The step most companies try to jump to right away is the establishment of Innovation as a core competency. They forget that it is rather crucial to know where to jump to.

Successful strategies define what the team wants to achieve, why, how, and with whom. The task of defining the strategy and its implementation plan falls to senior leaders in an organization. Even in the most democratic and decentralized companies we have found, the voice of the leader(s) was still the driving force behind change.

Helping You Defining Strategy

Teams need goals to concentrate energy and resources. They need goals to know when they are winning. They appreciate goals as the basis of their personal and team appraisals. In short, we have not seen a successful implementation of Innovation without a guiding strategy from the top.

Consequently, we will work with your senior management team and selected subject matter experts to develop a sound strategy. We typically base our work on the INVEST framework by Morgan, Levitt, and Malek. It is a robust approach to strategy creation and implementation. Here are the six steps:

1. Ideation: Clarify purpose, identity, and long-term intentions
2. Nature: Align with culture and strategy
3. Vision: Define clear goals and metrics
4. Engagement: Create the right projects in your portfolio
5. Synthesis: Execute the projects
6. Transition: Absorb the new into the mainstream

We call the output of this work our “Innovation Charter”. Ideally, it is signed by the senior leaders to mark their commitment.

Our Experience

As coaches, we will support your own thinking, drawing from experience of what we have seen work well in similar contexts. Be prepared to be nudged, provided with a lot of materials to read (if you like), conversations and discussions, straight presentations, or simple talks across the dinner table.

Our experience will help us here, both in the content as well as the facilitation. We have taught Innovation to multi-billion dollar mainline manufacturing businesses, startups in the machine tooling arena, and adult education service providers, to name a few. To give you an idea of the hands-on knowledge we can impart, take a look at the presentation below: (advance by clicking on the slide)