BLOG ON STRATEGY & INNOVATION
Ideas, tools and frameworks to reimagine strategy, build innovation capability, and lead with purpose in an AI‑transformed world
How far should your innovation team reach?
Recently, my friend and mentor Greg Bernarda highlighted the need to involve unusual actors in innovation in order to address systemic problems.
This sparked reflections on the evolving nature of innovation teams, adapting over time to tackle even more complex challenges and generate greater business and societal value.
Join me in exploring those changes in this blog post.
Should you incentivise employees to innovate?
We’ve learnt from surveying employees in large organisations in all types of industries that the biggest blockers to innovation from their perspective is always the same: the lack of a proper incentives and rewards system.
In this blogpost I propose an approach to “incentivise” employees to innovate that goes beyond the narrow scope of financial rewards and also focuses on:
Removing the underlying blockers for employees to innovate,
Helping them connect to their intrinsic motivation,
Accessing financial and non-financial rewards adapted to corporate innovation.
Innovation in a downturn?
The downturn could be an opportunity in disguise for innovation.
To assess whether leaders would be able to execute an ambitious innovation program during a downturn, there are three areas they should first look into:
The magnitude of the resource crunch impacting corporate innovation,
The leadership bandwidth available for innovation during the downturn,
The innovation readiness of the organisation.
Innovation requires deep alignment of executives and the board
Creating a sustainable innovation capability in an organisation is big endeavour that requires strong leadership vision, a vision truly understood and endorsed by the board.
In the last few years, I have developed an approach that helps executives and directors better understand disruption risks and strategic opportunities, requirements for exploration of those opportunities, and their respective roles to design and execute corporate innovation.
In this blogpost, I will focus on key questions that usually best contribute to shifting directors’ perspective on risk management and innovation, and ultimately create enthusiasm to have innovation added to the agenda of the board.