Startup land loses its lustre! (and other innovation predictions for 2020)
The past year in corporate innovation has seen an explosion in activity. Corporates have been rebranding and repositioning their innovation efforts on a seemingly quarterly basis as businesses struggle to deliver results for various 2020 strategies. All this has led to some clear trends emerging for next decade as the space matures, and the most effective approaches become clearer:
Startup land will lose its lustre: challenges within high profile fast growth companies like Wework, Uber, Facebook and others will result in increased skepticism around startups and their associated culture. Many who were already skeptical of them will feel vindicated. This will result in corporate innovation projects facing new levels of scrutiny from stakeholders. Key to overcoming this challenge will be leaning into those conversations and treating them as opportunities to demonstrate commercial maturity & savviness, rather than doubling down on some of the more superficial aspects of startups and innovation.
Ideas labs will face increased scrutiny: Over the past decade there has been a proliferation of idea labs. These are often held at arm’s length from business as usual, fulfil an exploratory and creative role, without clearly falling under the umbrella of R&D. Many organisations have struggled to convert the good work happening in these spaces into commercial impact. This will have a knock on effect in the corporate world where the more science fair style initiatives will have their funding cut, especially in cases where early skeptics of new ways of working and scaling will reinforce this message. This will have the beneficial effect of ordinary employees being put back in the driving seat, empowering a wider range of individuals to pursue creative and entrepreneurial projects.
More rigorous and systematic innovation programmes will thrive: programmes that work within existing corporate bureaucracies, taking the best parts of corporate structures and resources, will come to replace ideas labs and ‘innovation spaces’. Here the emphasis will be on sustainability, professionalism, commerciality, and bringing innovation into the hands of people on the front line. Building tools and capabilities for a general audience, and connecting innovation up to key departments like Risk, Legal, IT will be key for these kinds of efforts to work out.
The best innovation programmes will become powerful tools for addressing key business and wider social problems: Innovation programmes will become versatile tools to solve specific real problems. Innovation challenges often resemble all purpose ideas boxes. Whilst these can produce ad hoc fantastic results, they often fail to give those engaged the information they might need to really have an impact. In 2020, though, we will see smart businesses using the innovation processes they have refined to address important challenges. This is likely to be felt especially keenly in the efforts that organisations have to make around the environment, climate change, and other global trends which have no traditional home within the large corporations that are increasingly shaping our world.
My hope is that this will result in far more people within the workspace being able to meaningfully chip away at some of the big challenges we will face in the next decade.
