Selling Innovation to The C-Suite

Most organizations now place a major emphasis on innovation as a pathway to corporate growth. The RD increasingly, he or she is expected to help direct the role technology plays in enabling new services or business models and building closer integration with channel partners. With this broader mandate, the R&D manager must become an effective champion, educator, and salesperson for innovation within the corporation. To develop these internal marketing skills, R&D managers can look to successful independent innovation companies--design firms--for lessons on how they engage client C-suite members to get more deeply involved in innovation initiatives. Here, we take a look at the practices of these design firms in the hope of better equipping the R&D manager to bring innovation into his or her own C-suite. The Challenge of Selling Innovation to C-Suite Design firms such as IDEO, Continuum, and frog design-and the hundreds more actively supporting the innovation efforts of corporations both large and small--offer a unique perspective on the process of selling innovation. In a comprehensive study of best practices of design firms conducted in 2009 (1), we investigated how the most successful firms sold innovation to various stakeholders in client organizations. These firms have a reputation for excelling in innovation both incremental (such as a new type of packaging design) and radical (such as a new business model that can disrupt an industry). To survive as businesses, they have to be masters at selling innovation initiatives to senior management. That selling effort has traditionally been focused primarily on R&D managers. However, over recent years, as C-suite executives have become more interested in how innovation can fuel business transformation, design firms have found themselves directing their selling efforts as much to line-of-business executives and marketing VPs as to R&D departments. At the same time, many of these executives still have to be "sold" on innovation, especially higher-risk proposals. In the words of one design executive, "A more disruptive innovation is a nice thing to talk about once a year at an executive retreat, but few executives outside of R&D want to take the risk of actually pushing their companies into creating and testing disruptive solutions." Many executives now expect their R&D managers to be able to offer innovation solutions beyond narrowly defined notions of new products and services. In other words, executives want R&D managers to be involved in all aspects of innovation within their organizations. This push for innovation, coupled with skepticism about specific innovations, puts the R&D manager in the same boat as the design firm. What lessons can R&D managers adapt from design firms to play a more effective role in corporate growth? Five Lessons for Selling Innovation Our research with leading design firms has unearthed five key lessons for selling innovation that R&D managers can apply within their own organizations. The most successful design firms sell innovation across the organization by: * Building innovation insight in executives, * Understanding the competitive context, * Modeling the business value of innovation, * Framing innovation as more than just product or process, and * Managing stakeholders across the corporation. These firms have developed specific tools for accomplishing these goals, tools that R&D managers can use to similar effect. Building innovation insight in executives Design firms constantly seek ways to educate client executives to establish the foundation for significant innovation. They use a number of methods to make innovation and innovation thinking more accessible for their client executives. …