Accelerating Innovation

Innovation is a topic that’s talked about, agonized over, and disputed in every forward-thinking company, but few companies really know how to cultivate and operationalize a robust innovation practice.

With a well established internal innovation practice to collect and review ideas and top down funding and support, our customer, a multinational firm, was already ahead of the innovation curve.

But still, they were missing a critical element: a system to accelerate and scale their innovation process. They had found inconsistencies in their innovation process across the globe. Some regions were soliciting ideas or conducting experiments without sharing knowledge or updating best practices.

Without full visibility across its regions, inefficiencies emerged. When they took stock of their global innovation community, the firm realized that they had inadvertently funded the same experiment in two different parts of the world. Their current tools weren’t helping to smooth out the process either. With their innovation framework in one place, learnings in another, and ideation someplace else, it was difficult to keep track of all the tools needed for their innovators to be successful.

In collaboration with global management consulting firm Kearney, we introduced our customer to Conductor™, to help them grow and develop innovators with all levels of experience. Working together, we enhanced our customer’s existing practice and mapped the new protocols to an innovation funnel within Conductor.

Knowing that great ideas can come from every corner of the company and the globe, our customer wanted to tap into the entire organization. Any team member could submit their ideas through the central innovation portal. The Innovation Committee and other team members involved in a given project would then review and comment on the ideas, contributing to their evolution and ultimately, providing funding and mentorship through the idea’s execution.

To push boundaries, drive collaboration, and cross-pollinate ideas and perspectives, the firm went the extra mile by inviting its external partners to join its growing Innovation Community. Through Conductor, they could grant guests and external partners the limited access needed to participate or lead experiments without jeopardizing the privacy and security of its patients, team members and property. With strict access controls, external partners had access to all documents, communications, and tasks to fully participate in the right experiments, while securely preventing access to all other experiments.

As part of their innovation protocol, the firm’s leadership team would issue challenges as an effective call to action for ideas around a particular theme or topic. Often, the challenge was to either provide a solution a pressing problem or just to simply inspire out-of-the-box, disruptive thinking.

Once ideas were ready to be reviewed, the head of the Innovation Committee was notified, reviewed the idea, and either accepted it, rejected it, or collaborated with the ideators to improve it. Once their ideas were accepted, innovators were invited to present at Pitch Day, a “Shark Tank” style vetting process, where top ideas were pitched to the entire Innovation Committee.

To prepare them for Pitch Day, teams received a new series of training and planning tools to prepare them sell their idea to the Committee. These tools provided the guidance needed to develop budgets, logistics plans, and the plan resourcing requirements to not only make their idea feasible, but scalable and aligned to their objectives. They also received coaching on how to craft their pitch deck and message for the best results at Pitch Day.