Customer data fuels energy required to make great innovations: Doug Hall

You have said it is possible for companies to increase innovation speed by up to 6X while decreasing their risk by up to 80 per cent. How can they achieve this?
Innovation can be fast-tracked by following some key principles. First, the leadership has to be actively engaged in leading. It is important for the leadership to set strategic direction. Setting strategic direction means defining both “where” employees should innovate as well as “why” it is important to innovate. In the military, this approach is called “commander’s intent”. It reduces wasted time and thus increases speed. This is in contrast to the old world approach of setting financial goals or metrics for innovations. Goals are the outcome, not the strategy for winning with innovation.

 
Then you have to replace silo thinking with system thinking. Innovation success is a product of the system synergy between the offering, marketing, pricing, packaging etc. When employees are focused on optimising the innovation as a “whole system”, companies see faster speed and greater success. On the other hand, when employees are focused on optimising their departmental silos then it leads to bureaucracy and failure. 
 
You have to enable speed with speed systems. Forty years of innovation experience has taught me that 94 per cent of innovation speed problems are due to slow innovation systems; 6 per cent are due to slow employees. For example, innovating at the speed of today’s marketplace requires rapid research tools that deliver quantitative results in about an hour, at 5 per cent of the cost of legacy systems. When you can test this fast, you learn faster and make smarter decisions.

 

You have spoken of “vertical” and “horizontal” alignment to speed up innovation. Please elaborate?
Quantitatively, alignment can help double the financial reward you realise from innovation. Alignment between leadership and employees, and across departmental silos creates a focus of energy that speeds up innovation up to 6x. Without alignment teams pull in different direction resulting in wasted energy and effort.
 
How can organisations identify “killer” issues that must be solved to enable innovation?
A simple approach to finding “killer” issues is to go on a mental excursion. Imagine that you are years into the future. The innovation has failed. What might be the reason that the product failed. Listen to both your left brain rational mind and your right brain instincts. It is not always fun. Opening yourself up to your fears, uncertainties and doubts can be scary as you end up giving voice to your unspoken fears. But it’s also exhilarating when you create a plan of action for resolving your killer issues. It is rare when an innovation fails that those involved didn’t know the killer issues. The difference is, some deal with them some ignore them.

 
How can businesses benefit from promoting “rapid” research?
When you have the systems in place to conduct rapid research, opinions are replaced with data. The decisions are grounded in truth. And when truth rules there is a greater meaningfulness to the work. People have an extra energy when they believe they are doing the right things in the right way. The data from customers fuels the energy required to make great innovations happen.