The 5 key jobs in innovation

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

My name's Nick Himovic. Very pleased to be hosting this session today. Five key jobs in innovation. We have, of course, got Alex Osterweilder and Tendai Vicky joining us as well. Hey, Alex. Hey, Tendai. How are you both doing?

Hey, Nick. We're doing okay. I'm doing okay. I don't know about Alex. We've been on the road pretty good.

Just got back from Luxembourg today.

And how's Luxembourg doing?

Weather was bad, but it's a nice place. I've been there for the first time and great work with the local government and companies over there.

And it's a perfect segue to say let us know where you're calling from in the world. I'm calling from Moldova of all of all places. I wonder if we've got anybody from Luxembourg. But let us know in the chat. Alex and Tendai, of course, authors. We've got the Strategizer book series, but of course we've got Tendai's books here as well. Let us know which one's your favorite. I wonder if it's one of 10 days. You should definitely let me know. Okay, now, before we get into it, just a couple things that I want to mention. One is that you should definitely check out the Building Invincibles Building Invincible Companies masterclass, which is happening from the 23rd to the 25th of May, and Alex will be hosting that. And I think Eve Pinot will also be joining him as well. You can get your tickets@stragizer.com training so make sure you check that out. And if you'd like to join our virtual boot camp as an innovation coach, you can do that as well. Also, same, same place, strategize.com training and that begins on the 8th of May. So I really recommend those. And if you want to find out more about what we're doing, we offer advisory and coaching services. We have a great innovation platform and we also have training programs. So if you want to learn more, reach out at. Contact us@stragizer.com or sales. Strategizer.com now, in terms of today's session, there are three parts, A, B and C. First of all, we're going to talk about the professionalization of innovation, because that's really, when we, when we, when we first chatted about what we wanted to do with this webinar and why we wanted to do it was the real reason was because we want to help professionalize innovation. So this is. Alex is going to kind of set the scene with that. Then what we're going to do is talk about, break down the five roles of innovation and we're going to go through each one of them and give some examples as well. And then lastly we're going to go have a bit of time for a Q.

And a small analogy that I like to make is if you think back, many of you have probably been on the Internet for a while. You might remember the early days where if you managed how to do HTML, you could put up a website and you were basically state of the art, right? That's how the Internet was back then, pretty simple, pretty straightforward. And as an individual you could start putting up your website now. That was the early days. Today, you know, I, I asked, well, what were the jobs? Today's a little bit more complex, but I asked Chad, GPT, of course, our friend, you know, web development back then in the 1990s, what were the key jobs? And if you think back, it was super basic, right? Web designer. If you could do HTML, you could do that stuff. Then we had this term of webmaster, some of you might remember, web programmer, maybe graphic designer. But these were pretty basic jobs and with a little bit of practice and some tutorials, you could be state of the art back then in the web today. And I went back to ChatGPT and I asked, okay, what are the jobs in web development today, 30 years later? And of course the profession has matured and if you know how to do HTML today, well, you're definitely not going to make a state of the art website. So today creating great websites is a lot more complex and you have professionalization of jobs, separation into things like front end developer, back end developer, full stack developer, web designer, ux, ui, et cetera, et cetera. So this profession has matured and people have taken on specific roles. Now if you look at innovation after this kind of funny excursion into the web world, in innovation, we're in a pretty young profession, but one that is also getting a lot more professional. And you have a division of roles. It's not just, oh, the explorer type of entrepreneur in corporate innovation. No, we're going to look at specific roles where you do a specific thing and if you want to set up world class exploration in your company, you're going to have to fill those roles and it's probably not going to be one person doing it all. If you want to be state of the art today in an organization with more than maybe 100 people, you're going to have a team with specialized roles. So that's what we're Kind of going to get to. But Nick will kick us off with a quick question to see what you think. Which kind of professional roles do you see emerging in the context of innovation? In particular, corporate innovation? So, Nick, over to you.

Thanks, Alex. So we've got it here. What professional roles do you see emerging or already here in innovation? Use no more than two words, Tendai.

In the organizations that you've been accompanying from the early days on to today. Yeah. What would you say is the biggest change you've seen in professionalization?

I think it's more the explicit calling out of innovation rules. Because I remember when I first started at Pearson, for example, we didn't have explicit innovation roles in the team I was working, even though we were responsible for designing and driving the innovation framework. We were called the Product Lifecycle Team, which is more like a traditional term. I think over time there's this recognition that they. You need to start calling out this function or this kind of type of work as an explicit basis for probably even having a career. It's still early days, of course, but you are seeing that start to emerge.

Brilliant. We're starting to see some answers coming in now. We've got Chief Innovation Officer, Venture Builder, Business model designers. I think they're describing my CV now.

The one I saw on the thing was Ambidexterity Manager.

Some interesting stuff there, right? Yeah, yeah.

That wants to add.

I'll let that one professor play. Where is that? What organization has that role? Maurice?

Okay, it's gonna be interesting, right? What's the difference between Innovation Manager, Chief Innovation Officer. We're going to get into those things. Right. But I have never seen the Ambidexterity Manager, which is an interesting kind of topic. We have something like that, Right, that we're going to get into. Tender.

