Last week, I got into a robust discussion at work, some might even classify it as an argument, and looking back it was ultimately my fault.\u00a0 I broke a cardinal rule of successful innovation: I was making a change without having justified it.\u00a0 You tend to see this happen from time to time, and it goes by a variety of names such as skunkworks, 20% time, secret squirrel projects, etc. and looks to those outside the project that innovation is all about sneaking round processes and people to get an outcome that ultimately few people outside the project are bought into.<\/p>\n
But… if you’re doing skunkworks in an organisation you’re throwing away one of the principal benefits of being in an organisation, which is the ability to draw on a wide range of resources to help you achieve your goal.\u00a0 If you don’t utilise these resources, you’re effectively working as an n-person group (where n is typically a very small integer) in a virtual garage somewhere within the organisation.\u00a0 It’s true to say x% of garage startups (where x is a large integer approaching 100) die because they aren’t properly supported, either financially or through specialised expertise (how do you expect to build the world’s next Great Widget when you have to do the accounting yourself?).\u00a0 The same happens with most skunkworks projects, except the run rate is even worse because an outside influence (your management) can quite legitimately make you go and do something else with your day.<\/p>\n
Skunkworks works when you get someone outside the team to care about it enough to resource it (going back to the garage analogy, the idea survives because it manages to attract seed funding).\u00a0 This is what I mean by Doing It Wrong, since you’re hastily retrofitting the steps you should have taken at the start (e.g. securing backing) to allow the project to continue.\u00a0\u00a0 To do this right I think you need the following three skills in the team if you’re going to innovate successfully:<\/p>\n
The first two are self-explanatory, but the third is, I think, the key to being successful at innovation within the organisation: innovation is change therefore you need to understand how to make changes in the organisation.\u00a0 You have to identify stakeholders who you will need to gather resources from (people, hardware, time, etc.) and bring them along for the ride, from the first blue-sky ideas session to the point where the project is accepted into the organisation’s mainstream activities.\u00a0 You need to make allies of these people because they are the ones who are most likely to stall or kill the idea (they may still do that, in which case you need to be objective: are their reasons justified? Was there actually something flawed in your idea?).<\/p>\n