This is Part Two of our series on Innovation Strategy Proving Grounds. If you have not already done so, please read Part One before continuing.

Innovation strategy is critical to business longevity because if you do not disrupt yourself, your competitor will. Innovation is also something that is not learned in a lecture hall, but rather through action. These actions turn into repeatable habits across your team through Proving Grounds.

When I say proving ground, think of this as a hurdle for a leader to jump over to show that they are developing competency. Similar to how muscle growth is created through a targeted workout plan, an innovation strategy for your enterprise is created through targeted proving grounds to empower your leaders to learn by doing.

In this article, I’ll provide an overview of 10 Innovation Practices with example Proving Grounds.

These 10 are:

• • Customer-Centric Thinking
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration
  • Psychological Safety
  • Rapid Prototyping and Iteration
  • Data-Informed Decision-Making
  • Leadership Support and Vision
  • Time and Space for Creativity
  • Open Innovation and Ecosystem Thinking
  • Clear Innovation Strategy and Metrics
  • Learning from Failure

 

Customer-Centric Thinking

• • What is it?: Prioritizing real customer needs in problem-solving and product development.
  • Why does it matter?: Without paying customers, you don’t have a business. Being customer-centric (or even customer-obsessed) allows you to bring more value to your customer interactions, allowing you to close more new deals and retain existing customers for the long term.
  • Proving Ground Example: Conduct at least 5 customer discovery interviews and extract 1-3 actionable insights that lead to a proposed product/service enhancement or new feature.

To hit home how critical this innovation practice is, here is what the Founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, had to say on the topic: “The number one thing that has made us successful by far is obsessive compulsive focus on the customer.”

 

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• • What is it?: Engaging a variety of leaders spanning multiple business functions to generate innovative ideas.
  • Why does it matter?: To get any new idea, method, or product off the ground, you need a team with different skillsets working in harmony together. Communicating clearly and fostering collaboration are essential to building something new and innovative. Without this, nothing will get done.
  • Proving Ground Example: Co-lead or contribute to a cross-functional workshop or project that results in a novel solution or process improvement incorporating at least 3 different perspectives or skill sets.

Complex problems call for complex teams creating complex solutions. The winners of innovation today and tomorrow will be teams that can bring cross-functional leaders together so that 1+1 is greater than 2.

 

Psychological Safety

• • What is it?: Fostering an environment where team members feel safe to share ideas without fear or repercussion.
  • Why does it matter?: Innovation is risky. You need to remove the stigma from failure and provide a sandbox environment for team members to dream up new ideas and test them in a controlled manner to maximize learning while minimizing unnecessary risk.
  • Proving Ground Example: Facilitate or participate in a brainstorming session where at least one high-risk or unconventional idea is seriously explored, documented, and considered for development.
    • A favorite question of mine to enter unconventional territory quickly is, “What will our industry look like 50 years down the road? How must we adapt?”

Psychological safety opens people up to dreaming and collaborating. It opens the aperture for what is truly possible to drive your enterprise forward. Without this, your team will not be bought-in, see your innovation initiative as the new “flavor of the month”, and view every idea with short-sighted tunnel vision.

 

Rapid Prototyping and Iteration

• • What is it?: Building and testing rough concepts quickly to validate assumptions.
  • Why does it matter?: We don’t build new products and services in a vacuum. We share them with our customers to get real feedback to guide what we are building. Rapid prototyping allows you to create quick feedback loops with your customer to make sure you are moving efficiently to get closer and closer to a market-ready product.
  • Proving Ground Example: Create a prototype (mockup, MVP, or storyboard) within 2 weeks of identifying a new idea and test it with at least 3 users or stakeholders to gather feedback for iteration.

Zappos is an excellent case study of rapid prototyping in action since they started when the biggest assumption for their business was: “Will people actually buy shoes online?” Their founder tested this by building a landing page selling shoes they didn't own. The result? Amazon bought Zappos for $1.2B in 2009.

 

Data-Informed Decision-Making

• • What is it?: Using data to guide innovation and improve outcomes.
  • Why does it matter?: We live in a data-driven world. Hunches need to be verified with real data to de-risk what we are building. You need a team of leaders who will suggest innovative ideas and show the data to support their case.
  • Proving Ground Example: Present a data-backed case (using A/B tests, surveys, analytics, etc.) that supports a pivot, continuation, or cancellation of a project, and show how the data changed the team’s approach.