Yes, yes.

Go to Market Manager.

Go to Market Manager.

That's new Scouting Manager as well. Okay. And.

And what's interesting also to see is that everybody's putting their own terminologies. Right. So they're not that many besides maybe Chief Innovation Officer and Innovation Manager that stand out. Right. Which shows it's a young domain with, you know, there's not like in web development where I say, okay, front end developer, back end developer, those are categories that stand out. Or ux. So it seems like there are a lot of terminologies here.

And did you see the innovation ninja in the, in the, in the chat?

Yeah. So luckily I didn't see Pirate there or Rebel.

I'm really disappointed. That actually breaks my heart. Somebody just typed Pirate to make me happy.

Pirate in the Navy at least. Right. So. So maybe we can go to kind of our suggestion where we're going to highlight five key roles. Now, obviously there are a couple more and we'll get to more of them at the end and maybe we'll have also conversation. But basically, if we look at the org chart that we put up in the invincible company, which is now also a couple years old with chief entrepreneur, Chief Portfolio Manager Tenday and I sat down in Zimbabwe. Actually I visited Tenday last month, which is awesome. And we came up with key roles and we're going to highlight five and kind of put them over this org chart. And you could design your org chart a little bit how you want, but we would suggest that you have at the very least these five roles. So the first one, that could be the chairman, that could be the CEO, that could be the chief strategy officer. We call that the architect. And we're going to go into that. That is the person who designs the innovation ecosystem and makes sure that that that ecosystem is implemented right. And that's at the very, very, very top of the organization defining the vision. Tendai, do you see this role emerging? We're going to get into details a little bit more after.

Yes, I see the role emerging and we need to explicitly call it. I see like a lot of leaderships performing the role, but I think we need to sort of really call it out and maybe like standardize it and professionalize it a bit.

Okay. So one level down, you know, chief entrepreneur sometimes is mistaken as the person who does innovation, but we framed it a little bit differently. We call this the ambassador who creates relationships across the organization. So everybody buys into innovation. So it's a lot more a diplomatic role. And we used to have it actually down here, but we realized no, this is actually the role of the person heading innovation. The person who heads innovation needs to build alliances across the organization to create a space for the team that's actually going to work on innovation. So then one level down we have the portfolio manager, which we call the catalyst, making things happen, accompanying the projects and making sure we get real results in terms of revenues or impact if we focus on sustainability for from our innovation efforts. And then the pioneers, the actual innovators, entrepreneurs who pioneer new value propositions and business models within an organization. And then the last role we've added, which I think is very important in particular in this first phase where innovation is still pretty fragile in most companies and new we have the innovation coach, which we call the sherpa that accompanies the team concretely through the methodologies and tools to test and adapt value propositions and business models until you have enough evidence for this to work. So these are the five roles we're going to explore and as we've seen before when we did a little bit of brainstorming together, there are obviously more roles, but these are the five that we want to go a little bit deeper into. And we'll start with the architect. I'm going to show one example and Attenda is going to show example and one example before I look at the three key activities of the architect. So as I mentioned, the architect I'll get out of the way here. Is at the very top of the organization and makes sure that innovation has a strategic role, that the vision is clear of what innovation is supposed to achieve. And the example we used here is Hubert Jolie, who turned around Best Buy and we had him on a webinar a couple of years ago. And he even admitted that one of the mistakes he made is that initially he thought innovation can live within the business units who are running the business. And he admitted that that's just not possible. So yes, you can have innovation teams within business units, but you need to give innovation more power and a separate function which they called the Strategic Growth Office with a powerful position. So Corey Berry took that one over. Otherwise you will not see innovation happen if it's just within the functions, because the functions and the business units are incredibly busy just running the business. So he admitted making that mistake first and then moving towards creating the Strategic Growth Office. And the interesting thing here is Corey Barry, who was leading the Strategic Growth Office, took over innovation, took over from innovation, the CEO role afterwards. So I often say, you know, being in innovation is sometimes career suicide. This is a good counter example where the person leading innovation, the Strategic Growth Office, became the successor to the CEO to Hubert Jolie. And by the way, you want to check out his book, the Heart of Business, highly recommended. Now the second example we have, Tendai will talk about it is not the CEO but is a role just one level down. So maybe Tenda, you can talk about Sergio and what he has done at Sealed Air.

Yeah, so when we started working with Sergio and he brought us in to try and help him build the innovation ecosystem within, within Sealed Air, he was very focused on making sure that he had the right structures and processes in place. He quickly realized that if he, if he went down to the idea level and focused on ideas and how ideas are manifesting and are being managed within the organization. The interventions would not be long lasting. They wanted to make sure that he has the right organizational design, he has the right structures and processes, the portfolio management systems are set up properly. The way that decisions are being made at the innovation board level or the decision making investment council are happening the right way. We're using the right tools and templates. And so that became his focus to nurture and sort of put in place the right systems and talent for, for innovation to actually work out. Because his concern was that things would start and stop and start and stop and there was no repeatable process in place. And that's what he really wanted to make sure happened. So it was a piece of work that was focused of architecting the processes that I used to run and drive innovation, including putting in place the right organizational structure, putting the right talent in the right place as well.

