100 Days to Disruption - Program Plan for Innovation in Tough Climate

If you are planning to roll-out an Innovation program across your Enterprise, there are probably two top-of-mind concerns given the current economic climate:

  1. How do you show value to the Executive Team, while they are mostly thinking short term profitability and cash flow?
  2. How do you make the program sticks?  The worst thing is to launch a program and then nothing happens.  Amidst all the layoffs and bad news, employees might be feeling overworked and demoralized. They can get cynical really quick about “yet another” corporate initiative.

When I was designing the innovation program for my company’s innovation initiative, I looked at different best practices.  I must have read all the current books on the subject, and talked to many top practitioners in the field.  I know I want a program that has these attributes:

  1. Result Oriented - real results visible to both employees and Executives
  2. Persistent Regular Cadence - so as not to over hype or under market the initiative
  3. Quarterly Rallying Points - set a time boundary and plan quarterly events to serve as rallying points for innovation activities - IBM does this well with their Innovation Jams and we learn that innovation program works best if you put a time constraint on it
  4. Energize Even a Skeptical Employee Base - make them believe that they can make an actual difference and that you are not wasting their time and passion

While I was just finalizing our roll-out plan, I serendipitously bumped into this article on Forbes web site: One Hundred Days to Disruption.  In the article, Scott D. Anthony and Brad Gambill of Innosight, laid out a simple 5 step plan.  (By the way, Innosight is co-founded by Clayton Christensen.)  The “100 Days to Disruption” title is perfect for what I was looking to do.  It lets everybody knows that we are looking for disruptive and not incremental ideas, and it let the Executives see concrete results in regular quarterly (100 days) cadence.

Here are the 5 steps.  Please follow the link above to the article which has a lot of good detail suggestions for each of the step.  It is well worth a read.

There are a few more things I want to add to this:

  1. Executive Buy-in and participation is key. For example, work with a Business Unit leader and make her feels like a customer and intended beneficiary right from Step 1.
  2. Funding and Support System must be in place. Don’t do it if you do not have funding or support program to actually launch the winning idea(s) into venture projects. Employees would think you are a joke and wasting their time and passion. An Incubation Program should be setup well before launching thie 100 day plan, along with secured funding and support infrastructure.
  3. Mix in Cross Pollination and Crowd Souring Concepts. The article suggests forming a small team in Step 2 to generate a long list of ideas.  I personally am skeptical about limiting the ideation exercise to a small group.  The broader the background of people involved, and the more cross pollination from different disciplines, the higher the chance is of getting a disruptive idea.  I think there is an opportunity here to employ crowd sourcing concept, using Web 2.0 tool to solicit ideas from a broad base of employees, and letting them form birds-of-a-feather teams to further collaborate and develop proposals.
  4. Use NABC Exercise. For Step 4 (Build Business Plan), I highly recommend using the “NABC” exercise highlighted in Dr. Curtis Carlson’s book “Innovation: Five Disciplines of Creating What Customers Want”.  See my earlier blog post regarding NABC.  I think it is the most simple and effective process I have come across in helping teams articulate customer value propositions and develop business strategy.
  5. Publicize Your Decision Making Process. For Step 5 (Decision Making Workshop), it helps to have pre-determined selection criteria agreed among the decision makers.  Make the decision process as transparent as possible.  Consider making a blog post to document the decision making process and rationales, or even make an “Apprentice TV” style webisode of the decision process.  It is a great way to train the rest of the employees about what you are looking for, and that the company is serious about sponsoring innovation.  Make this an education opportunity to energize the employee base for your next 100 Day cycle.