How Ternova Created a Culture of Innovation in their Organization

Innovation is not R and D of a product. Innovation is not just doing something differently internally. It's really building the company of the future. That's really the concept of innovation that we're talking about here. What I had in front of me was a great team that could do a transformation for our core business. But we had no organization thinking of the disruption of the future. We were only looking at the problems, not the opportunities. So I needed to be the one in front of it. I needed to take the stand on that. And that really forced me to transform the way that I thought of my time allocation, how I run systems, and how a lot of this could be delegated with a lot of responsibility, with the right resources, and we could move forward. That's why that transformational process came aboard. We did three things internally. First, one was the innovation capability assessment to understand who internally was the best group to be delegated to this small SWAT team to start the innovation culture. Everyone that joined the innovation team originally, they all had the mindset, so we needed to have a fertile ground. Second thing was we need a mentor. We need someone to teach us the way. And so we had to find a mentor to help us. And this is where we found help. And then the third part is we need to talk to people that are way ahead of us. So we needed to talk to people in the entrepreneurial world. We needed to talk to venture capitalists, we needed to talk to people that were running corporate venture engines at big corporations, but we also needed to bring entrepreneurs inside to talk to us. So it's not a simple answer and you're not going to get it straight.