So let me go quickly into the key roles, the key activities of the architect. And I want to emphasize again, so this is at the very top of the organization. So sometimes, you know, we say, oh, it's the chief Innovation Officer, but we'll define that role a little bit differently. We put this one level up where you really define the entire direction and the system. And that needs to come from the very, very top. Ideally, Chairman, CEO could also be like with Sergio, the Chief Strategy Officer. So first role, and it's not one we always see, is setting the vision and strategic goals for innovation and ensuring the alignment across the leadership team. If this is not done, the innovation teams don't know where to go. The rest of the company doesn't know the position of innovation and the role of innovation and in the future. So while this sounds pretty trivial, we still see organizations that have a strategic direction, a strategic vision, but innovation is not part of it. But it should actually be, you know, the strategic direction, including innovation. So it's very clear to the entire organization how much is innovation going to contribute to the future of the company? Again, sounds trivial, not always done. And it's mainly done when you have an entrepreneurial CEO or you have somebody in the strategy office as a powerful position and can set this direction. The second role is one that we mentioned a couple of times, is designing the actual system. So at the very top, we don't pick the ideas, we set the direction, but the other really important thing that we need to do is build that system. System meaning the resource allocation. What do we invest in, what types of innovation? Giving innovation power and legitimacy by designing it into the org chart and making sure that the Rest of the organization understands the position of innovation, not just the role in terms of strategic direction, but how this system works so that anybody who wants to innovate can turn to innovation, to the exploratory kind of system that we're building so that we can actually innovate. And then the last role here is, or the last activity is making sure you design and manage an innovation culture. And this can only happen from the very top. An innovation culture cannot be created bottom up. There's a bottom up kind of behavior, but it's only by the top down system that we can really create and manage that innovation culture. And that means also removing all of the key blockers in innovation. One of the things I want to emphasize is people always ask, well, hey Alex, you know, how do we incentivize innovators to innovate? Well, number one, you don't actually need incentives, you just need to tear down the blockers and innovators will innovate. Then after maybe two or three years, when these innovators have created, you know, multi million or multi billion dollar kind of business opportunities, that's when they also want a little a piece of the pie and then the last one. And Tenda, you talk about this a lot, is constantly providing air cover for the innovation leaders and the innovators. So Tendai, maybe you can just emphasize a little bit what you mean with air cover. Right. It's a big thing.

Yeah. I mean if you're the architect, especially if you're at the C suite level. Right. You're trying to balance demands on resources, time. And so when innovation doesn't have legitimacy and power, that's really hard. And that becomes the role of the architect to actually make sure that there is that kind of like air cover. So that when there's conversations about where do we make a sacrifice, where do we cut? Is the innovation team designing something that's about to cannibalize an existing product? Those kinds of environments is really where the architect can step in and go, yes, I understand that's the situation, but that's exactly where we want to go. And that then empowers the rest of the innovation team to be able to go out there and actually do the work.

So Imran has a good comment in the chat section. So saying the big challenge I've seen is that companies invest in innovation org constructs during good times. But the first wave of folks to be restructured is the same innovation teams when cost cutting happens. So I would agree that that happens when the architecting hasn't happened at the very top, it's when it actually happens at one level down at the Chief Innovation Officer who doesn't have the power to institutionalize these things. When it happens at the very top, we have not seen that happen. When it happens one level down, we actually have multiple examples where innovation, successful innovation engines have been cut, but that's when the top was not fully involved. So I would agree and disagree with Imran that it does happen, but not when the architecting has happened at the very, very, very top.

And you need to make sure that you have authentic buy in because sometimes you'll come to you do a presentation, they go, yeah, I've got to do that.

Yeah.

But they're not investing their own time and their own political muscle into, into making sure that happens. In that case, yeah, they don't feel like they've invested anything. And so. Yeah.

Okay, so over to you, Nick. So we have the question and people are already answering, right? Do you have a strong architect in your organization? And maybe we should have said a strong architect at the very top, right? Setting the direction, setting the clear goals, resource allocation and building that system. So Nick, what do we see?

So in terms of the question, we're seeing a 2.3 at the moment, which is, means that people are closer to non existent and very strong on that side of side of things. So yes, there's, there's room for improvement.

On this one and that's typically what we do see in companies. So in, you know, the, the workshops I've run, I was in Barcelona last week and in Luxembourg this week. The innovators often say that at the very top they do not yet have that buy in and systems building. So we have strong innovation leaders and strong innovation activities, but we don't yet have that architecture that gives innovation power within the organization.

So the ambassador is in one sense where you typically find the roles of like the head of innovation, chief innovation officer, chief entrepreneur. That's where you kind of tend to find those roles. And you know, when we first started doing this work, most of the conversations were around, you know, the value creation aspect, which is making sure that innovation projects become successful, making sure that the ideas are working really well, you're choosing the right ideas. But actually what we have discovered through various conversations, and I'll let Alex stick to one particular situation, is that it's actually far more important in this role to build relationships and make sure that the work that the innovation team is working on is actually aligned to the company's overall strategy.

