The Innovation Manager Journey
After wrapping up the INFINITI LAB earlier this year, we had almost a dozen conversations with other large enterprises about their innovation strategies. Each of these large enterprises operate in different industries (Financial Services, Manufacturing, Government, CPG, etc.) and have different levels of experience executing innovation strategies (6 months to +5 years).
Our Hypothesis
From these conversations we developed a hypothesis about the growth curve that Innovation Managers go through as they execute on their innovation programs. We like to call this the “Innovation Manager Journey” and it looks like this:
We were curious to know if our hypothesis was correct and whether or not this growth curve reflected the journey that Innovation Managers experience? We also wanted to understand the common problems and best practice solutions Innovation Managers found at each stage along the journey.
As the Innovation Manager job title didn’t exist a few years ago, the practice still lacks codified best practices and we’re hoping to fix that issue. Practicing what we preach, we went back to the Lean Startup methodology. We did several customer development interviews with these Innovation Managers with the goal of validating or invalidating our hypothesis, collecting common barriers at each stage and the best practice solutions that yield results. The goal of this post and subsequent posts is to publish our findings and make an attempt to create codified best practices for corporate innovation.
Summary of Our Findings
After 15 interviews, we found out that our hypothesis wasn’t that far off from reality. Also we learned some really interesting insights.
Our three biggest learnings we found from these conversations were:
- It’s very lonely being an Innovation Manager — being such a new job title there isn’t really a community of Innovation Managers.
- They are frustrated and have very difficult terrain to navigate. To their corporate colleagues, they are seen to ‘play’ with startups all day and seem to speak a different language. And, to the startups they work with they are perceived to have the ability to drive decision making and implementation — which is rarely ever the case.
- As there are no codified best practices, almost all Innovation Managers are “just trying to figure it out” and their biggest goal is to “get wins on the board” meaning successful pilots with startups.
Follow-up Blog Posts
Over the next few months we’ll be publishing more detailed posts on the following topics:
- Defining your corporate innovation objectives
- How to design an innovation plan and get buy-in
- Why your CFO should care about innovation
- Lessons learned from successful innovation teams
- How to overcome common challenges
- Best practices in running pilot projects with startups
- Summary of The Startup Way book by Eric Rise
- After 5 years of an innovation strategy what’s next?
