The key to fostering a corporate innovation culture? Inside Out!
Many large firms are currently grappling with ways to incorporate a more innovative culture into their development and organisational environments. As with any large transformational project, success or failure tend to depend on the right mix of culture and human relationships.
This was the main crux of the discussion at the inaugural Rainmaking Session — How to foster a corporate innovation culture — hosted by Rainmaking Innovation in May.
A wide range of corporate innovation leaders and learners from organisations as diverse as Standard & Poors, BP and SwissRe gathered to hear a discussion led by Rachael Jackson, Solutions, Design, Services at RBS and Alex Farcet, partner at Rainmaking Innovation.
The conversation around the table, conducted under the Chatham House Rule, came thick and fast as participants relayed stories of their own companies’ internal challenges, strategies and successes. The only interruption to the discussion came when two enormous anti-terrorist transformer helicopters buzzed the Rainmaking Loft!
The main findings from the roundtable were as follows:
Innovation leaders at corporations need to operate with one leg inside an organisation and one leg outside. Being outside a firm allows the leaders to learn and discover new technologies and new business models that can transform the enterprise. While keeping a foot inside a company, keeps lines of communication and collaboration open with senior people at the firm.
This line of talk moved onto a debate on whether innovation departments need to be centralised, and separate from the main organisation, with their own staff, budget and authority or decentralised. The centralised model had the advantages of a separate budget line which would allow projects to develop without relying on the P&L of separate business units. The decentralised approach emphasised the importance of encouraging the entire firm to engage in innovation projects and activities.
Innovation tends to signal change for most companies and change is scary. People and culture are key to ensuring that establishing and innovation culture is seen as beneficial and empowering to the rest of the organisation.
Many around the Rainmaking Session breakfast table recognised that many innovation projects were led by either senior management or staff working hands on in development. It was the so-called ‘middle layer’ that was most in need of empowerment when it came to innovation. Many argued that this ‘middle layer’ was not incentivised to try anything new or to embark on innovation projects that have the possibility of failure embedded in its DNA.
Innovation projects are hard to measure, and including metrics at all might be detrimental to its successes. However, most large corporates operate in a risk culture that requires performance metrics and measurement. The ‘can’t live with metrics/can’t live without metrics’ debate continues.
Finally, the roundtable debate focused engaging with and working with startups. The large corporate around the table all expressed an interest and a desire to work with startups — given that the search for new technologies and solutions is often found in the startup community.
Their advice for any startup looking to sell into or partner with a larger organisation was to make sure that they presented their value proposition in a way that made sense for the corporate and their clients’ needs. If that value proposition was met correctly, a partnership between a corporate and a startup would be more likely to be successful. These successful projects could then be used as evidence to the rest of the company that embarking on an innovation culture was beneficial and worthwhile.
Please join us, or invite a colleague, for our next Rainmaking Session on June 16th — What’s the matter with payments?
You will hear from:
· Jon Prideaux, CEO at Boku
· Richard Jackson, UK Managing Director, WoraPay
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