So that was a very painful story that the company and the person shall remain unnamed. But he became a good friend and, you know, he built a very, very successful exploration engine with really strong innovation portfolio projects, you know, over 50 projects and so over a couple of years. And you know, the whole thing was cut back for various reasons. Definitely not success, because the success was there. So that's maybe back to Imran's point. In that particular case, despite the success, the innovation activities were cut back because of external context. And what our friend has, our friend ambassador has actually mentioned is he realized afterwards that you spend way too little time on building internal relationships with the key functions, but also with the key leaders and the key board members. So there was not, there was some support, but just not enough to survive, you know, a restructuring. So it is something that we see. So Imran's point is, is correct. But in that particular case, the. There was no architecting at the very top. Right. This was happening one level down and there were not enough relationships that were created which ultimately led to the thing disappearing. Could it have turned out differently? Very possible, not certain, of course, but definitely something. We realize that many of the innovation leaders should be more ambassadors and politicians rather than actually doing.

Exactly.

Innovation work, Right, Exactly.

And that's in response to your question there, Matthew. You're asking what's the distinction between the Ambassador and portfolio management? Portfolio management focuses on what's in the portfolio, the projects, what progress are they making, are they getting the right investment? But the ambassador role is really building relationships because what you really start to realize is that innovation does not succeed on its own. But by the time we want to get the thing out to market, different other functions are actually contributing to the success of the project. And just to give another example, a bank in South Africa, 14 successful innovation projects, MVPs, customers demanding. And they couldn't get anyone in the core business to take that up. And the first question I asked them when I arrived was, who was expecting this? When you started working on it, who did you align with? And that was an interesting conversation. And then at TD Ameritrade, we, the innovation team used to call themselves the Home for Homeless Ideas. And then they realized that when ideas are homeless when they get there, they're going to be homeless when they leave. And that's where you really need, you need the Ambassador role. And so in our work with Tribal Foods, which is based out of Wisconsin, the Chief Innovation Officer really understands that a big part of his role is building bridges with the core business to ensure that they're really working on things that are aligned. I like that Vinnie refers to himself as WD40. Like he, he views himself as like the person like taking out all the friction that, that could stop the innovation team from actually succeeding. And most of the friction is not within the innovation teams themselves. Most of it sits within the bigger organization where you then need to build those, those, those, those, those relationships. So the ambassador role is again aligning with leadership on strategic goals for innovation, which is really important because if you're working on stuff that is not aligned to the company's strategic goals, it's hard to get that stuff to actually scale. And then you know, you can design and manage the programs. You can work with your portfolio managers to make sure that you know the returns being delivered because that's something that's still being demanded of you. And then you can then be really the WD40 and support these innovation programs by removing barriers and blockers. And you can only do that in collaboration with the architect and in collaboration with the cto, the CFO and all other functions that have a point of view on the innovation projects becoming successful.

Yeah, just one thing that came to mind was is it the WD40 but is it also the gaffer tape? Sometimes it needs to keep things stuck that need to stay stuck, you know.

Exactly. It's more like the gaffer tape. The gorilla tape.

The gorilla tape. There you go. Okay, let's have a look. So we're back to where we were before, back onto Mentimeter. So do you have a strong ambassador in your organization? Is it non existent or is it very strong? At the moment we've got, we've got a good 30 people in there already. Again around 2.2, 2.3. So you know, it's on the close to non existent but it is happening in a lot of places. But we're certainly not, we're still have got a long way to go in terms of being very strong.

I like Kathy Master was like no. And then.

A quick comment on a little bit of a pivot that we made, you know, regarding that org chart that we showed before. We had the chief entrepreneur and we had the ambassador. So one of the pivots is actually that the chief entrepreneur is the ambassador, so not the portfolio manager. The chief entrepreneur is the ambassador in the sense of building those relationships, connecting everybody, but also making sure that the vision of innovation is understood and how it creates value. So what was set out as a strategic direction by the leadership, the ambassador then constantly, constantly reminds everybody in their organization of how this works and connects the pieces. And we've seen that in one very, very big consumer brand that, that the Chief Innovation officer was this type of ambassador and could do this role because he's been in the organization for quite some time and has created result as, you know, a business leader before, so had a lot of legitimacy and was embedded within the organization, already had a lot of connections. So the ambassador role that we put in the middle, actually we see that now more as the role of the chief entrepreneur, or what some people call the chief Innovation officer. So let's go to the catalyst, and some of you already brought it up. The portfolio manager, actually. So that's what we call the catalysts, who designs the implementation of the framework. So here we're really one level down. And our friend Karim from Seal, there is a good example here of making things work, making sure that the portfolio produces results and that, you know, we, we get things coming out of the innovation engine that we're setting up. So very important role, very different from the ambassador, where it's about, you know, making that system work and constantly creating relationships. Here it's down to the hardcore innovation work if you want. Not the exploration of ideas, but, but putting the portfolio together and. Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah. Karim and I spent hours and days just like designing the frameworks, putting the tools and process says, like, you know, as VP of innovation and portfolio and project management. So there he is really great at like, almost like making sure the mechanics of how innovation runs through the organization work really well, ensuring people are submitting things at the right time, they're working on where they're delivering and actually producing results, that it's a very, very powerful and important role.

