Making Progress: The 7 Responsibilities of the Innovation Leader

by Ryan Jacoby

PROGRESS, NOT JUST PROCESS

Your job, first and foremost, is to make progress.

Progress means helping your organization expand its impact by better understanding and serving customers and by launching better products and services people value.

you have to make progress this year, this month, this week.

First, define what innovation progress means in your organization (#1), Then you’ll need to help your team get there: ● Set an innovation agenda (#2) ● Create and support teams that build (#3) ● Cultivate the ingredients for progress (#4) ● Give great feedback (#5) ● Inspire progress (#6) ● Reward progress (#7)

What’s not your job?

Process.

Process is no substitute for innovation leadership.

If you’re an innovation leader, transformation isn’t your job either.

The good news about process

The bad news about process

RESPONSIBILITY 1: DEFINE INNOVATION PROGRESS

how your work will impact your company and your customers in your markets,

Start building credibility

Tackling the big metrics is part of the innovation leader’s job.

“First, you must demonstrate that you’re not frivolous."

As an innovation leader, you need to be both informed and specific about mission and goals, the organization’s track record, and market considerations even as they change and evolve.

“know the numbers”

Connect innovation activities to business outcomes

Innovation increases customer impact and, as a result, organizational impact.

At minimum, seek to understand the target and actual numbers of customers, growth rates, customer acquisition costs, and segment profitability (or lifetime value, LTV).

Making progress means overcoming the growth gap and customer gaps you’ve identified.

what would need to be true to grow operating profit by 10%?

Understand the pace of progress and actively manage the throttle

Good answers are often better than fast answers.

Don’t wait to ask “what’s next?” Start every innovation project with the next step in mind.

It’s important to understand the end game.

Know the type of outcome you’re looking to make.

Activities Define your growth gap. What growth is possible? What parts of the business might it come from? What contribution could innovation make? Consider your market. Where might new customers come from? Who could be a competitor of yours tomorrow that isn’t today? Assess your assumptions and evidence. What fundamental assumptions do you and your organization have about growth? What do you know about your future growth plans with a great deal of confidence? What are you unsure about? Consider your pace. When was the last new product or service introduction at your company? How long did it take from inception to launch? What happened to the product since? How typical was that process? What accelerated and what dampened its progress? Plan your landing. Would your team take things through a pilot? Would you launch a new service and run it until you can transition to a more operational leader? Consider your metrics for progress. If you don’t have any, create one or two.

RESPONSIBILITY 2: SET AN INNOVATION AGENDA Once you know how you define and

put together an innovation agenda that clearly articulates the future-critical challenges you w...

If you fail to set your own agenda, you risk becoming the island of misfit problems—a place where everyone in the company dumps the random projects they don’t know what to do with, the questions they can’t answer, or whatever popped up as interesting at the last executive cocktail party or jet trip.

To start, articulate and share what you see as 1) the priority innovation problems, 2) customer groups, and 3) types of innovation to pursue.

your problems should be carefully crafted, not just inherited or taken on by default.

three crucial pieces of your agenda: defining the problem, identifying the customer, and articulating the type of innovation you’ll prioritize.

Articulate your priority innovation problems Definition

Articulate your innovation target (people, customers, consumers, etc.)

Articulate the type of output you expect to create and launch

refine the statement to make it more usable, specific, and appropriate

Customers or problems? Problems or customers?

Focus on what’s “new” and within your control

Share your agenda frequently and revisit it occasionally

Align on problem statements.

Align on customer insights.

RESPONSIBILITY 3: CREATE & SUPPORT TEAMS THAT BUILD

Your team should be dedicated to building and learning.

Embrace the builders Find and support the “builders.” Builders are people who have a track record of getting things into the world in some way, shape, or form—hopefully within your organization and hopefully in different environments. They’ll be scrappy and entrepreneurial. They’ll exhibit intense curiosity, value learning, and be willing to try things, getting feedback in any way they can. Builders aren’t going to wait for you to tell them what to make and they’re rarely going to show up with a single idea, hoping it’s the right idea. They’ll bring several ideas to the table, usually right from the start, even if they don’t completely believe in each idea themselves.

Diversify and balance teams

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