how you manage your core products and services inside your organization. You need to make sure that your innovation portfolio is balanced so that you're not just working on improving your core business with efficiency innovation. But maybe you engage in sustaining innovation where you're taking some of your existing products to new markets, maybe you're creating new products for your current customers. But you also need transformational innovations where you're investing in totally new value proposition, the new business models that your organization has never worked on before. If you don't have a balanced portfolio, what we can say is you're probably efficiently innovating your way towards the death of your company. And we don't want you to do that. We want you to be improving your core business for sure, because there's a job you have to do. We want you to be thinking about how you navigate the company into the future. You also need to think about how you organize the activity. And the best way to organize the activity is to think about the innovation programs you're running. So some companies will have accelerators where they bring in external startups. Some companies will have incubators where they incubate internal teams. Some companies might even do like corporate venture capital activities where they invest and take stakes in external startups. The goal is to make sure that all these innovation programs that we're working on are actually creating value. There's really two jobs that you can do with innovation programs. One is to actually create net new revenue, net new profits, improve the company from a bottom line perspective. But there's another group of innovation programs that are focused on driving culture change. When we design our innovation programs, we need to really think, are we doing this to drive culture change or are we doing this to create net new revenue and value for our organization? What we don't want to do is, is to do an innovation program because we saw another company do it, because that's innovation theater. So we just need to really focus on making sure our innovation programs create value. The final pillar of a really great innovation ecosystem is the innovation culture. And with innovation culture, what really, really matters is the enablers and blockers that are in the way of innovation inside large organizations. The things that are often visible inside companies are people's behaviors and also the outcomes that those behaviors create. What's often invisible are the things that drive those behaviors. What we really want is to sort of put the right nutrients in the soil of your organization so that you start to create the behaviors you want. Really great leadership support where the CEO spends a lot of time, or at least a lot of leadership, spends a lot of time on innovation and supporting innovation. Really great organizational design with great incentive to motivate people to engage in innovation. Also giving innovation power within the organization and then a really great innovation practice where people have the right tools and processes for working on their project.
