An innovation culture or an innovation process

Yesterday, I spoke at the Finextra Forum for Innovation in Financial Services. There is great coverage of the event by Christophe Langlois here. Christophe has been doing a rather good job lately of being everywhere and covering everything – makes me wonder how he copes with his day job.

Anyway, something that came up in the panel discussion – as it often seems to at these things – is the question of whether the innovation strategy should be that there is a culture of innovation as part of everyone’s day job, or if, in fact, you need a team that does innovation as its core function.

I am always suspicious that when companies say that they don’t have an innovation programme (because innovation is "part of everyone’s day job") that, actually, they just don’t have a systematic approach to innovation. The problem with this is that it is inherently random. You are reliant on the goodwill of your employees: essentially, the ask is that you do your day job first, and then go the extra mile to make what-ever-it-is that is innovative happen.

This will obviously occur in a number of cases, but you can’t be certain that it will. A key point in my presentation at Finextra was that we need to get the randomness out of innovation. Give us more science! Let us make sure we can meet our numbers and generate a return!  All these things are much, much harder when you don’t have a good innovation process to drive things forward.

On the other hand, it is clearly important that one has a culture of innovation. Without such a culture, where does that first impetus for the change – the idea nugget that starts everything off – come from?

One of the attendees had, what seemed to me, part of the answer to this problem. His institution's solution is a light-touch innovation team that guides an innovation network – a group of champions across the business that self-select membership. With more than 300 members, this is a group that is charged with driving forward all parts of the innovation process, and the people with whom I was speaking disclosed to me that they’ve already had their big hit this year that's driven out the financial returns they need. It wasn’t clear to me how, if at all, members of the innovation network were compensated for their efforts, but I’d assume that there is some kind of system in place for that.

We, on the other hand, take a somewhat different approach. We have an innovation programme and dedicated innovation team. But we also goal those people who have an ability to influence change – especially those who are custodians of the business/IT relationship – with driving forward a certain number of innovations a year. We don’t care what these particular innovations are, really, or whether they’ve originated with the innovation team or elsewhere. But we do care that our activities – however they occur – drive to measurable returns.

So I’d say an innovation culture is an important aspect of getting good ideas into production reality. But the suggestion that you can have a repeatable – and therefore not random – process without someone owning the overall innovation agenda, does seem to me to be somewhat wishful. Or, at the very least, not measurable.

Comments

[Bohdan Szymanik]

And without a managed process how can long term innovation occur that requires significant effort, and therefore cost? Unmanaged innovation is necessarily driven by the individual and an individual's timeframe to achieve return is short.