Corporate innovation is in a rut.

Think like a purpose-driven innovator to get unstuck.

Is corporate innovation suffering from an existential crisis?

We’ve had numerous conversations with leaders of corporate innovation, including a recent Innovation Vanguard event hosted here at SYPartners, and one could be forgiven for coming to that conclusion. One hears that “we need to transform more quickly,” and at the same time, “true innovation doesn’t really happen in our company.”

So, what’s standing in the way?

As much as many companies have committed themselves to incorporating greater agility and risk-taking, we see that these two practices alone fall short of creating successful cultures of innovation. There is a third element — call it purpose-driven — that must be in place for innovation to thrive. Companies that look at innovation as a means to live up to their purpose not only recognize their purpose as sacrosanct, but also take steps to ensure that it shows up across the innovation function — strategically, operationally, and behaviorally.

LEVEL 01: STRATEGIC

Purpose drives expansion, not just focus.

A company’s purpose is most effective when it not only serves to illuminate potential innovative growth platforms, but when it also brings clarity about which to choose. Such an approach demands fidelity to what the promise of the company really is, an eagerness to live up to that promise in new ways, and recognition that not doing so jeopardizes the company’s brand in the long term. As a statement of purpose, Airbnb’s assertion that “We help people belong anywhere” is rooted in a deeply motivating social need, one that would nevertheless ring hollow if constrained to a marketing idea. Seen as a coda for Airbnb’s innovation strategy, however, its greater strength becomes manifest — the evidence of which starts to be revealed through the company’s recent foray into tours and experiences.

Though the willingness of a company to pursue a new venture will always be, to some extent, evaluated in terms of risk, its belief that it’s the right thing to do is bolstered when framed as a matter of forging its existential relevance. Airbnb may be regarded as a positive outlier, and it certainly is when compared to the status quo, as cited by the leader of an innovation team in the financial services industry who laments that “80–95% of our resources get swallowed up to fix/improve the base business, so there’s not enough explicit room in the roadmap for innovation.” You can certainly call out this type of company for “playing it safe,” but it’s also a sign of an innovation portfolio that points to unrealized potential. Conversely, companies that think more expansively about how they live up to their purpose set out to fulfill correspondingly more ambitious innovation agendas.

Questions to consider:

• How committed are you to growth platforms that enable your organization to live up to its potential, and to fulfill its purpose in altogether new ways?
• To what extent are decisions involving your company’s innovation agenda motivated by purpose?

LEVEL 02: OPERATIONAL

Purpose rallies around impact, not just ideas.

The leaders who attended our event were highly aware of what it takes to create the conditions and systems in which innovation can flourish. They expressed a conundrum around wanting to give innovation proper breathing space, but then also wanting to gain momentum by enrolling stakeholders within the business. One way that purpose-driven innovators can transcend this divide is to galvanize their organizations around a people-centric — rather than a techno- or product-centric — mindset.

To see the difference, imagine as an experiment re-framing an MVP (within tech circles, the Minimally Viable Proposition) as the Minimally Viable Population you plan to reach. The group you identify as a pivot population (e.g., a select group of clients or a new consumer segment within a pilot market) are those who will most dramatically benefit from the new experience, and who also possess outsized influence in building momentum for the idea. When companies are laser-focused on the impact they intend to achieve for such a population, innovation teams can operate far more effectively, and with less friction. Without this focus, it becomes too easy for ideas to get only so far as proof-of-concept, or to fall into the trap of what one interviewee in the publishing industry described as “dabbling in emerging tech.”

We see true innovation emerging when companies empower and equip a targeted population through the thoughtful prototyping of new ideas, and successfully engage them to experience the company’s purpose in an altogether new way. When this happens, as stated by a leader of innovation in the white goods space, “Not only did we do something good for people, we did something purposeful for the brand. And, our company changed as a result.”

Questions to consider:

• How might you rethink what’s required to prototype an idea by narrowing your focus to a pivot population?
• What new pivot populations would you most want to reach and impact for your company to truly live up to its purpose?

LEVEL 03: BEHAVIORAL

Purpose needs to live in the hands of creators and decision-makers, not on walls.

It’s incredibly rewarding to see executive teams truly rally around purpose. But it’s critical that purpose doesn’t live just within the boardroom, or on the “about us” page of a company’s website. As new ideas are being conceived, developed, and tested as innovations, purpose needs to meet practice and be put in the hands of practitioners — whether product managers, engineers, or UX designers.

In this sense, purpose is not used just to help a company navigate where — or where not — to go, but how to get there. That means that team members need to be equipped with a compass to guide them, so that everyone in the company possesses a similar orientation. We’ve designed such tools, which we’ve sometimes called Purpose Filters, to drive decision-making down into an organization, so that teams can both move quickly and stay on track. When purpose isn’t wired in, even the most “agile” of teams will spin, and risk-taking can go off the rails. As described by one innovation leader in the packaged goods space, the goal is to “equip people who have a passion for doing things differently, more creatively, and entrepreneurially, so that we’re less about waiting for alignment on internal metrics, and more operating from our gut.” For that to happen, individuals in the act of creation need to possess the means to be both inspired and guided by purpose.

Questions to consider:

• Where does purpose show up in your organization? Where is it wired into the workflow?
• How consistent are purpose-led decisions across your team? How would you measure their effectiveness?

In the absence of being purpose-driven, there is neither the organizational belief required to take risk, nor the organizational willingness to change the standard operating model in order to get stuff done in new ways, and quickly. Rather than “innovating to innovate,” the purpose-driven innovation leader sees innovation as the means, not the end, and galvanizes their organization’s ambition, energy, and resources by putting purpose first.

Daniel Schwartz is a Principal at SYPartners, having previously worked in world-class innovation, design, and brand strategy firms, including IDEO, the Arnell Group, Redscout, and Prophet. He brings more than 15 years of experience leading multidisciplinary teams of marketers, business strategists, and designers to unlock new sources of growth.