Who is responsible for innovation in your organization, and how do they ensure that it happens in the right way for your company? Not surprisingly, the answers to these questions vary greatly. Here are some of the most common answers I've encountered:
- Everyone is responsible for innovation, because good ideas can come from anywhere, and people need to be empowered to bring them forward.
- The Head of R&D, because we need to be developing new technologies that can drive our success in the future.
- The Chief Innovation Officer, who is responsible for forging relationships with technology partners and developing new processes for the organization to integrate them.
- The Head of New Product Development, because innovative ideas are embodied in new products and services.
Of course, there is no single right or wrong answer, as every company is different. What is striking is that the main focus of these roles is on collecting new ideas and technologies. I seldom hear of roles that are focused on determining the success criteria for new ideas and technologies beyond internal metrics.
Today I will leave you with a few questions that I'd like to explore further. How many organizations drive innovation efforts based on success criteria that satisfies consumer goals? By consumer goals, I mean understanding the motivations behind what your consumers do. What needs does your product or service really satisfy? What would provide a better solution and fit more consistently into the consumer's life?
Finally, who is responsible for ensuring that your organization has the right answers to these questions?
In our company, we have focused innovation within the responsibility of the CTO, the Chief Technology Officer. This maybe the case because we are a technology company, but I really like to have the responsibility sitting with one specific team. This allows us to focus on all aspects of innovation and take advantage of synergies that exist between different types of innovation.
Great point. It is important for someone to know what’s going on throughout the company to take advantage of the synergies. I’m still curious though. How does this person establish goals for innovation? How do you know that you are developing the right technologies?
Within our own company innovation is two pronged – the whole company is empowered and responsible for creation (we work in research, brand development and innovation), so this is normally around process and technique. We have a second group who is then responsible for the capture and codification of the new stuff – recording it, then disseminating it across the rest of our offices. (so more like a KM function than a strict innovation function).
Our clients have lots of different structures – some very successful, others very ineffective. The most ineffective is the innovation person with no clear objectives. They run workshops, develop blue sky concepts, and gather trends. But as they have not been given any strategic guidelines, fail to deliver anything of value to the business. Often they head off on a hunch. The other way is via an RD team who drive innovation – this is quite hit and miss. They invent, then a consumer need is found. Occasionally it really works – they stumble on something that people love, other times it’s often a force fit.
Our dream clients are the ones who have make it a strategic imperative to innovate around consumers and their needs. Often the innovation role sits within a special function in a marketing team – they answer straight into the Martketing Director, have clear goals and a loose process (fluid and open, but with milestones and an objective). They are the great clients who keep asking yes, but is this really giving people what they want? – they also tend to have success criterias that are a combination of internal metrics and consumer response(qual and quant)