Golden Rules for Guided Innovation

How can corporate leaders guide innovation within their own organizations? According to Diane Beecher, The Brand Consultancy’s CEO and Senior Strategist, suggests the following Eight Golden Rules for Guided Innovation.

1. Understand the customer. Listen to your customer’s thoughts and ideas, in their own words. Don’t ask questions; let them respond to ideas.
2. The customer is the boss. The customer’s ideas should carry more weight than senior leadership teams or even the CEO. The Brand Consultancy’s process involves capturing the senior teams’ hypotheses and validating them with the marketplace. If a concept doesn’t fly, evolve the seed idea in a way that resonates with customers.
3. Listen to all organizational levels. Internal brainstorming should not come only from the R&D and senior teams. Solicit and consider the perspective of employees with customer touch points throughout the organization. A cross-functional support perspective is also valuable.
4. Include external ideas. Internal perspectives are valuable, but ideas generated internally may be created by those wearing industry or organizational blinders. Solicit ideas from a variety of external constituencies, including current, lost and prospective customers; vendors; creative panels; and any other relevant audience. Optimized idea selection should be limited to current and prospective customers.
5. Be practical. You must be open to all ideas, but practical in response. Feasibility filters (time, money, resources, and impact) and competitive perspective must be applied to the ideas selected by customers.
6. Create a replicable, scalable process. The innovation process should be replicable and scalable, to encourage and advance a culture of innovation within the organization.
7. Get leadership buy-in. As with any organizational change, leadership must embrace the process for it to be successful and generate tangible, measurable and profitable results.
8. Make a business case. The process must always include making the business case. If profit is not considered, then the process and the outcomes are not sustainable.