5 golden rules for innovation teams
My name is Gavin Jones and I’ve recently become the Innovation Manager for the John Lewis Partnership having previously worked as the Waitrose Lead Innovation Architect for a number of years.
My new role will see me managing JLAB, the John Lewis Partnership’s startup retail tech accelerator programme. We’ve some really exciting developments planned for JLAB, which I’ll be sharing in future posts.
As Lead Innovation Architect for Waitrose, part of my team’s role was to provide support for experimentation and ‘Test and Learn’ projects, this allowed us to learn some obvious, but useful lessons which I’d like to share today; my five golden rules for innovation teams:
Rule #1. Provide a framework for everyone to innovate. Don’t try to do it all yourself.
One of the main focuses of an innovation team should be to put in-place a repeatable, sustainable framework for innovation. Innovation teams must be focused on removing the barriers to innovation that exist within the company, changing mindsets and making it easy for everyone to innovate, not trying to do all the cool stuff themselves.
Rule #2. Be Customer obsessed, not technology obsessed.
In innovation, with the amazing new technology, tools and techniques that we see everyday, it’s easy to get swept along on the technology hype, but it’s essential that this doesn’t happen and that you don’t lose focus on your main priority; your customer.
Empathise with your customers. Use tools like Design Thinking and the Value Proposition Canvas to ensure that you are thinking from a customer perspective. But get the balance right; sometimes you do need to lead the customer rather than being led by them.
Rule #3. Run Innovation projects like experiments; monitor, measure and evolve.
There’s no point in running an experiment if you already know the outcome and there’s no point in running an experiment if you can’t measure how successful it is.
Before you start on an innovation project, ensure that you have a really clear understanding of how you will monitor and measure it, and also what success looks like. Ensure you’re monitoring it through its life, and don’t be scared to evolve it, or kill it, if it’s not going the way you expected, which leads me on to…
Rule #4. Fail fast (yes, we’ve all heard it, but actually do it).
This is really obvious and something that we’ve all heard before, but sometimes it’s really hard to do if you’re emotionally invested in a piece of work.
Ensure the success of your team is based on learning lessons and proving (or disproving) concepts rather than a KPI such as ‘projects completed’, or even worse ‘innovations implemented’.
Ensure the teams around you understand and support your fail fast approach, and most importantly, when you do fail fast, ensure that the reasons why and the lessons learned are well understood and communicated to all stakeholders to avoid the “why did you stop my project?”-style political situations.
Rule #5. Look forward exponentially (think big!)
Your team’s time is limited so there is little point in doing work that only makes a small change.
Think about the scale of the impact your work will have. While incremental change can make a huge difference to an organisation, you should already have teams looking at this.
Focus on the pieces of work which will have the biggest impact, learn to say ‘no’ when it’s not suitable for your team, even if it’s a fun piece of work that you’d enjoy doing.
Bonus Rule. Don’t become a Shadow IT team
An innovation team can often be perceived as a team that gets the impossible done, while frequently working around the IT Department.
It can be tempting for your customers to use your team when something needs to be done quickly or cheaply, without them needing to go through the governance processes that major organisations have in place.
Apply the rules above to every request, avoid doing favours for teams, and always set the expectation: ‘we’re here to prove concepts, not to help you cut corners’.
