Innovation Management

Finding and GroomingBreakthrough Innovators

Presentation By :Pawandeep Singh| Sahil Kapoor| Mayank Lau| Bhushan Kumar| Himanshu Singhal ( MBA , DMS I IT Delhi )

Innovators

After Steve Jobs …

What should Apple do now to ensure that the next generation of “must-have ” technology is not masterminded elsewhere ?

Need for Innovators

1. Finding and developing breakthrough innovators is a major challenge for growth oriented organization of all sizes.

2. More than two third of directors at leading companies cite innovation as critical for long term success.

• How can Organization sustain innovation.• Do Organization have a plan for developing future leaders who can facilitate this goal

Trend

• In study of 25 organizations in multiple countries and industries:

– Finding is simple and disturbing– Developing leaders replicate rather than innovate– Rising star realize that to be promoted, they need to

mirror incumbent leaders– Even, external talent drawn into anti-innovation

culture

Learning from Reading

How successful companies

people who can master the innovation process.

Identify Groom Place

What innovator look like

1. Very strong cognitive abilities2. Excellent analytic skills3. Waste no time on peripheral issues4. Ability to integrate key factors5. Ability to think strategically in highly

ambitious situation6. Never rest on their laurels

What innovator look like

7. Attitude : Just because it worked in past doesn’t mean it will work going forward

8. Driven by certain underlying insecurity to not rely on past success9. Evaluate each new challenge with a clean slate10. Reinvent the wheel

Identifying Innovators

Scour the ranks for new talent: Look among high potentials to find people who are never content with following yesterday’s

best practices and who display unusual skills.

– Example :

Reuters uses a “predictive index” to help identify employee’s attributes, which allows executive to maintain a master list of potential innovators.

Identifying and foster innovators

• Test people with live ammunition: They give their innovators real projects and access to top management.

– Example :

At Starwood rising innovators build and manage cross-functional teams to develop their projects and then present full-fledged marketing plans to the company’s top executives.

Identifying and foster innovators

• Encourage mentoring and peer networks: Mentors equip rising innovators with information about the

people they are most likely to encounter and the interactions they are most likely to have.

Innovators are encouraged to turn to peer groups for feedback.

• Example:

Allstate , CEO personally makes sure that innovators have access to mentors in functions relevant to the projects they lead.

Foster Innovators

Foster Peer Networks: • If a few young stars are drawn from

the ranks of the organization and placed on a special innovation track, their experience will of course differ.

• It is useful to create opportunities for them to bounce ideas off one another.

• Peers will share information with one another that they might not reveal to a mentor, who is typically a senior member of the organization.

Identifying and foster innovators• Actively manage Innovator’s careers:

Be careful to place innovators outside the regular structure,

by increasing the likelihood that they will create wholly new businesses.

Example –

At JPMorgan Chase the CEO and the head of human resources spearheaded “ascension plans” for breakthrough innovators, in concert with the innovators themselves.

Identifying and foster innovators

• Replant Innovator in the Middle

Organizations that excel at developing innovative leaders:

They take them out of well-defined, long-standing, revenue- generating line positions and replant them in the middle of the organizational chart, where no formal boxes exist.

There they becomes “innovation hubs” !!

Identifying and foster innovators

Example:

• Tom Gros’s history at Reuters offers an excellent example.

• When Gros joined the company, in 2002, he quickly proved he had all the requisite attributes to become an innovative manager.

• He consistently cherry-picked the right personnel and applied cost-saving techniques from other parts of the organization to his department.

• Based on his track record, Devin Wenig, who is now CEO of the Markets Division of Thomson Reuters, in 2006 made Gros the head of new markets, a hub position, specifically to identify and develop opportunities.

• With a modest budget but significant autonomy and latitude, Gros assembled a team that developed new businesses in commercial real estate, environmental markets, and freight as a derivative product.

Napoleon Story• Napoleon famously remarked that a general’s most important asset is his

luck.

• What he didn’t mention is that luck comes to people who are well prepared and manage to be in the right place at the right time

• Napoleon’s brilliance lay in identifying future commanders early in their military careers and giving them access to resources, authority, and the opportunity to prove their mettle.

• Despite his arrogance, he was smart enough to recognize a good idea – and he wanted his commanders to be so as well.

The same is true for business innovation !!

Thank You !

pawandeep@gmail.com