I know you can because I’ve seen it happen over and over again, as innovation leaders and teams move away from using “silver bullets” that don’t work, following experts that have never shipped their own product, or listening to advice that doesn’t have much in the way of results to demonstrate its effectiveness.
Instead, the companies in my community have moved towards understanding their own barriers to innovation, to find solutions that will work for them. They’ve moved towards joining an engaged community of innovation leaders who want their company’s best ideas to reach the market faster. They’ve embedded the innovation practices that have delivered many innovations into the market, demonstrating that they work in real-life, not just in theory.
They’ve learned how to accelerate innovation.
They’ve discovered how to generate and sustain pull for innovation, from strategy through idea generation and concept evaluation, execution and launch. They’ve learned how to celebrate the failure of one idea because it frees up time and energy to accelerate a better one. They’ve recognized that “culture” is as often an excuse as it is a reason, and that the real culture of an organization is determined by the day-to-day actions of its formal and informal leaders.
They use the right program management style at the right time. They understand how to tie their product releases to their customers’ natural buying cycles, and then continue to get faster so that they free up time to deliver more new products with the same resources. They capture the knowledge they build real-time, share it and then pull it into new programs to eliminate the waste of reinvention.
So many of the things that others do to try to get products to market faster just slow it down instead.
And so many great ideas fail not because the concept didn’t work, but because the execution failed to realize the vision. Some teams see execution as “boring” and others believe that aggressive schedules — or no schedules at all – drive creativity. Some believe that innovation is a specialist function, best delegated to “creatives” and others know that the current business will always take precedence over future innovation, and believe nothing can be done about that.
None of that is true, once the pieces are in place to pull innovation from your entire organization.
My writing here will share my experiences and those of the companies around the world who have learned how to pull learning forward and push decisions later, so that they waste less time revisiting decisions and experience fewer nasty surprises late in the execution phases.
They’ve learned how to get their best ideas to market faster. So can you.
