Innovation is a clichéd place to operate. It really is, I don’t think I have worked for a company that hasn’t had ‘it’ in some form or other in its mission statement or annual report. In a world where no one ever got fired for producing an ad or sales aid – Innovation so often sits there alongside ‘human capital’ as corporate lip service. It sits there as a golden goose of differentiation and competitive advantage. Yet when you challenge for proof of concept or at least an understanding of where novelty has been championed by the truly new – you often see the old in a veil of gloss.
It takes a hell of a lot of effort not to dress up the old as the new, to kid yourselves that what you have produced is in fact something that had risk at its heart. It also takes a unique group of individuals to achieve and maintain such an approach.
When we started hunting around to learn some rules about innovation businesses we wandered all over the place to find inspiration; banking, programming, digital publishing, manufacturing technology, telecoms were places we all spent time with to figure out whether there was an opportunity at least for our healthcare world to have this type of offer.
The rules behind a business that’s going to task itself with ‘doing the not done’ are vastly different from the agency world. Comms agencies work with clients around what often is a familiar ground, a set of channels that are familiar and the challenges live at the cerebral brand end and at an audience connection interface. In eBee’s world we needed to be prepared to undertake projects that are not client led, that are sometimes distant from brands, and this impacts on the teams you need. Your teams need the capability to not only identify new spaces in which to operate, but also the capacity to develop often woolly concepts through the process of conceptualisation shift and change, until you have something that’s a commercially viable product or service.
These teams operate in a strange world. We need a process that allows the unknown to be experienced in a controlled manner and it’s often this that provides the comfort in the eye of an hunch.
The most important part of the innovation business is the availability of resource. For people to come up with ideas, they need dedicated time to formulate and develop what’s ‘future valuable’. This fundamentally impacts on staffing models, operational approaches, and the ability of the organisation to rank projects in terms of opportunity and proximity to return on investment.
Our learning across the Innovation space is that, for most successful companies, innovation is seen as something that ‘does’ not something that ‘is’. It’s a process that results in a tangible, not a banner to stand by and trumpet in the vain hope that that will result in a change to the status quo. We know that this approach has given us stacks of exciting output, and stratospheric growth, as importantly it resulting is difference for brands, franchises, people and finally delivering to those dozens of annual reports.
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