And the second example that we have here is Sarah Stablefeldt from Schreiber Foods. And you can see the difference here. Right Here we're working at the portfolio and team level, empowering the teams, whereas one level up, and we don't necessarily need to speak about levels in terms of hierarchy, but, you know, there is the more organizational level where we're creating alliances across the organization. Here it's all about empowering the teams. So there's some similarities. Right. So you also need to go into different functions, make sure, you know, with key account managers that the teams, the innovation teams, have access to customers, etc. Etc. Sounds trivial, not always the case. Right. The key account managers don't want innovation teams to talk about the future because they want to get their bonus and sell today. So there is that diplomatic relationship as well. But it's really focused on helping the teams get results and unlocking the teams. So if we look at the different activities, roles, the top three for the Catalyst is to manage the portfolios, to track the team's progress and also collect the performance data to make sure we're getting results from our innovation portfolios, right from the projects that we're running. But then there's this big kind of catalyst role of unblocking, unlocking teams and making sure they have everything they need in terms of coach support, but also innovation infrastructure, maybe digital factories or access to brand, access to marketing, access to customers, making sure that infrastructure is humming so that the teams can actually explore and do their work. And then the last one, making sure that what we discover from the teams, what is holding teams back, gets reported to the C suite. So we take action. Because it's never a smooth journey. There's always challenges for the teams and this is generally something that only leadership can unlock.

Yes. And I can see that we only had 11 or 12 people in there, but it was at 1.6. But now as more people are joining, it's going up, it's 2.2, 2.3. So see it moving towards the stronger side of things than it was at the beginning. Yeah, but, yeah, so similar, similar kind of feeling to the Catalyst on this one compared to the last two. Really. Although going up to 2.4, hovering around that 2.2 to 2.4 area.

I'm really surprised by this because in a lot of the organizations that we work with, we see a lot of innovation program managers. Right. Portfolio managers that are driving innovation programs, driving, driving accelerators, a lot of innovation directors. So they're kind of playing this role. So I'm not surprised that the score is that low in terms of trying to, of finding catalysts. That's a, that's a, that's, that's very interesting.

There's, there's one thing here. So I'm absolutely with you on that. That's surprising for me as well. Tendai, just want to go quickly to a question. One or two questions that came up for smaller organizations are saying one, oh, you're just doing, you know, you're describing roles for large companies. What the difference is in, in smaller companies, you're still going to need these professions, but you might have one person that's going to combine two or three of these roles. Right. So if we look at the architect still at the CEO level, and then the last two, three roles that we were looking at could be combined in one person Right. Where you have the ambassador, where you have the catalyst, you know, combined into one role. So the same things need to be done in smaller organizations generally a little bit easier because you don't need that big ambassador role. So some of those things actually go away in smaller companies. But you'll have one person that will aggregate some of these roles that today in larger companies we would put a specific person in charge of that.

And just to piggyback on that comment, Alex, sometimes you might even find in large organizations the person does two, maybe two of those roles. But if you are going to do that, if you are going to have a person do more than one role, which they can do, then they need to sit at the right level in the organization. So you can have a person who's sitting at the lower levels of the organization be both the catalyst and the ambassador. Because to be an ambassador you have to be having peer to peer conversations with other leaders within your organizations to smooth things over. And so that's a harder thing to do depending on where you sit. So some roles are easier to combine and some roles that are harder to combine depending on where you sit in the, in the organization.

And one thing I'd also like to emphasize that we always say, oh, smaller companies, you know, we don't have enough resources. I think rule of thumb, you know, think of how many people you put in sales. Sales is today getting results from what you have. Innovation is about getting results from tomorrow. So personally, I believe any company should put 5 to 10% of their staff on the future in an exploratory role. So if you have 300 people, I believe you should have 15 people working on the future because that's future sales. And if you don't innovate, you will have no future sales. So I believe there's this misconception that oh, smaller organizations, we have no people. It's because you didn't make the choice to put people on it. And that's the same in large companies. If you take a large company with a hundred thousand people, the innovation teams, they say, oh, we have 40 people. That makes no sense because that's way too small for an organization with ten thousand, with hundred thousand people. So we are understaffing one of the key things today, which is looking at the future. And that's the same for small organizations or for large ones. So I think it's just because we are not putting the money where we should. And if leadership understands it, in small organizations or in large organizations, they're going to put 5% to 10% of their staff onto the future. Because if you don't, you have no future.

Tendai, I think you're on mute. Always had to happen.

