Innovation cannot be delayed. Swatch managed it in time.
Every corporation needs to innovate. And every CEO knows it. But what has changed in the last 10 years is that innovation can no longer be an occasional event, an interruption to the daily grind. It’s not sufficient to innovate every 5 years with long periods of complacency in-between, churning out the product. There are too many start-ups out there trying to eat your lunch for that. And dinner.
But big companies are traditionally poor at innovation. That’s why there are now a number of agencies offering outsourced innovation services. The idea is that they look at your current offerings, think up a whizzy new addition that will make you look good in your industry and then persuade you that you’re going to make lots of money from it. Then they give you a whopping bill for their services and leave you with the not inconsiderable task of working out how you’re going to take it to market.
But the biggest problem of all with outsourced innovation is that few (or none) of your own staff have really bought into the process. They don’t own the new product. And when they move in to take over and nurture it on its way, it’s a little like adopting someone else’s baby.
So if outsourcing is unsatisfactory, what can corporates do to raise their game and do innovation successfully in-house. How can they make innovation a part of corporate culture?
Corporations contain their own human soup. The problem for big companies has been how to pick out the right people from all that soup and put them together at the right time in the right way. In other words, how to build an innovation team that will come together on day one as if made for each other and then not only design a new product or service but secure the participation of other vital talents in just the right amounts and at just the right times to help nurture the new product through its journey and steer it through the internal roadblocks all the way to market acceptance and delivery.
It’s a big ask.
But there is an answer.
Method Teaming is the world’s only proven teaming science. It is perfectly suited to the mission of building an innovation team made up of people who have little experience of working together. Method Teaming will first identify employees with exactly the right talents for the task. But it will also choose people with complementary attributes. When they come together and form a team they will find, possibly to their surprise, that they work intuitively, knowing their own and each other’s roles, as if they had been assembled like the parts of a Swiss clock. Method Teaming will help them understand their unique contribution to the team and, just as importantly, the unique strengths and talents of all the other members. They will be playing exactly the role that they always wanted to play. In this way, everyone knows how to get the best out of each other and the opportunity for conflict is minimised.
An innovative product or service built by your own staff will be your own – and their own – baby. No adoption is necessary and the risk of rejection is zero.
“When your employees come together and form a team they will find, possibly to their surprise, that they work intuitively, knowing their own and each other’s roles, as if they had been assembled like the parts of a Swiss clock.”
