How to Drive Innovation from Within
Driving innovation from within an established organization is hard work. You battle bureaucracy, hierarchy, and cultural norms that often suppress new thinking. It’s tempting to give up. Indeed, most employees do, resigning themselves to the belief that entrepreneurs, not employees, are the innovators.
But there is a way out. It is possible to effectively guide new, exciting ideas through your organization and into the world. Drawing on a decade of research, over 150 expert interviews, and rigorous studies of today’s most innovative companies, Kaihan Krippendorff synthesizes his findings into a repeatable process and set of tools for driving innovation from within.
Based on his upcoming book, Driving Innovation from Within (to be published by Columbia University Press in August 2019), this site will arm you with the tools you need to break through bureaucracy, move beyond naysayers, and become a skilled internal innovator, thereby advancing your career, experiencing greater creativity and fulfillment at work, and changing the world.
Here you will find seven steps and seven sets of tools:
Intent
Facing early obstacles, many would-be internal innovators abandon their original intent. They eventually simply give up looking for chances to innovate. Successful ones dig deep to keep their intention alive and, as a result, are more likely to spot innovation opportunities.
Need
Most employees do not understand what kinds of innovations their organizations need. Want proof? Fewer than 55 percent of middle managers can name even two of their company’s top strategic priorities. So even if someone is inspired to look for new ideas, they look in the wrong places and then propose ideas of little strategic value. Successful ones take the time to learn critical market forces affecting their company, understand what their organization cares about, and sense unmet customer needs.
Options
Would-be internal innovators often grow frustrated because they become fixated too early on a few innovative ideas—or even worse, just one. It’s much more strategic to continually generate a flow of new ideas and manage them like a portfolio of options.
Value Blockers
It is commonly accepted that innovative ideas are inconsistent with, and therefore disruptive to, a company’s current business model. This makes the value blockers that prevent an appropriate new business model from forming around the new idea seem insurmountable. Successful innovators understand the need to engineer their ideas so that rather than conflicting with, they enhance the company’s standing.
Act
Established organizations tend to ask employees to provean idea will work before giving permission to take action. This puts would-be internalinnovators in a fatal Catch-22: they can’t take action so they can’t prove their idea willwork so they can’t take action. Yet most new ideas are better suited to the opposite
Team
Corporations hamper internal innovation by the nature of their structure: They use silo work teams, act slowly, and value results over learning. Successful innovators recognize that pursuing new ideas often requires the opposite, and so they pull together a cross-silo team that runs at a rapid pace and is geared toward learning, rather than delivering results.
Environment
Getting support for new ideas is politically complicated because the leadership behavior, types of talent, organizational structures, and cultural norms that help established organizations sustain their core operations also tend to hinder internal innovativeness. Successful internal innovators figure out how to find “islands of freedom” from which they can access the talent, structures, cultural norms, and leadership support that bolster attempts at innovation.
The Book
Coming August 2019
Foreword by Professor Rita Gunther McGrath (https://www.ritamcgrath.com/) for the upcoming book, Driving Innovation from Within.
Overheard at a recent conference: “Today is the slowest day of your life.” As the pace of change accelerates exponentially, established corporations are increasingly waking up to the reality that the rules have forever changed: Sustainable competitive advantages are growing shorter, less attainable, and more difficult to sustain. Meanwhile, growth by acquisition holds little value for investors, the old ways of organizing are dying off, and formal, structured innovation programs such as hackathons and incubators are often nothing more than “innovation theater,” doing very little to actually drive real business impact.
So what, then, is the answer?
Kaihan Krippendorff’s key insight is that the successful companies of tomorrow are finding a new way to compete by empowering the true drivers of innovative growth: their employees. These companies are implementing an entrepreneurial mindset and creating organizational platforms that free employees to identify and seize innovative opportunities themselves—thereby merging the advantages of scale with the agility of a startup. While this was once deemed a near impossible task, tech giants born from lean approaches—the likes of Google, Alibaba, and Netflix—are undeniable proof that this is not only attainable but absolutely vital.
In Driving Innovation from Within, Kaihan Krippendorff offers a simple guide for how large corporations can move at the speed of startups by activating internal innovators. Drawing on five years of in-depth research and more than 150 interviews with the world’s top experts, Krippendorff unites several of today’s most important strategic concepts—corporate entrepreneurship, lean startup methodology, human-centered design, entrepreneurial intention, agile team-based structures, and self-coordinating organizations—into a single applicable framework for leading an organization of employee entrepreneurs.
The IN-OVATE framework Kaihan introduces in this book compiles a set of proven tools and practices into an accessible structure that readers will be able to apply immediately within their own organizations to build a pipeline of competitive advantages. This framework identifies seven of the most common barriers to innovation and outlines the contours of a new type of organization that successfully unlocks the value of employees’ ideas.
Intent: Turn your employees into intrapreneurs
Need: Communicate simple statements of purpose that describe what the market needs
Options: Generate disruptive business ideas in hallways not boardrooms
Value blockers: Predict and preempt business model conflict
Act: Adopt an Act-Learn-Build approach rather than Prove-Plan-Execute
Team: Assemble agile teams instead of siloed, hierarchical structures
Environment: Shift to open platforms that allow employees to rally resources
While there are plenty of books available offering senior leaders a top-down view on the challenge of innovative growth, Krippendorff writes instead for the employee, arming readers with a set of practical tools to more effectively drive innovation within an established organization. After reading this book, employees will be able to better understand their organization’s strategy so that they may focus their efforts on fertile ground and learn what hinders their passionate pursuit of innovation so that they may build the game-changing ideas their organizations need to survive. Leaders, in turn, will walk away with a broader understanding of key organizational factors—including culture, structure, and talent—that block internal entrepreneurial activity so that they may move beyond innovation theater and focus on what really works.
As a seasoned strategy consultant and one of the world’s premiere transformation experts, Krippendorff is an authoritative guide to navigating organizations through this era of transient advantage. While we still do not have an absolute, proven system for innovative growth, this book provides one of the most comprehensive paths I’ve ever read, uniquely combining the breakthrough ideas of Steve Blank, George Day, Steve Denning, John Hagel, Alex Osterwalder, myself, and other leading thinkers into a single framework that can be easily activated within any organization. Through the IN-OVATE framework, readers will learn how to shift their organizational mindset, break free from traditional thinking, and challenge the outdated status quo in order to embrace transformative possibilities, deploy disruptive ideas, and deliver bottom-line results.
The organization of tomorrow will gain a sustained competitive advantage by asking its employees to paint outside the lines. Let Krippendorff show you how to create a masterpiece.