Who does innovation in the company?

I often witness major misunderstandings on this issue. In many companies, it is thought that innovation is “simply” the result of the work of those who develop and design the new products to be launched on the market.
When the company is large, this happens more easily, because divisions between different functions become more acute and specializations increase.
In other companies,innovation is almost entirely “relegated” or delegated from below to the top management, i.e., the entrepreneur, the owner or the CEO. This can occur in both small and very large companies.

In other companies, one does not even ask the question, hoping that what brought success and “luck” in the past can continue to bring it into the future without interruption, regardless of who was the lucky author of the successful idea.

This category, unfortunately, includes a significant portion of companies in the market. The most peculiar belief then manifests itself when people believe they are innovating and in reality what they are launching as new to the market is just a derivation of what has already been done in the past.

The customer is the ultimate judge of innovation

From my point of view, doing innovation, high-impact innovation, means significantly increasing company revenues and margins by introducing new products and services to the market.

Richard Branson, the historic founder of Virgin, says that you only do innovation when you improve people’s lives with your product or service. Who then can judge whether a product is truly innovative? Only the people who use it, only those who use the new product or service, deriving more benefit and value from it than from other user experiences.

Think of the rapid expansion of UBER, a company founded in 2009 to offer an alternative urban mobility experience to traditional cab services, now valued at about $40 billion globally. Who has judged the goodness and potential of the UBER service?
The industry specialists who claimed that the service would not capture the tenth part of the success it had? Or the technology infrastructure specialists who judged the APP on which the UBER service is based to be very “poor” and changed very little from its origins?

It was judged by the customers who used the service and the drivers, who thanks to an alternative business model can round out their salaries without being professional taxi drivers. A good starting idea, a good business model, a well-thought-out delivery process, the ability to make good use of the technological platform and the digital world: here is served up a many-zero dish in today’s world economy.

And this is happening more and more in a world where it is more important than the ability to master existing technology to know how to exploit it well and, above all, put it at the service of people.

Who can and who should innovate in the company?

It is no longer the traditional elites of people, appointed through a corporate organizational chart, but increasingly large groups of people who when you least expect it provide a new way of solving an old problem.

From those that Roberto Verganti, author of Design Driven Innovation, calls interpreters of the different meanings and values attributable to new products and services, to those that Gary Pisano, an authoritative professor at Harward Business School, calls Open Collaborative Innovators, in a decidedly fascinating model of innovation, where the ability to harness the multiple skills and ideas around us trumps the individual capabilities possessed by individuals and companies.

Suppliers, partners, collaborators, colleagues, researchers, interns, trainees, and experts from neighboring or alternative fields to our own are just some of the possible new interpreters of new needs that we can meet.

The problem then becomes how to organize ourselves to take maximum advantage of the diverse sources around us. If we open ourselves to this idea and agree to evolve the organizational paradigm by whichinnovation is managed, we are spoiled for choice with which to initiate “Innovation Scouting” paths.

5 examples for generating innovation in the company

• Internal workshops facilitated by an external or internal expert;
• Internal and external campaigns to hunt for insights, where answers to guided questions on some specific topics are sought;
• Creation of hybrid work teams, where external and internal figures complement each other in terms of experience and skills;
• Establishment of “technology scouting“ groups in which exploitable technology opportunities and trends for new products and services are mapped;
• Selection of a small team going to work in a completely different environment for a limited period of time;

Sometimes I have witnessed an initial reluctance in the face of this broadening of the front, as if it is frightening the increase in ideas and opportunities that might result.

I am scared of the exact opposite, having few ideas, and especially having the same ideas I had in the past.
I like the idea of being able to choose and select from many, rather than having few.

So always be curious, observe, ask questions, try to recognize different points of view, try to understand what people different from you feel and think, jot down cues, ideas, maybe in a small notebook or on the notes of your smartphone.
You will be surprised at the amount of cues you will gather!