Immersion is the best way to bring external innovation into your company

Target reader: industry side professionals who want to see what’s really in the market and bring it to life inside your organisation.

The world is awash with innovation noise. When I started my career in 2012 the Digital Transformation trend was kicking off and the whispers of disruption were on the lips of every business case proposal. Fantastical promises were made and money was piled into the engine of transformation. Incumbents eagerly watched new entrants gobble market share and hubristic transformation programmes were launched to catch apparent waves of disruption in IoT, Analytics, Cloud and more.

I saw the issues as each new BIG BANG programme launched, a new manager/ consultancy ran it, a new promise was made, assumptions to capture 1% of a $10bn market and new goals were piled on top of execs already complex businesses. Was any value created? It was too complicated a question to answer.

My journeyman apprenticeship into the world of innovation began at this juncture through a mixture of my MBA and M&A work immersing me into the VC/ start-up/ innovation consulting ecosystem. Too little is written from the messy incumbent perspective and too often articles/books/consultants cite how Apple, Amazon, AirBnB, Uber disrupt the market in broad brush case studies. The issue is these companies are playing in a totally different league and riding various different waves.

With these articles and this publication, I hope to share what I’ve learned in the field and from all the great people I’ve met along the way.

I’m by no means an expert but I am passionate about finding what really works in this space.

Lesson 1: Go explore

Don’t: Go straight to consultancies, there are a great array of consultancies in this space from boutique specialists to Big4, BCG/McKinsey. But you need champions that have a close understanding of your organisation that can help connect the dots between internal problems and external opportunities. Then engage the consultancies to help you execute the next product/iterative cycle, the champions can effectively shepherd them and continue the activity after the 12-week cycle ends.

Do: Go straight to networking, Eventbrite [in London] is a fantastic tool for finding free events to go to and learn what is happening in the market. On an individual basis, this lets you explore what’s really in the market and use your internal knowledge to tie it back to your strategies/goals.

Approach: search “innovation” and book onto one event a week, you’re going to be sacrificing a few evenings and hearing a lot of “this isn’t a sales pitch but it really is a sales pitch” presentations but slowly you’ll find the gems and begin to distinguish contacts that are the real deal and those that are selling [Note: selling isn’t bad it just isn’t useful to learn from]

Goal: keep it broad, go to events that have hooks back into existing projects but you don’t know what you don’t know so keep it fairly exploratory. This is contact harvest mode, so try to capture emails and arrange follow up calls from these events, that’s the momentum builder!

Lesson 2: Build Bridges

Don’t: Hire a really expensive expert before you know what you want.

Ok so depending on your seniority you may have no control over this, but if you can, try and avoid the Big Bang approach to hiring a rock-star FTE whom your organisation will bet the house on. You need an ecosystem, not a prophet.

Do: Try and broker a few external-internal coffees to cultivate sponsors.

By this point you’ll hopefully have a few gem contacts found from your networking. This is the point where you want to bring them in. Depending on your role it might just be to your team or to an exec board. Gauge your audience. Internal boards can be a circular reference, external views can bring fresh perspectives and unique insights to challenge your market information.

Approach: every company is different but your role here is to match-make the right external to the right internal. At all costs, you need to ensure the external is not selling anything [initially] and that the internal does not exploit the knowledge with no reward. This has to be a Win-Win relationship. In your broker role set the ground rules and check bad-behavior on either side.

Goal: education. Execs are a long time out of the classroom and the great ones love to keep learning. Most should see the value in an ecosystem of external contacts. Don’t forget, no innovation projects advance without internal sponsors. So it’s not just about you getting it, you need to bring key sponsors along on the journey with you.

Lesson 3: Set-up camp

Don’t: Go on a really expensive Startup Safari [according to TechCrunch] is an eco-system immersion program that enables international growth and scale for entrepreneurs across the globe. In the largest companies, that can mean the “Innovation Vacation” a sexy reinvention project with a large budget and seemingly brand new approach to the core organisation. As a large company, your greatest strength is your core inertia, that stable business that lets you place bets on future growth. Innovation activity has to be done with close alignment but separate from distracting the daily operations of the company.

Do: try to take a seat in a start-up community, these are hotbeds of young companies experimenting, getting funded by investors and being pitched to by consultancies. Avoid commercial start-up studios, they’ll try and sell your projects. Depending on your organisation’s maturity, time is required to calibrate to new processes, internal governance, setting up labs and funding architecture needs to be modified for growth initiatives.

Approach: Level39 in London is a prime example of a tech community where companies can join for 1x seat at £500pm, giving them access to an ecosystem of 200+ companies and 1500 members and 80+ mentors.

Goal: By this stage you’ve networked, you’ve sold the value of this activity to some key sponsors and now you need the space to bring the organisation into contact with the innovation community. Build exposure and formulate what the organisation wants to get from it.

Lesson 4: Kill Zombies, Build Faith

Don’t: start a whole new programme of work and pitch for $$$ funding to turn your company into the next Uber. No sponsor will back you, it’s unlikely your company can deliver the giant project yet and you’ll piss everyone off.

Do: Try to identify a customer and a problem where there is an existing innovation activity in the organisation. Explore if they are duplicates, what pace they’re moving at and if they are stalling. Then pitch to Kill Zombies and free up resources to complete projects that show promise. Customer wins, £5k-£500k, build faith for a wider expansion of activity later on.

Approach: Here your sponsors come into play, they may have slow-moving projects that the external contacts and ecosystem can help with. They have to want to back a solution. Build a coalition of support amongst the sponsors that see promise in the activity and translate it into a financial plan. Avoid sponsors that are only interested parties, outcomes require authority and budget.

Goal: Harness your new ecosystem of contacts to help bring to life a dormant or slow-moving innovation that already exists. Prove that innovation is tangible and not a promise of future wealth, one small win starts the conversation for a long journey to building a disciplined innovation function.

In the end, there are a million ways to approach this activity but external ecosystems give you, the individual, the best position to ask questions, test ideas, and network teams together. It ultimately comes down to what you can make of it but there are lots of us out here willing to help guide you!