3 ways to organise your way to innovation

In a previous post I wrote about my concern with ‘unnovation’ – whereby businesses risk disastrous consequences by refusing to innovate.

Its polar opposite – innovation – is a concept that has continued to fascinate down the years, with many attempts to capture exactly what it is, what it isn’t, and how you can foster it within your business.

For some people, innovation might bring to mind brainstorms, word clouds and crazy ideas. Not to mention the people with interesting haircuts in fashionable offices who are paid to come up with those ideas. But I have my own view about what’s likely to be a more reliable route. It’s something that might surprise you.

Because the thing that I’ve found consistently and successfully contributes to nurturing new innovation is organisation. You just have to be really, really organised.

Focus your attention on it

Coming up with the next big thing to allow you to leapfrog ahead of your competitors, take your industry in a new direction or change people’s daily lives for the better, is going to need the right people at the table. And that means taking it to the very top level of your organisation, right from its infancy. It’s been well-documented recently for example that Google’s Larry Page has put a lieutenant in charge of BAU at the internet business, so he can properly devote his attention to Google’s next innovations.

Do your research

How does your product, service or organisation stack up now? What benchmarks are you paying attention to? Are you aiming high enough? (I usually find in the beginning that the answer is no). Take the time to really understand how ready you, your marketplace and the surrounding landscape are for what you’re planning. Look at similar things that have been tried in other markets or geographies. Get the right people on board, or hire them in. Make a list of hurdles – and the ways in which you are going to leap over them or knock them down.

Take ownership of the challenge

If you are going to blaze a trail, you must do it with confidence and energy, bringing any doubters along with you. It might be that you need to tackle a regulatory landscape that isn’t ready, a market without the drive to push things on to the next stage, or – as in my own company’s experience of introducing 4G to the UK – a whole ecosystem that is not set up to support what you want to do. You are going to have to drive the change, which will take a lot of persuasion and determination – stakeholder by stakeholder, partner by partner, hurdle by hurdle.

Published in collaboration with LinkedIn

Author: Olaf Swantee is CEO at EE.

Image: A woman is silhouetted next to a solar panel display. REUTERS/Yuriko Nakao