Innovation leaders, and indeed whole innovation teams, tend to come and go. Unlike sales or marketing or finance, the entire innovation department can get wiped out with one abrupt announcement. Many Chief Innovation Officers, despite the title, don’t have a true seat at the executive table. Often, the execution resources allocated for innovation do not remotely match the level of internal hype and/or executive scrutiny.
These challenges are a fact of life for corporate innovators – and navigating them is part of the job. But these inherent difficulties are often needlessly inflamed by confusion about what type of innovation program is at play:
- Type I innovation programs – those motivated by a specific business challenge or opportunity (e.g., an energy company exploring the next-gen power grid, or an insurance company responding to the rise of insurtech)
- Type II innovation programs – generalized innovation functions that drive business value across various parts of the company in perpetuity
The differences run deep and are highly consequential. In fact, Type I and Type II programs are so different that it makes very little sense to call them both “innovation.” They have very different determinants of success, different reporting structures, and different OKRs. The types of people and processes that work best are very different.
Slides from this webcast are available in PPT and PDF form below. Here are five tips that Chris Townsend of Wellspring shared.
1. Design innovation programs around a specific business threat or opportunity — not vague ambition
If an innovation effort doesn’t have a clearly articulated why now, it will struggle to survive.
2. Accept that some innovation programs are meant to be temporary — and plan for the endgame
Not every innovation initiative should live forever; success sometimes means knowing when (and how) to shut it down.
3. Don’t try to force breakthrough innovation into existing corporate functions
When innovation requires fundamentally different thinking, isolating it from core operations is often necessary.
4. Measure innovation by enterprise value — not activity metrics or busy work
If your innovation KPIs don’t make sense to Finance, they won’t protect you during budget season.
5. Treat “always-on” innovation as mission-critical infrastructure, not discretionary spend
Innovation functions that persist are those embedded in how the company competes—not special initiatives that require constant re-justification.
Speaker Bio
Chris Townsend, Vice President Product Marketing, Wellspring
Chris is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Wellspring, the leading provider of Growth Innovation software solutions for corporate, academic, and government clients worldwide. Chris has worked for nearly twenty years in the innovation management space, first as a thought leader at Forrester Research and then as a senior executive at solution providers in both North America and Europe. Chris holds an undergraduate degree in biology from Harvard University. More recently, he has cultivated an interest in dad jokes.
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