Yes. It has to happen at least once every webinar. So the next role is what we call the Sherpa and the shepherd is the innovation coach. In a lot of organizations when they're working on innovation projects, they still don't have sufficient skills right. Within the teams that are working on the projects directly for them to actually run the innovation projects themselves or go from idea to a successful business themselves. So one way to quickly build capacity is to bring in coaches either from outside the organization or develop your own internal group of innovation coaches that help and support the teams. You can really see that clearly here. There are a couple of few examples here. This is Jonas, who is one of our strategizer coaches who really talks about how the role of the coach is to wear two hats, right? One is you have to be really great at the methodology and tools but then you also need to be able to move the team forward to make progress so that they actually start to get results. Melissa, who works at Stripe of Foods with Vinnie and Sarah, who we've seen before, she does more than coach. She also is one of the innovation programs managers which also works directly with the teams just to make sure that they're actually advancing their business ideas in a way that allows the company to hit their portfolio goals. And then finally we have the great Aurelie who's also another one of our coaches who really talks about how her role is to guide, motivate, reassure and challenge the teams and through the various things that they have to figure out, the ecosystem, the product itself, what customers need, how do you scale in the political and legal environment site. So it's really helping the teams figure out how to become successful while they do their work. And she had a little end at the end where she was like that's why we're great or something like that. And Nick and I decided to kind of like part that. But it was a, it's a really cool way to really think about the role of the, of the coach or the shepherd. And so here the role is to support teams while they design, test their value proposition, making sure they're making progress and also support them in making decisions. What on on what to do next. To be a really great Sherpa, you can't be too afraid to challenge the teams, but you also can't be too aggressive in challenging the teams and you can't do the work for them. So you have to somehow figure out a way to inspire and motivate them in terms of making decisions, tracking progress and actually doing the, you know, making sure that they do things. So you have to push them and get them out of their, out of their comfort zone. I don't know, Alex, if you have anything else to add about on top of that.

Yeah. So I think, and we're gonna see this with the next role. So you need coaches when you get teams who've never done innovation. Right. The more people have done innovation again and again and again, the less they need coaching because it becomes their profession. So the more we go to business model innovation and where we have entrepreneurs types been doing just this, the less they need coaching. But when we're in, you know, digital transformation, we're building new apps and we're, you know, incremental innovation or new products, that's where coaches can really play a strong role because they're going to accompany teams and people whose main job is to run businesses to manage. So again, the coach is not necessarily for everybody because ultimately you should also have professional innovators who do just that. They don't need coaching because they know exactly what they're doing. But I believe you'll always have both. The more we're to incremental innovation with managers and doers, the more you need coaching because they need that accompanying.

All right, so Nick, over to you for the, for the question, let's see how much coaching people have in their organization.

Yep. You can see now we're starting to move more towards the right. We've got 11 answers. Oh, but it's coming to the left now. So it started off as very strong with this, but it's moving a little bit more, more towards the non existent side, which I'm surprised by as well. But for this one, what do you think, Tenda? I can see you smiling.

Yeah, it's fascinating. It's, it's as if we're learning that organizations don't have a lot of these roles in them. They don't have any of these roles. Right. But I think it, it really speaks to, because when we were setting up the webinar just now, we're having a conversation and Alex and I were betting that as you went down towards the shipper and the, and the pioneers who are coming up next that you would have more within organizations and you'd have less at the higher levels. But it seems as if nothing happened.

It's reminding me, it's reminding me of the comment that Bogdan made, which is that you could have innovation sheriffs. And then I said, well, what about innovation cowboys? And so it's decided it's still the Wild West a little bit. And that's why this is so important that we're trying to help professionalize this. So it's really pertinent.

And I do think this might actually depend on the size of the organization. So obviously you'll have more people doing innovation in smaller companies because they won't afford coach and they might not need coaches because they have one or two people who are doing innovation all the time.

Right.

Who are themselves the experts. So that could be one explanation. But I do think, you know, sometimes you just want those people who've been doing this for, for ages, they're just better at it. And you know, you can't get that coaching because that's their profession. So we also see some companies who say we don't want to internalize internalized coaching. They always go with outside coaches and some companies they want to internalize. Our preference is to get companies to build an internal coaching function because that's a lot more trusted.

The Sherpa is the one with the least that that's been number two. We've got two that's closer to non existent than the other ones.

Which surprised, I think Juliana's comment really explains maybe why that might be. I think there's a lot of external coaching but not strong Sherpas within the organization. So maybe if we had frame the question of do you have coaching available? And maybe we might have a, we might have had a higher number, might.

