Continually producing fresh, new, highly valued innovations that drive enterprise values is one of the most important outcomes for senior innovation leaders. It’s estimated that over 75% of revenues in three years for the most competitive organizations will be produced from new products, services, and business models that aren’t in development today. The rate and pace of new innovations continues to accelerate in direct correlation to the rapidly declining cost of bringing new offers to market, exerting additional pressures on innovation leaders.
Many innovation leaders struggle with this rate and pace of change, primarily driven by frequent velocity adjustments. The typical time horizon for innovation leaders is three plus years with product development and design addressing the H1/H2/less than three year horizon. But, and subject to debate, CEO’s and investors expect innovation teams to deliver on much tighter timelines than the more typical longer term that intrapreneurs should operate. This can be confusing to innovation teams who are tasked with ‘creating the future of the organization’, yet are held to short term results and outcomes.
This is a typical scenario inside most Fortune 500/Global 2000 organizations and publicly traded companies. The tension between short term outcomes and longer term results can create mixed messages and more often than not leads to disappointment. So, how do innovation leaders cope with this tension? How do they convince the C-suite and investors to remain patient whilst they tinker in the innovation lab?
We’ve witnessed this tension for over a decade working with our members and have designed our work plans to address short term outcomes while driving longer term results. Our members gain access to strategies and tactics that allow them to deliver victories in the short term which provides air cover that allows them to design and develop for the longer term.
To address this tension between short and long term results, our memberships are designed to provide immediate impact while planning for the future. In the first month of membership we work with corporate innovation teams to help them assess their innovation maturity using a sophisticated set of tools that allow them to precisely determine their greatest challenges and biggest opportunities. Using an ‘Innovation Maturity Index’ our members can quickly and precisely determine where they are on their innovation journey and report this to the C-Suite, the Board, investors, and the organization at large.
We offer our members the Assessment for Innovation Maturity which is a web-based tool that can be deployed within hours across thousands of employees. When the assessment is completed, a detailed report is provided to each member allowing them to precisely determine where the innovation bottlenecks reside. Using this data, i8CoLab members can begin the process of designing and developing new plans to increase innovation outputs. In our experience, when members are able to provide granular detail and data to ground their innovation assertions, the path to resources and new opportunities tends to become less burdensome. In correlation to those innovation teams that are unable to back up their strategies and tactics with relevant data, our members gain a real and valuable competitive advantage in their industry. All of this work is accomplished within weeks of launching an i8CoLab membership.
Working with a telecom consortium that includes the top leaders from their industry, we deployed the innovation maturity assessment to better understand their threats and opportunities. The leadership team was new to the organization so gaining insight into growth and innovation systems was a top priority when beginning their tenure. i8CoLab deployed our assessment and in less than a month we had determined their barriers to innovation, what departments needed guidance and leadership, and a new innovation and growth strategy that aligned with the corporate strategy was produced. Although the outputs from this work would take months to materialize, our members were able to hit the ground running by building a solid growth plan that was based on data.
Establishing the relationship and appreciation of future results with short term objectives is a common challenge for innovation teams. Creating the future of the organization and providing value in the short term is a difficult task for anyone to manage but it's essential to the success for any organization, especially the innovation team. Our memberships are specifically designed to provide value in the short term while building for the long.
Along with the innovation assessment that can be delivered within the first few days of an i8CoLab membership, we also work with members to produce value in the short term. We can elevate the ‘innovation profile’ of our members by creating press releases, co-publishing articles, or hosting professionally facilitated working sessions. After joining the group, each member receives a press release announcing their membership in our working group.
Periodically, we co-author and co-publish articles highlighting recent innovation accomplishments that are then distributed through our members public relations and communications channels as well as i8CoLab channels. These channels are heavily focused on corporate innovation, R&D, and product development. Within the first quarter of each membership we also host and facilitate a challenge working session for each member when they have the opportunity to work with their peers on an opportunity or challenge.
i8CoLab members gain access to other corporate innovation teams who are facing these same tensions and challenges. Not only do members gain access to corporates who are facing similar challenges of producing short and long term results, they are exposed to the solutions that work and don’t work on a real time basis.
