Understand the difference between incremental and disruptive innovation and let your team focus on the bigger picture. You’ll be pleased you did, says Alex Bunting
In 2022, why not set yourself a resolution: to leave your innovation team alone. Not forever, of course. But if you’ve been guilty of overwhelming them with today’s problems – and today’s problems only – give them a break.
At Re_Set, we see this often with clients: innovation teams busying themselves driving short-term efficiencies and improvements with quick ROI. And while this may seem a fair and noble cause, on closer inspection, it’s limiting big business to incremental innovation alone.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with incremental innovation – it’s the way businesses solve some of their most critical problems. Yet it also often leaves the innovation team with little time or energy to truly disrupt.
A two-pronged approach
The truth is that both incremental and disruptive innovation are necessary. Incremental innovation ensures that the business runs effectively and efficiently today, while disruptive innovation futureproofs the business for tomorrow.
And leaders who understand the difference between them – and can adapt their businesses accordingly – will be best placed to navigate the complex changes that will arise from The Great Transition in 2022 and beyond.
So how do you do this? The key is to ensure that the role of the innovation team is twofold – first to enable innovation across the business and secondly to focus on the bigger picture.
The former sees innovation become a part of everyone’s day job, and in this way ensures that incremental innovations are driving continuous improvement. Ultimately, innovation should no longer be the sole preserve of the innovation team. Instead, it should be a knowledge base and mindset that permeates the broader culture of the business.
The latter requires the team to engage with the wider ecosystem to spot trends and opportunities for disruptive innovation that can transform the status quo. A desire for disruptive innovation is probably why you hired your innovation team in the first place. In an ideal world, this team should run externally to the everyday functions of the business and have the freedom to explore the disruptive trends of tomorrow.
Setting up your innovation team for success
Re_Set supports businesses to build a culture of incremental innovation and unlock disruptive innovation. Re_Set worked with Aviva and UKHO in 2021 to run innovation challenges that would spot new ideas and upskill the wider organisations in innovation. We also recently conducted an unconstrained innovation scan for Tesco to identify trends and technologies that could revolutionise their business.
Through these experiences, we’ve developed our recommendations for setting innovation teams up for success:
- Engage leadership. Build understanding about what success looks like for innovation and how traditional governance may need amending to achieve this. Disruptive innovation is not likely to generate huge profits until delivered at scale. As such, different metrics for success are required in the short-term – e.g., prioritise metrics that capture the potential value driven for customers from ideas, rather than the number of ideas generated themselves
- Give time to exploratory thinking. Make space to explore the trends that don’t fit into the current business strategy but could create interesting opportunities to disrupt or build out new propositions.
- Seek out disruptors and innovators in your and tangential industries across the globe to close innovation gaps through partnerships
- Enable the wider organisation. Innovation mindsets and methodologies should be embedded into BAU to upskill and empower all teams to drive innovation and break down organisational silos
- Embrace failure. Failure shouldn’t be something to fear, but instead dissected to generate key insights. For innovation to be successful, a shift in focus away from outcomes and towards insights is needed.
The end goal
Creating a culture of innovation within your business pays dividends. After all: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and you feed him for life. Your innovation team needs to shift gears from being one that provides all the innovation for the organisation, to one that teaches the organisation how to innovate.
In the longer term, your aim is to create almost a symbiotic relationship between the two. Once your innovation team is receiving as much insight as it shares with the wider organisation, this will power the engine driving real disruption.
Alex Bunting is a Consultant at Re_Set. Want more insights from the Re_Set team? Follow us on LinkedIn, or sign up to our newsletter for our latest thinking. Want to find out how Re_Set is helping businesses like yours stay competitive in 2022? Contact us today.
