Tales of a non-profit leader who accidentally fell into the corporate innovation world
By: Luisa Gockel
Tags: Social Innovation, Social Impact, Corporate Innovation, Diversity And Inclusion, Innovation

My transition into the corporate innovation space reminded me of my transition into motherhood. I sleep-trained my kids, and they slept through the night by the age of four months. Desperate friends still ask me how we did it, and my advice is always the same: read everything you find, don’t take any single author too seriously, mix all the concepts that are relevant to you, and do whatever works for your family. Now replace family with company and here’s my non-recipe recipe for your corporate innovation problem.

This is obviously an overly simplistic way to describe the process, but one of the things that really struck me as a non-profit leader parachuted into a corporate innovation setting was the number of innovation gurus and methodologies that claimed to help people to build an innovation culture, process, team, or function from scratch. The diversity of voices is always welcome, but it is hard to cut through the noise when you are a beginner and find advice that really works in a specific context.

Below are some of the lessons from my corporate innovation stint. The list is personal and non-transferable, but I’m hoping someone out there will share my pain and joy.

Just one little thing before we crack on. I hear you. You have just started and are already overwhelmed and have no idea whether you should go for design-thinking or lean start-up methodology (or even go for a Zig-Zag approach as our friends at IDEO suggest). Have no fear. I make a personal commitment here and now to honour all stressed innovation leaders out there to finish this write-up without name dropping any innovation gurus or miraculous methodologies. Wish me luck!

1 — Storytelling & the c-word

Something that has always intrigued me is how might separate innovation labs, or so-called moonshot factories, have a positive impact on a company’s culture if they are purposely created as an external entity, most of the time in a different location to keep them safe from the mothership’s innovation antibodies. And sorry for the bad metaphor. You only know you are one of them when you start using either space or biology-related metaphors in your active vocabulary (it goes away, eventually).

I kept asking this question to every innovation person I met (yes, they are a thing now), to try to understand how effective these spaces were on impacting a company’s culture and if there was one common thing in their answers, it was storytelling. Powerful and engaging storytelling that makes the company proud of the innovation team’s achievements, that helps executives impress shareholders, and helps salespeople showcase to prospective clients how innovative the company is. And before they notice, if done well, their innovative practices, way of speaking, and agility is part of the ‘regular’ employees’ lives.

2 — Disruptive innovation is always good, right? Wrong

Once I met the head of a corporate innovation lab from a large and well-established company (I mean very old), and he pointed out something that I had never thought about before. They don’t want all types of managers to get all disruptive all of a sudden. Some managers who work on incremental innovation need a different skillset and processes from managers who are working on disruptive innovation. Now that I write that, it sounds pretty obvious to me.

3 — Learning how to behave in ecosystems

I first heard the term ‘open innovation’ back in 2009, and one thing I learned through my work with corporations was that some large companies think in a very counterproductive way. Some still believe that start-ups will be waiting patiently to work with them. You have probably guessed by now that this is not very clever. The start-up will eventually walk away if a large corporation is too slow, too bureaucratic, or too cheeky to ask for products, services, or IPs for free. You heard it right, a tech giant once assumed they would own our IP when I was working at a non-profit. True story.

This behaviour may show underlying issues about a company’s culture. It shows that the company still fails to recognise that all these smaller organisations are an important part of their open innovation ecosystem and shouldn’t be treated as mere suppliers; a word I learned to dislike over time.

4 — A complex web

There is a menu of things that you could try in your corporate innovation strategy: start-up investment, partnerships, employee upskilling, volunteering, reverse mentoring, M&A, incubators, accelerators, etc. The list is very long, and each one of these things, when done right, should be seen as one of the pieces of your innovation puzzle to help build your company innovation capabilities.

I see the fear in your eyes. You don’t have to do all these things at the same time, and they obviously can’t be done by the same team as they require different skills and the involvement of various business units, from HR and employee engagement to product development and partnerships. So, start small, pick your battles, and go where the energy is. You can always grow from there.