Without data, you may feel like you are blindfolded, spun around, and throwing a dart at a dartboard that is actually in the other room. We are far beyond leaders being able to excuse themselves with the old thinking of “Half the money I spend on marketing is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

 

Leadership Support and Vision

• • What is it?: Leadership advocating for innovation and aligning with strategic goals.
  • Why does it matter?: Innovation lives and dies by leadership buy-in. If leadership is not taking innovation seriously and marking it as a top priority, your team will not dare to attempt it. Why? Because innovation is high-risk and nobody wants to lose their job for thinking outside of the box when their work culture only rewards “safe” inside-the-box thinking.
  • Proving Ground Example: Present a proposal for an innovative project to leadership that aligns with a strategic business priority, and secure budget, endorsement, or executive feedback to move it forward.

This practice is particularly dangerous if you do not actively practice it. Your would-be innovators? If leadership does not support their innovative ideas, they will leave for your competitor.

 

Time and Space for Creativity

• • What is it?: Allocating actual time and resources for idea generation and exploration.
  • Why does it matter?: Building and scaling your business took time, energy, and capital. Why would you treat a new idea, method, or product any differently? Any project needs to be properly resourced to have a fighting chance. It’s essential to make sure that an innovation project is properly scoped and resourced.
  • Proving Ground Example: Dedicate 10–20% of your time over a quarter to work on a self-initiated innovation project, and present a prototype, concept pitch, or insight report at an internal demo or review.

Most innovation projects fail before they start since they are not properly resourced. Consider setting up a corporate innovation outpost, set aside clear time, space, and metrics for innovation.

 

Open Innovation and Ecosystem Thinking

• • What is it?: Leveraging external partners for ideas and solutions.
  • Why does it matter?: Your workforce is comprised of key talent to support your current business model. To do something new, you will most likely need to bring in external partners to accelerate the ideas you are working on. Find collaborative partners to brainstorm, build, and launch with.
  • Proving Ground Example: Initiate or contribute to a collaboration with an external partner (such as a startup, university, vendor), and deliver a co-created prototype, pilot, or proof of concept.

If you had everything you needed for innovation, your enterprise would have done so already. Start with an audit to identify your gaps and get creative about inviting external partners in to collaborate with.

 

Clear Innovation Strategy and Metrics

• • What is it?: Understanding and applying the organization's innovation goals and tracking progress.
  • Why does it matter?: Without a clear strategy and measurable metrics, how will your team know that they are making progress? Metrics are a powerful constraint to de-risk building something that nobody asked for.
  • Proving Ground Example: Map your team’s innovation efforts to the company's innovation framework and provide a short report or dashboard showing measurable progress or outcomes.

 

Founding Father of modern-day management, Peter Drucker, has said, “What gets measured, gets managed.” Use a clear set of 1-3 metrics to act as guardrails for your innovation projects to ensure alignment on what success looks like.

 

Learning from Failure

• • What is it?: Using failures as a source of learning and improvement.
  • Why does it matter?: A mistake is not a failure; it is an opportunity to learn. Retrospectives are key to gathering learnings on what went wrong (or what went right) to ensure that your team grows through each innovation attempt.
  • Proving Ground Example: Lead or participate in a retrospective of a failed initiative and contribute at least 3 documented lessons that inform future projects or process changes.

When I was scaling a consumer electronics company, we had a value of “grow through failure”. To turn this into action (not lip service), we created a Failure Log and had the first entry done by none other than our own CEO to make sure that our entire team understood that failure is acceptable here. Failure is not long-lasting unless we avoid learning from it.

 

Where to Start

You won’t transform your established business into an innovation hub overnight. Start by picking one of these practices and find a way to embed it into your current business model. For example, you may charge your team to be more customer-centric and gather data on two key areas:

1. 1. Why do customers choose us in the first place?
   2. Why do customers stay with us (or leave us) over the long term?

Crafting an initiative like this allows you to set proving grounds for innovation, document the process/learnings, and make meaningful progress on real initiatives impacting your core business.

Done successfully, this gets your workforce more open to acting with an innovative mindset. With that buy-in, you can launch another initiative to build up quick wins and eventually make the case for a more out-of-the-box innovation project.

How can we help? Innovation can be messy, disorganized, and a drain on limited resources. But it doesn’t have to be.

We can work with your team to strategize on where to start and provide expert-level guidance to help ensure that your innovation practices are more likely to succeed.

Reach out directly to us through our contact form. Our Executive Performance Coaches have seen a lot, and we can work with you directly to build a culture of innovation so your company becomes more like Netflix and less like Blockbuster.