For Intrapreneurs losing steam

I have just come out of an encounter with another drained Innovation Lead.
This person has been driving an innovation initiative for 18 months and the rather common point of exhaustion has been reached. Community members are falling away due to “lack of capacity”, good ideas are no longer seeing the light of day and they have noticed that eyes roll at the sound of yet another workshop or “sprint session”. They have done some great work but line managers are putting pressure on their people to focus on their core objectives. The team is “over it”.
In a recent report by KPMG and AFR, CEOs have rated ‘Fostering Innovation’ in the top 5 of strategic focus areas (good pick up, Janett Egber. ta!). This innovation thing matters. But it’s hard.
While there is no recipe for success and every organisation needs a framework that both challenges and fits their culture, people and brand, after 10 years tackling this from the inside, I believe that there are some key ingredients to keep entrepreneurs sparky, to save some energy, avoid getting bogged down and keep innovation communities thriving up to and beyond this 18-month mark. For me, they come under the headings of METHOD, MINDSET, MANDATE & MOMENTUM:
- METHOD. Don’t think you can do it alone. Don’t create a scarcity model where you are the person “in the know”. You’ll find that people leave you to it. Select a small range of methods that help you generate feasible, inventive ideas & hyptheses, experiment and prototype. Train up a diverse, cross-functional dream team to use them and share them on the job. Once they are trained, give them abundant opportunities to apply them anywhere in the business and ensure they feel supported and rewarded, not exposed. As a group, gain a real understanding of your toolbox and know the sweetspots and blunt areas for each. Become agile in your ability to use them whenever you need them. Don’t create a single idea portal but rather, ensure that there are a number of touchpoints for idea channelling — and one central place for tracking their implementation. Oh — and be sure to implement. Results will bring you support, interest and personal motivation.
- MINDSET. Resistance to change is a constant in most large organisations. When you combine this with conflicting unspoken messages (“innovate but don’t take risks”) as well as default thinking, lack of time to think, pressure and fear of failure, the culture of an organisation can really drag an intrapreneur down. Tackle the elephants in the room head on. If you are working in an environment where creative thinking is seen as “soft” or where taking time to think is scorned at, you’ll need to challenge this. Learn about — and watch for — any type of bias that inhibits innovation. Bring in partners from the outside who challenge your thinking and keep things fresh but don’t idealise startups; there is plenty of cool stuff that can be done from inside a corporate. Experiment. Be sure that innovation is not elitist; that it cuts across all three horizons and includes everyone.
- MANDATE. The French have an expression along the lines of “don’t be more royalist than the king”. Basically it’s hard to drive innovation yourself if your leadership gives it lip service but is not offering constant, clear and communicated support for it. You need to hold the leadership accountable for a clear innovation strategy and be sure that innovation is a long-term focus and not the latest shiny new toy. You’ll need to make a case for adequate resources (space, time and money) and make sure the time aspect isn’t token; that people are incentivised to spend time looking for alternative ways of approaching things. Create courses to train the line managers of community members on how to support their innovation champions. Be sure that the leadership creates and nurtures the structures you’ll need to foster innovation long term. This means having them act as (energetic) sponsors, openly sharing failures, rewarding the coaches and trainers etc. It also means a reward and recognition policy in sync with your innovation ambitions…
- MOMENTUM. Embedding innovation long term requires making all this a habit across the business and on demand. Your innovation efforts need to be recurring so you should train until a toolset and mindset is self-sustaining. Once again, don’t be left alone in the positive communication. Enlist your colleagues across your different labs, in communication, HR and the leadership to share progress and to gratify the efforts of the innovation community and any partners you are collaborating with. If possible, seek both internal and external measures of your progress. Track ideas. Watch where they get stuck. Celebrate their success and commend risk taking.
Watch this space for my diagnostic tool, The Innovation Wheel, to see how you are going in these areas.
Rachel Audigé is a marketing and innovation facilitator and speaker. She is an ex-intrapreneur and runs the Australian arm of Systematic Inventive Thinking (S.I.T.)
