Why is it that innovation teams are so often delivering the right thing at the wrong time? Let's assume a best case scenario where the conditions are all primed, with technology, consumer and operating model all aligned and ready. Maybe there's even a viability test in the bank with early data suggesting an imminent success after the 'handover' is complete. What could go wrong?
Firstly, let's pause for thought on that last point. The handover. How does it feel to receive the product of someone else's work? Almost never good.
Based on your measures of success you're no doubt likely to be VERY clear. All your criteria must be met for any chance of the asset moving from one place to the other. It's like the unstoppable force of an innovation team needing to complete meeting the immovable object of the certainty that a commercial team requires for adoption to be possible. More often than not it's akin to throwing a bomb over the wall, where understandably everyone on the other side scatters. You would too. You have your own projects to manage, your own complexities to navigate. You do not need another weight on your shoulders, especially given the margins are probably low, the details are lacking and the pathway to scale is going to be long for many innovation projects emerging out of incubation. Ugh!
This brings to light a few important realities.
- Ownership will always win over obligation (no matter what the go-to-market calendar insists).
- Prospect theory dictates that we will all value what we have now twice as much as what we could have in the future (loss aversion is a leading human trait).
- We learn to live with our limitations and we prefer the familiar, even if we love the idea of disruption (right up to the moment where it is us who become disrupted!).
So a well built portfolio, stretched and balanced across three horizons of readiness, needs another organizing principle that respects the mismatch between the radical and the familiar. We call this the 'tilt'.
Consider two perpendicular axes. The vertical is the linear future and represents the familiar, where business-as-usual prevails. Not to say that innovation is absent, not at all. Innovating with current capabilities towards a competitor set is existentially important. We have already been clear that growth in your market under your terms is a valuable activity to undertake. That said, the horizontal axis is for the lateral future: the radical exploration of who you are without being constrained by how you currently operate. This is the definition of business-unusual and this is, of course, where innovation teams love to play the most. Moving from a linear model of innovation to one where lateral explorations are included in the portfolio is where the tilt happens. Every company will have a natural tolerance or tendency for tilt and it ALWAYS takes time. Longer than you think.
This makes sense if you think about it. Great companies achieve productivity through efficiency, offering predictable employment and without the assumption that lightning will strike every time a new idea is launched. In our experience the most tilt tolerant organizations will move at 10-20 degrees per year, leading to a cycle of major change over a 5-10 year period. Interestingly this can also be the very nature or habit of a particular industry. This might be dictated by regulatory or legislative processes, major events such as an Olympics, or the simple economics of recouping the cost of significant capital investment after the last 'big' project. Lastly it is important to note the outliers. We've all heard the idea of the pivot and it is true that sometimes an accelerated tilt occurs under certain, difficult conditions. Famously IBM divested from their founding hardware business to become a cloud computing business whilst looking down the barrel of bankruptcy.
There are however certain characteristics that persist with the 'great' companies, and these have become part of our training and systems of support. Firstly, it is imperative to acquire an intimate understanding of the averaging algorithm of the culture. Do not be fooled by a progressive CEO, a smooth talking innovation leader or anything called a 'transformation project' where consultants are walking the halls, metaphorically taking the watch from all the employees then telling leadership the time. Ugh again!
The truth is hiding in how long the last notable innovation efforts took to achieve scale. There will be a pattern. And if you're not sure of the difference between hype and innovation, be sure to filter for new or novel revenue streams that have endured more than 5 operational years. When you have your cycle time, you have your tilt, and your portfolio can now be optimized to inspire the maximum level of ownership across the organisation.
Next come the methods at an individual level and what we call designing the 'egg breaking act'. This comes from a story of Betty Crocker. Yes, the instant cake company. Apparently, after the first launch of this time saving venture, consumers were not adopting at a rate that could sustain the new business. After some solid research it emerged that consumers were not feeling empowered; they didn't want to adopt a product that had none of 'them' in the result. A quick modification to the recipe was completed where consumers were required to break a real egg into the mix, and the game was changed. Now they were bakers from this simple shift and the rest is history.
The lesson here is that ownership is earned. At adidas we altered the entire innovation process to only present unfinished prototypes in a Goldilocks zone of readiness that compelled a designer to take over. Suddenly the members on the stage shifted and the project adoption went from 10% to a close to 100% hit rate.
This phenomenon is not new. Possibly the most famous inventor in modern history, Thomas Edison, understood this the most. He did not invent the electric light. He invented the electric light that could be best integrated into a 'gas-like' infrastructure, down to the fittings in the wall. He wrote the recipe binding the radical of electrical lighting to gas familiarity.