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Presenting Innovation in a Way That Gets to 'Yes'
by Robert B. Tucker
In the innovation field, the closest thing we have to a
professional association is the InnovationNetwork and its
annual Convergence conference (produced in partnership with
the Institute for International Research), which just took
place in Minneapolis. I'm on a plane heading home to California
as I write this, and I have to say, this was the best conference
I've attended in quite some time.
The talk in the hallways was about the up-tick in the number
of companies launching innovation makeovers. Just as some
of us predicted, as the global economy has improved and CEOs
get past their hunker down/cut costs/survival mentality, the
question of how to drive growth begins to dog them. But getting
senior management to take action on innovation often needs
a catalyst.
To address this issue at Convergence, I led a CEO/Senior
Management Panel titled "How to Present Innovation
in a Way That Gets to Yes". We jettisoned the
traditional panel discussion draped table and moderator podium
and replaced it with a more dynamic talk show format. It went
well, and was very well received. Guests on the lighthearted
program included Carol Pletcher, Cargill Innovation Officer;
Stephen N. Oesterle, M.D., Senior Vice President Medicine
and Technology, Medtronic, Inc; Virginia Albanese, Vice President
of Service, FedEx Custom Critical; and Alex Cirillo, head
of 3M Commercial Graphics.
Championing innovation as a driver of growth
In my opening monolog, I noted that each time another company
says yes to innovation, you can be sure there was a champion
at work behind that decision. And quite often a team of committed
people as well. They did their homework. Amassed the evidence.
And made the case for embarking on a new approach to innovation
as a way to drive growth.
With PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Accenture surveys showing
that innovation has risen to the top of CEO priorities, you
might think this would be easy. It isn't. CEOs know there
is a great need to master innovation. But there's a lot of
trepidation.
Top-line vs. bottom-line growth
As a result, companies have long favored interventions and
initiatives that promise immediate returns: lean manufacturing,
TQM, reengineering, Six Sigma and scores of others. These
process improvements, none of which are easy to implement,
have the benefit of showing short-term cost-savings, and elimination
of inefficiency, the need for fewer staffers. They are, therefore,
easier for consultants from outside and/or advocates on the
inside to sell to the guys in the head shed. But here's what
is not often clear: they do nothing to create top-line growth.
They only improve the bottom line, and after awhile you run
out of places to cut.
Oh sure, you can achieve growth from mergers and acquisitions,
thus the M&A boom of the1990s. Guess who did a phenomenal
job of selling CEOs on that strategy? Banks, lawyers, accounting
firms, M&A consultants, etc. The only problem: study after
study demonstrates this is a strategy fraught with problems
of integrating incompatible cultures, and turf battles. But
the big aha is that they just don't create shareholder value,
as longitudinal studies by McKinsey and others clearly demonstrate.
Again: innovation is the only way to unlock organic growth,
and the only way to sustain it is with an innovation strategy
that has metrics, is comprehensive, involves the whole enterprise
and is cross-functional and cross-silo.
Innovation initiatives require patience, commitment
Innovation will never be an easy sell because it can't promise
a quick payback. It took agribusiness giant Cargill, for
example, almost a year of internal debate and study of best
practices in innovation before folks there got clear on how
they even should define it. With almost 100,000 employees,
they knew it was a journey, but that they had to start somewhere
if they were going to transform the organization. And as
the feisty and outspoken Carol Pletcher, Cargill's innovation
maven, told the audience at Convergence, now they are on
their way.
Cargill has the advantage of being a privately-held company.
Many CEOs of publicly-traded firms, with Wall Street ever
more impatient for steady quarterly earnings, are apt to
be gun shy. Innovation conjures up sinkholes of investment
and missed earnings - and too soon the ax. So if you're
in an organization that hasn't yet gotten to yes, you're
going to have to overcome a lot of what professional salespeople
call objections, both real and imagined.
Building a winning case for innovation
How can you make a stronger case for innovation? How can
you present innovation in a way that gets to yes? By doing
your homework. By keeping current on this ever-evolving field
and knowing what works and what doesn't. By constant benchmarking
of what other innovation-adept companies are doing, and finding
out. And by selling benefits (growth, transformation, talent
retention), not features (it works like this, isn't this clever,
etc.).
Most important of all, it’s essential to identify and
reference companies that are enjoying the fruits of their
systematic approach to innovation. Whirlpool, for instance,
added a whopping $100 million in top line revenue during the
first 12 months of launching its now-famous innovation initiative.
Deloitte-Touche Tomatsu of South Africa doubled the size of
its enterprise within two years of launching InnovationZone,
its idea capture system. And companies like 3M and Medtronic
cite innovation for their success year after year. By building
the case for innovation, it won’t be long before other
firms come to you, wanting to know how you did it!
Robert B. Tucker is president of The Innovation Resource,
an innovation consulting firm based in Santa Barbara, Calif.
A frequent keynote speaker at conferences, he is the author
of "Driving Growth Through Innovation: How Leading Firms
Are Transforming Their Futures." Details: (805) 682-1012
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