Whenever you work with or hire people, it is almost always a good idea to set and clarify expectations. For example, if you are appointing an advisory board for your start up, you should define the deliverables, timelines and roles. Likewise, when you are working on a project, you should set SMART goals-
S – specific, significant, stretching
M – measurable, meaningful, motivational
A – agreed upon, attainable, achievable, acceptable, action-oriented
R – realistic, relevant, reasonable, rewarding, results-oriented
T – time-based, time-bound, timely, tangible, trackable
When it comes to innovating, though, DUMB goals might be better to stretch people a bit.
The same applies when you are leading an innovation initiative. You should be crystal clear about defining and setting expectations. and here are some big reasons why:
1. People have different understandings of innovation: Innovation has both a qualitative and quantitative component and occupies one of four boxes in the novelty-value matrix.
If you want to build a great company, your product has got to be ten times better than the competition.” Today, that advice feels out of date. If you want to build a great company in 2018, your customer experience has to be ten times lighter than the competition. It used to be what you sell that really matters, now it’s how you sell that really matters.
Innovators need to understand where you want them to play.
Tinkerers: low novelty, low value.
A solution looking for a problem: high novelty, low value
Go big or go home: High novelty, high value
Useful but no cigar: High novelty, low-medium value. Some refer to this as a minimally valuable product.
Incremental: Disruption is not the only path to innovation and growth. Creation without disruption or nondisruptive creation is about creating a new market outside or beyond existing industry boundaries and has its own organizational and business advantages. In this article, the authors outline four advantages to opting for this nondisruptive route: 1) It allows you to avoid direct confrontations with established incumbents. 2) It is an effective way to respond to full-on disruption. 3) It makes it easier to secure support from internal stakeholders. 4) It avoids backlash from external stakeholders.
2. It’s hard to boil the ocean. In healthcare, for example, there are multiple ways to create value, but they come down to improving the patient and doctor experience of quality of care and service, reducing per capita costs, and improving population health. Of course, there are also business metrics that improve revenues, reduce costs or capture market share. You also need to be specific about your strategic priorities-cancer care, the injured and aging brain or renal disease- and specific what ideas will be rejected.
3. You need an innovation leadership system that is transparent. A suggestion box won’t work. You have to explain to potential innovators not just what ideas will get consideration, but how and the steps you will take to solicit, vet, and choose ideas to test or implement and how the innovation process will work. There should be no doubt in the mind of potential innovators about what happens next.
4. Everyone seems to have a different understanding of value
5. You should lead innovators, not manage innovation
6. Innovation in organizations happens when intrapreneurs-those with an entrepreneurial mindset- work in a culture of innovation. Consequently, you should make the organizational structures, processes and procedures clear,particularly when it comes to explaining how ideas will be vetted and resourced.
7. Be sure you avoid pilot purgatory and the pitfalls that cause it.
8. Monitor and kill ideas that are not meeting expectations.
9. Identify the right key performance indicators, particularly the clinical ones
10. Celebrate success and the champions, no matter how small.
One thing most everyone agrees on is that innovation starts with the right mindset
Having high innovator expectations might also be a self-fulfilling prophesy, like teachers having high expectations of students.
Innovation, like everything else, needs to be led because freedom, creativity and regulation are often in conflict when people are competing for scarce resources. Just because creativity is about serendipity, unpredictability and happy accidents does not mean that your process should be.