Have had a different, different answer. And I like Kathy saying no to everything. Yeah, no, we don't have. We don't have. So let's go to the last one which we call the pioneer actually. And with the pioneer we mean the innovator or the entrepreneur. Again, it depends a bit. You know, the closer you are to the core business, the more it's incremental innovation. It's a little bit less pioneering, but still you're pioneering new stuff which could be, you know, as, as simple as a new app for the, the sales team by digitizing some of the things that haven't been done before or if we take pharma, you know, clinical trials that are digitized, but then the real pioneers, and this is not real in terms of value judgment, is building entirely new business model. That's when we get closer to entrepreneurship and that then gets, gets really, really hard. So one of the things there definitely Is this ability to experiment and work differently. And I think this is the biggest challenge because pioneering, exploring new value propositions and business models, constantly testing and adapting, constantly making decisions every week with an insane speed and overcoming obstacles all the time, don't have access to the, to the, to the customers because the sales team doesn't want to give me access or you know, seeing contradicting data and I need to find a pattern. Pioneering is extremely hard, right. We're getting closer to the profession of entrepreneurship. But what's great in companies, we can have salaried entrepreneurship, we can have professional entrepreneurs who have a salary so they actually take less risk. Some might say, you know, oh, there will be less hunger. I'm not so sure actually. I think, you know, the innovators that we see, they're driven to create new stuff, they have a similar passion, but maybe not the same risk appetite as entrepreneurs who go out there and do it with venture capital, which is a completely kind of different animal and requires a different kind of risk profile. But I remember, you know, small anecdote talking to Bracken Darrell a couple of years ago, two years ago, I think CEO of Logitech musing around this idea. Could we have salaried entrepreneurs on the payroll of companies? I do think it's a slightly different profile, but I do think there is something there where we can have entrepreneurs who are paid to explore within companies. Because at the end of the day companies have something that startups don't have. They have assets like customers, brand ip. So entrepreneurship or entrepreneurship within companies can be pretty interesting. So if we look at the different kind of activities and roles, well, number one job is making progress towards value propositions that customers care about. Not in a PowerPoint deck, but something that you know, is validated where we get to product market fit embedded in, in business models that are profitable and that can scale and produce real revenues. And that does mean being extremely proficient in these tools and methods and processes to test and adapt business models and value propositions to produce evidence to, and this is the big one, recommend either pursuing the idea within the company, iterating into a new kind of project, or and this is the big one, killing the business idea or retiring the project. That needs to be a legitimate decision. Because as I always ask, there are too many zombie projects. You know, to this group, do you have zombie projects that should be killed in your organization? Probably most of you will say yes. Why are they not killed? Because we don't have yet evidence driven kind of decision making with pioneers who recommend to Kill ideas. And then the last one, identifying and reporting the blockers to innovation so that we can create a real ecosystem that works. We do need to report up to leadership when something is not working, when something is holding the pioneers back. And I think Tenday, you do this exercise quite a bit, right. You ask the pioneers, which hoops do you need to jump through to create results? Yes.

So like when we start our innovation maturity assessment because we, we have this offering where we evaluate companies maturity assessments, we start by asking the pioneers, if you had an idea that you wanted to work on, what are all the things you would need to do to get that idea to be invested in and then actually getting resources to work on it and then take it out to the world. And that's when you start to hear the story. Well, first I have to get my line manager to sign off, then I have to complete the 35 page business case. Then I had to. So you see all the hooks they have to jump that are really like blockers to, you know, towards innovation. And I think that's what we want to identify and report back up the food chain to make sure that things are working well.

So let's see Nick, how well are we doing in terms of pioneers with this group? Does this group in their organization have strong pioneers? I'm very curious to see what's going.

To come already with the few than 10 people that we've had. 2.4, 2.7.

I want to know what Kathy thinks. Kathy, you have to type something. She said no. Kathy says no is now a meme.

I think there was a question, the.

Strongest one we've seen so far.

Yeah. And, and it is something that we, this was an assumption that we had before also. Right. That bottom up you actually do have people who are doing pretty good work who, who are testing ideas. Unfortunately, when the system doesn't really work, these ideas rarely scale even when there is evidence. Right. So the organization will mobilize all its antibodies to kill validated ideas. So we've seen this again and again. One is to get the innovation process started, getting a portfolio going. Where we see a lot of challenges today is in companies scaling validated projects. So this seems to be also a little bit the case here. So Tendai, there was a question about what do you think about entrepreneurs in residence? So I have mixed feelings. I'm not so sure. Haven't really seen it work, not work yet. I haven't seen a lot of cases. I'm a big fan of people in companies identifying with the brand, having Been there for a while, driving real projects. I don't have that much experience with entrepreneurs in Residents. Have you seen this? Do you have an opinion on this?

I think what we really care about, and it's a philosophy that we have as an organization is what do all these things leave behind? And so do they leave behind a new portfolio of projects and new business models that have become successful? That's hard, right? Because we don't really see that that often do they leave behind capabilities for the organization to be able to innovate once they're gone, we don't really see that because it becomes like, you know, it's an us and them situation where, you know, the cool kids are doing their thing in the venture studios or wherever they are, meanwhile the rest of us are running the core business. So I think it's really, it's really important if you do go for entrepreneurs in residents to make sure that they really are having an impact on the, on the, on the organization. Right. You know, the successful founder, startup founder, Tail juice and his jeans and laser.

It's a big one. It's a big one, right? Because then it becomes innovation theater. So I don't think we can judge, you know, do entrepreneurs and residents work or not? It can work within a system where there was an architect who built a system where there's ambassadors who connect the things. Right. So often you need all of these pieces for an entrepreneur in residence to work. So per se, we can't judge when the ecosystem doesn't exist. These things become innovation theater.

It's interesting, Alex, Atif asked the question, you and I had a long conversation about this, like, what do you do at the country level? Remember? And we'd like designing roles at the country level. And we were just having a conversation. So Atif is asking, does this work? You know, at the country level? And I remember the country level, we had the business owner or the owner of the business models, and then we had like different roles that we were talking about. But you still need to make sure that there's a bridge between the country level and the core business. So you do need to play the ambassador role. You do need to make sure that the teams are being coached properly so that they're delivering value. So there's a lot that you still need even when you're operating, operating at a country level. Maybe we just slight tweaks to make sure that, you know, it's kind of relevant for contact 100%.

