Part 1: Innovating in a corporate environment
Comparison with my studio experience
When trying to set up innovation in a corporate environment, it’s important to remember that innovation is all about growth. Anyone who innovates for fear of disruption is pursuing innovation for the wrong reasons in my opinion.
Since everything is measured in financial terms in business, innovation doesn’t have a good rep in corporate environments because of the high risk involved — no tangible financial results can be guaranteed. When we hit the nail with something disruptive, we hear the claps and cheers, but for the hundred other cases that turn out unsuccessfully, most people fail to see the value that was delivered through innovation— if done right, this should be a whole lot of learning!
As a designer who has had the chance to explore innovation design before transitioning to corporate innovation, I decided to reflect and try to capture and understand why they work so differently; why is it so difficult to innovate in a large organization, even when leadership has decided to invest in innovation?
Reflecting back on one of the most innovative projects I’ve worked on, a communication campaign for oral health, I tried to draw a parallel with some of the challenges I am currently facing in corporate innovation; below are some of my reflection points:
- All of the design research was done without involving the client (we only did so for clarification purposes).
What this means is that the client didn’t influence the research process, the research findings or the insights generated — it was a truly unbiased discovery of the problem space (I also really enjoyed this link on design research).
The difference in a corporate environment: the key stakeholders are often the ones providing information about the problem and pushing for the type of solution they would like to see; without a good facilitator involved in these conversations, we are likely capturing all the assumptions and biases that come with their specialization / domain. If these meetings and workshops are our design research, this could problematically lead to defining a very narrow problem statement (I will share more about this point in Part 2, coming in March 2021; for now notice on the diagram below how unclear the problem actually still is in the early stages).
One key to successful innovation is identifying and questioning our assumptions, which is easier said than done. It’s also more easily done with an innovation facilitator who is highly skilled in design research, and possibly also provides better results when the facilitator doesn’t hold very deep knowledge in the problem space being explored (this 2nd point is my opinion as a curious generalist).
2. The concept development and ideation was done without the limitations that might be imposed by the client.
I’m sure we could’ve held some ideation sessions with the client, but what I’ve seen from experience is also that good ideation takes time. Every designer starts with a moodboard for inspiration, and my team and I spent a whole sprint priming our brains with innovative ideas and concepts that could apply to the insights we found through our design research. Our ideas weren’t confined to the “oral health” domain, the dental industry or what would be an “acceptable solution” (this is also a bias).
The difference in a corporate environment: Without adequate inspiration, we are bound to find solutions that solve the problem but aren’t very creative. In corporate environments, the ideation phase tends to be limited to a quick workshop without too much prior preparation. But isn’t innovation about pushing the envelope on creativity?
Again, this is where having a great facilitator can make or break the process: the facilitator needs to be prepared to share some cool ideas, should be able to create an environment conducive to creative brainstorming, and have the right tools to lead the participants through the creative process (this is not easy).
3. We were able to pivot quickly and easily, without the weight of the corporate decision hierarchy.
We went on to prototyping and testing the solution after receiving a green light on our concept. We presented our top 3 ideas — this provided 3 very different solutions to the problem, which made the client more receptive to receiving a novel solution. Similarly to framing a problem not too narrowly, proposing a set of different solutions allowed for conversation with the client; even though we ended up choosing one concept to move forward with, feedback from the client on all 3 solutions gave valuable insights on elements of the discarded solutions that we should keep.
As we developed our prototype and refined it, some adjustments were required along the way. It wasn’t always easy to get a hold of the client to notify them which poses a big challenge when working with innovation in a corporate environment: the key stakeholder is often only supporting the innovation project from a “side of desk” capacity; if they need to provide input along the way every time there is a pivot, this becomes problematic to truly create an innovative environment.
The difference in a corporate environment: As mentioned above, a quick turnaround from the key business stakeholders can be difficult to get, and that can stifle innovation.
In addition, the culture is oftentimes such that pivoting or changing direction isn’t really an option; this means that the solution selected during the brainstorming becomes the solution we work towards, instead of being a starting point. Part of the reason for this is the fact that decisions need to flow up and down the chain of command. This can be dangerous because as the innovation team continues to learn as they move through the design process, there is a chance that the scope of the problem changes. The only way to ensure quick decision making is to develop business agility in the organization — the image below sums that up pretty well.
In my opinion, to build an innovative organization means to develop business agility; ie: if a disruption enters your market, can you bounce back quickly or will it take dozens of hours / multiple processes / decisions from tens of busy leaders for you to react to the disruption?
I’d love to hear your thoughts, please leave them in the comments! In part 2 that I will publish in March, I will focus on some learnings specifically focused on corporate innovation.
