CEO’s Guide to Strategic Innovation
As CEO is there anything more difficult the striking a balance between being strategic and reactive? It takes rigorous discipline to be strategic, let alone innovative. You’ve got fires to put out AND you want more. More satisfied customers, more stable revenue streams, and more impactful results. Instead, reality often feels like circular conversations, rogue leadership, declining revenue, and a team stretched thin by the relentless pace of change. When you propose innovation, do you have a deputy to help rally the team?
First - decide that it’s time to do things differently, and take baby steps. Take stock of where your strategy is working and where it’s not. Align’s Strategy Scorecard will show you where to start. Then, embrace a mindset for innovation and invention. Get more curious about customers and where you can create more unique value.
Why? Because if You’re Standing Still, You’re Falling Behind. It’s not enough to execute today’s plans and solve today’s problems. You’ve got to be inventing the pipeline for tomorrow’s solutions.
Customers want more, and CEOs should expect to do more. More segmentation and hyper-specialization to deliver on divergent, diverse wants and needs within the market. Strategic innovation is the key to understanding and meeting emerging customer demands.
Competition is looming. Mid-sized companies get squeezed by both small agile start-ups and large corporations. Start-ups have the agility to create something “newer and better,” and large corporations have the resources to bring “newer and better” into more local markets.
See problems for what they are: symptoms of a larger gap.
Lack of Alignment: When senior leaders aren’t on the same page it’s a signal that the playbook and the process are missing. There’s waste because all aspects of the business aren’t aligned, working from the same realities to create synergy.
Lack of Traction: If attempts to work strategically never get off the ground, teams talk in circles, and planning devolves into frustration, it might be because big ideas were never chunked into manageable pieces or people weren’t bought in, because objections weren’t addressed with evidence - like a proof of concept.
“We’re Doing Fine:” Doing well today provides fuel to plan for tomorrow. Beware - success is a well-worn rut, where you keep getting better at today’s cash cow. These ‘Blinders of Success’ cause you to miss the turn in the road, where the market went one way and you kept perfecting the process for something that’s slowly becoming passe.
The results of these problems include loss of market relevance with outdated services or uncompelling products, declining revenue, and employee attrition.
Strategy requires more creativity and innovation than ever before. But, if you’re winging, you’re doing it wrong.
Here’s How Innovation Goes Wrong
Ignore reality. Turning a blind eye to big issues only makes them more entrenched.
Getting the wrong help. Counting is not the same as creating. Industry reports, advice from your accountant or technology partner have a time and place, but when you need to be inventive, you need the right partners.
Trial-and-error. Half-baked plans where innovation teams are directed to wing it and hope for the best, can make problems worse. Misguided innovation teams acting on incomplete advice are the worst because this give innovation a bad reputation as freestyle, hit or miss group of creatives cooking up wizbang options. We’re all for ‘a bias toward action’ but there’s more to it than putting people in a room with pipecleaners and colored paper.
If this sounds familiar, your current approach may be riskier than you think, costing you time, money, and missed opportunities. The less obvious consequence of doing innovation wrong is that internal stakeholders blame innovation itself for the lack of success, causing them to shy away from the much needed work that will turn things around.
A major reason innovation fails is the lack of a real process and failure to treat innovation as a core capability. These skills, attitudes and methods can be learned, managed, and measured. When companies use the right process, they generate wins! In fact there’s a proven, structured process for finding, developing, and implementing innovations such as new or improved services or solutions to complex societal problems.
Strategic Planning is now Strategic Innovation
Strategic innovation is about inventing new value. Instead of solely an inside-out view, it’s driven by outside-in, customer-focused perspectives. Strategic innovation is agile, lean and iterative. It’s rooted in evidence from customers. It’s not about going to market saying ‘if we build it, will they come?’ It’s creative, collaborative and inspiring for everyone involved (even people who forgot they were born creative and don’t realize it’s still in there, just buried.)
Align’s Strategic Innovation Process is The 4 I’s of Innovation
The process is detailed on our website, but here’s the nutshell version:
INSIGHTS: engagement methods that reveal blind-spots and reframe the disconnect between what stakeholders really want and what’s currently available
IDEAS: the experience that provides a jolt of new thinking, activates teams, and produces novel concepts rooted in market research
INCREMENTS: the baby steps for converting ideas into action, like concept testing, gathering proof from the market and getting internal champions in place
IMPACT: the business plan, dashboard, and fine-tuning that build momentum, monitor progress, and provide a deployment roadmap
What Success Looks Like
MANTEC, an regional resource center for manufacturers, needed to revisit its service strategy to enhance value it creates for clients, reach more companies, and grow revenue to improve financial sustainability. MANTEC CEO Bruce Newell asked Align to help create a strategic framework to reach his goals.
“I really like how you started with the customer needs and our value proposition instead of budget and revenue goals. I can see how this new strategy will lead to revenue growth because we’ll be offering more of what our clients want,” Bruce Newell, 2022. “People have noticed, and have been asking me how we made the change. I tell them we have a new strategy that puts our clients and sharing our thought leadership at the center of our culture,” Bruce Newell, December 2023. Learn more about MANTEC’s story here.
It’s halfway through the first quarter of 2024.
Is your current strategy working? Your revolving business metrics tell the story in hindsight. Is your team is making progress on projects to fill the growth pipeline?
Remember - start with baby steps. Download Align’s Strategy Scorecard, determine your score, and identify the areas to improve. Engage your business leaders and create the opportunity for an honest, holistic look at where you are and where you want to go.
Once you have your scorecard results, reach out to chat. Based on the areas you want to work, we can suggest the most efficient path for gathering the info you need and engaging your team in the work.
Onward and Upward. We’re here to help!