In March 2020, at the dawn of the global pandemic, academic institutions were faced with an immediate and existential challenge of delivering education in a remote environment, almost overnight. Administrators, professors and teachers, and students were forced to adopt and adapt to a new learning environment with virtually (no pun intended) no prior experience or training.
Innov8rs CoLab noticed this trend across our membership and immediately designed a 90-day working group to support our members in this transition. Collaborating with the US Air Force Academy, the University of Denver, and a school district consisting of over 120 schools and 35,000+ students (St. Vrain Valley School District), we created a working group to share the practices that were working and not working in transitioning to a remote education delivery model.
The spring 2020 semester served as an innovation lab for these institutions and at the conclusion of the summer they were ready to conduct virtual learning as the fall 2020 semester approached. With the help and support of their peers, facilitated and led by Innov8rs CoLab, our members were better prepared than many of their peers for the remote learning environment - we know, because they told us.
Collaborating and sharing best practices in real time with peers has proven to be a unique model for innovation leaders to better lead their organizations. Innovation is inherently a function and practice area with a high level of ambiguity. Our role as innovation leaders is to reduce this uncertainty through rigorous experimentation, learning, and evaluation on an ongoing and continual basis. Innov8rs CoLab provides our members with unique insights into what practices are working now, and those that aren’t, so they can choose the best path for their organizations.
A serendipitous moment occurred at a working session where a member challenge aligned with another member's core capabilities. One of the largest North American ski and resort operators was challenged with catering to future resort customers and their unique needs in comparison to past and present customer requirements. Fully accepting that technology will play a key role in the customer needs matrix and realizing their core capabilities do not match, our member turned to their peers to gain insight into how others were leading through this challenge. They were pleasantly surprised at the serendipity that would occur.
Not only was this a widely shared challenge among the membership, many had successfully navigated this journey. Matching members with others who have tackled similar challenges is one of the first values we deliver to our members within the first three months of their membership. This allows them to create and stand up a custom advisory board to gain insights, support, and guidance as they advance their innovation agenda.
Our resort operator was pleasantly surprised to find other members had solved similar challenges. In fact one member had the specific technical capabilities to develop, implement, and deploy a range of technology solutions that fit their needs. The shared challenge quickly became a group collaboration with members providing guidance and leadership as well as the technical capabilities while the broader group was able derive their own value from participating in the challenge discussion. This single challenge helped our member solve a real and immediate challenge while providing the ‘sandbox’ for the entire group to learn and grow.
Since this challenge was presented, the resort operator has deployed a pilot in a smaller resort town with much success allowing them to expand the project across their portfolio of properties. Now their customers are able to access high speed wireless internet on mountain and in town creating value added opportunities for the community, support businesses, and visitors. This initiative started as a simple innovation challenge presented to their innovation peers and ended up having unexpected benefits for the resort operator, their customers, and the communities in which they operate.
Building on this digital and technological challenge originating in that working session, an i8CoLab member uncovered their own related challenge that they were not fully aware of prior to the presentation. As a regional economic development group situated in a high-tech environment they too wanted to elevate their technology game and cater to current and future constituents. An opportunity was presented to develop an adjacent area of a local city where they conceived of deploying state of the art technology in the design plans. What this meant was visioning the development of the city based on the most up to date technology including renewable energy, Internet of Things sensors, and adaptable architecture.
What began as a resort operator who sought to cater to the next generation of customers turned into the basis for the design of a new city. Our economic development member was able to observe the deployment of new technologies across a resort town environment and use those observations to create a new, modern, 21st century city.
When innovation leaders collaborate with one another in service of supporting and helping their peers, unexpected outcomes can be expected, but only for those who are curious enough to allow them to materialize throughout the ordinary course of their engagement with i8CoLab.
About Innov8rs CoLab
Innov8rs CoLab is a private, by invitation only, no competitors allowed peer group of Chief Innovation Officers and senior innovation, R&D, and venture leaders. Our members gather frequently and collaborate often to ensure they are advancing their individual and collective innovation growth agendas. Sharing and benchmarking corporate innovation management best practices, connecting to opportunities and resources, and building enterprise value is the primary agenda of our working group.
For more information regarding Innov8rs CoLab membership, please contact Thomas Knoll at thomas@innov8rs.co.