5 — Accelerators & incubators: FOMO or fad

If your company hasn’t thought about running an incubator or accelerator programme as part of your innovation strategy, I’m sorry, but you are alone. Most start-ups want to grow and become a large company, but I doubt many corporations would be keen on shrinking in revenue, staff, or market share in order to operate more like a start-up. For that reason, one may find this obsession that corporations have with start-ups a bit odd.

Accelerators are one of the most common ways that corporations have been trying to get innovation through the door, and some trace its origins back to the launch of the Y Combinator in 2005 in the US. After so many years, there are great, successful programmes and best practices that companies that are new to the space can build on. If I can give one little piece of advice, it is this: please don’t start from scratch and fall into the trap of doing your own thing. There are brilliant companies out there that are experts in running corporate accelerator programmes.

Being a mentor in a few corporate accelerators made me realise that, very often, when companies launch a new acceleration programme hoping to get fresh innovation through the door, they still lack that level of self-awareness needed to become a valued player within an open innovation ecosystem. Does your company suffer from risk-aversion, short-termism, dependence on a very hierarchical structure, or extensive internal bureaucracy? If the answer is ‘yes’ to any of these, it probably makes sense to deal with your company’s internal innovation antibodies (sorry, did it again) before inviting external players in. Or at least make sure you have the right level of internal buy-in needed so you don’t waste your energy trying to convince thousands of people that the strategy makes sense.

6 — Your allies

If the company is large and has been around for a while, there will likely be colleagues or whole teams that will block innovation for being too attached to a specific solution or a certain way of doing things. Where did I read that you should always fall in love with the problem and never with a specific solution?

Once I tested a simple prototyping fund with a few start-ups. I offered a small financial incentive to foster collaboration between the participating ventures and a large corporation. It only worked well when I found a brave and innovative team inside a large company who jumped headfirst into the challenge. There is always a team like this (maybe several of them), and you need them on your side. When it comes to corporate innovation, it may be helpful to start with the converted.

7 — Are you building something old?

One question that has always been a mystery to me, having come from the social impact world, is: why would any company build an innovation strategy from scratch that is not already focusing on doing good and doing well at the same time?

Doing well and being profitable at the expense of the communities around you and the planet is no longer good enough, and to ignore it is the same as building an innovation strategy that is not future-proofed. Building outdated innovation capabilities doesn’t sound like a smart move to me.

8 — Yes, we need to talk about diversity

We are hopefully past the point where I need to convince people that if all senior leaders look the same and hire people who look and think like them, it will be unlikely they will challenge each other’s assumptions — which is key to help innovation to flourish.

I’m usually on the start-ups’ side, but unfortunately with this one, both small and large companies are guilty. Growing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are encouraging, but even for an optimist like me, I just feel it’s happening too slowly.

I once spoke with an SME where their 12-person senior leadership team was formed by 12 non-diverse men (and by the way, women made up 50% of their customers… go figure). I couldn’t help but think that there’s something undeniably wrong when a CEO can’t see not only the benefits but a strong necessity to bring diverse voices, experiences, and different world views to the team.

Conclusion: be inspired, don’t get prescriptive

When I started on my innovation journey, I read everything I could about innovation, but I really tried to get out there to talk to people in similar positions, learn from them, and borrow best practices. I learned the other day that there’s a sort of informal support network formed by moonshot factories (I pictured the image in my head and found it funny). The point is that well-funded innovation labs that are linked to fancy brands need help to find their identity and the best strategy to deal with the mothership innovation antibodies. Now imagine us, mere innovation mortals. We shouldn’t feel bad about failing and feeling lost sometimes.

I know innovation means different things to different people. My understanding of innovation was very much influenced by the young innovators I had the privilege to work with at Apps for Good, a non-profit that teaches young people to build tech products to improve their communities. To me, innovation boils down to people finding new and better solutions to problems they care about.

If your question is where you should start your innovation efforts, the honest answer is that I have no idea. However, I feel strongly about what you should not do under any circumstances and that is to build a team with a non-diverse group of people who care about the same things, and as a result keep trying to solve a narrow set of problems. Over and over again.