And I remember one of the conversations I had with the CEO of a large financial institution with 50,000 people. And the point I was making is you need an innovation function that is standalone where you can do business model innovation. You might get teams coming from the core, but that needs to be a protected space in itself. But then you also need innovators within the business units, within the countries, and they need to collaborate with the function. Right? So I would almost call these antennas, but they use the same methodologies, the same KPIs, the same processes and they constantly share. So it's not either or, it's. And sometimes people say, Alex, Alex, you don't get it. It should just be, you know, it should be embedded. Well, yes and no. It should be both. Right. You need a separate function for the whole coordination for the systems building for business, small innovation. And then you need really strong antennas within the teams that have legitimacy. So you reproduce some things in a larger company that you do at the corporate level. And one thing. So before we get to the score that you put up, Nick, somebody was saying, I don't remember who it was. Yes, we have these roles, but people are doing them beside their core job. And I think that's the challenge, right? If we really say this is a profession, we need to, even in companies that have, you know, 150 people or 300 people, we need people who do this as a full time job. If you really take the future seriously, you put people on this full time, you don't have in it in the company with more than 300 people, you have full time salespeople. Like, why would you not have people doing innovation? Right? So this analogy between sales selling today and selling tomorrow and somebody quoted the Steve Blank quote run forly, right? You know, the, the core and pays the salaries and the innovation function, the exploration pays the, the, the, the, the, the rent, the future, the pension. I think that we need to keep into account. If we don't invest in the future, we're not going to have a future.

A couple other things, but we'll get back to one more question before we do finish. We've got the Building Invincible Companies masterclass that you should definitely check out. I'm just in the way here. There we go. That's better. It's going to be with Alex and Eve tickets. You can get them at strategizing.com forward slash training and that's from the 23rd to the 25th. I highly recommend checking that out. And also if you want to really get deeper into being an innovation coach, you should join the Strategizer Virtual Bootcamp which is on the 8th of May and you can apply@stragizer.com training as well. And if you want to find out, if you want to learn more about how Strategizer can help your organization with innovation, email us salesrategizer.com I'll also put a poll in a second and you can drop your email in there if you want us to contact you directly. The next webinar is going to be the Anatomy of a Successful Innovation Accelerator with Anita Deshpandi from Alexion. She's the head of Digital Health and Experience Innovation, so also the head of the accelerator there. So it's going to be a really interesting webinar there. But just before I think we've got a couple of minutes left, should we answer one more question? Did you see any interesting ones Tendai Alex, in the chat that you wanted.

To cover I just thought what I saw that was kind of funny. You know how like when an athlete gets injured you see on Twitter like prayers up for this athlete, prayers up. So everybody's like doing prayers for Kathy at the moment. So it's kind of an interesting one. Yeah, like Kathy, we feel you. So yeah.

One general comment maybe you know, is that one thing I strongly believe is innovation is bottom up with top down support. Right. Because sometimes say hi, innovation's bottom up. Yes. But you know, it doesn't work if you don' top down systems building. That's why we really mentioned the the architect which comes from the very top. If you don't have that systems building innovation usually has a weak role and will disappear as soon as you have your first restructuring. And the other one is these things, you know, are very similar in smaller organizations. Maybe with some compromises you won't have all roles as one role. But if we want to really invest in the future, 5 to 10% of your team should be focused on the future.

Yes, absolutely. And just to end with again, one of the things that I'm most passionate about is pushing back on the debate that you don't need full time innovation roles and that is everyone's job to do innovation. There needs to be a function that drives all the processes system. Make sure it's coaching. Make sure that the math that are make sure all of those things have to be designed into the company otherwise the individuals that want to do innovation won't have the capacity to actually do it.

And I'll add to that framing. Right. So as you said, I don't believe everybody should be an innovator but everybody should be allowed to start and then bring the evidence to the table and then we kill ideas after three months. Right. So I remember this session with, you know, an executive team and the CEO said, oh, we need to infect everybody with the innovation virus. No, you don't actually. What you need to do as a CEO is create the system so that innovators can thrive and innovators will innovate. So something I actually pivoted on. I always believed incentives this and that. No, just tear down the blockers and innovators will innovate. Not everybody needs to be an innovator. You actually want good executors, but you need to let everybody start and then have a system where you can rapidly retire ideas that have no, no evidence. Right. Otherwise you have zombie projects.

Thank you so much, Alex, so much. Any last comments you want to make just before we finish?

No, no Prayers up for Kathy.

So thank you everybody. It's been an absolute pleasure having you all on this webinar. We are on the hour, we're Swiss time. We look forward to seeing you next time on the 31st of May with of course, Alex Ostelver and Tendai and Anita Deshpande. And we're really looking forward to see you then. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you. See you next time. Oh, there we go.

Bye.

Bye, everybody.

Thank you, everybody.

Take care of.