COVID and innovation: The Swan Song?

Analyzing the top corporate performances of the last 30 years, the author shows how these companies include lesser-known businesses operating in ordinary sectors: railways, health insurance, back-office automation.
The company that grew the most, with stock price growth of 107,099% since 1985, is Balchem Corp., which produces flavors and nutritional additives for animal feed—not Google or Disney!

But the most important part of the story is that every single one of these corporations faced at least one ‘near-death experience’ during its long journey toward success. For many companies, COVID-19 can be the jolt they need to break down the paradox of expertise.

The second reason is linked to how the human mind works. Research published in Scientific Reports showed how it is possible to enhance people’s ‘creativity’ by suppressing the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex area—the region associated with reasoning and thought—using a small stimulus. The researchers observed that by temporarily suppressing this area, the people involved in the study significantly improved their ability to solve difficult problems that require thinking outside the box.

Think, for example, of how many attempts to introduce smart working (or at least remote working) collapsed when faced with mindsets and arguments based on past patterns. The arrival of COVID swept away these resistances and demonstrated how, when faced with necessity, it is possible to ‘silence reason’ and experiment with new ways of working.

This highly difficult and complex period could therefore be an opportunity to rethink and experiment with new ideas and new paths that, until now, have never been fully considered.

In this regard, for any company wishing to ride this wave, it becomes essential to develop an innovation system capable of channeling and finalizing all the energy that this difficult period can release within our businesses.
To support companies in winning this challenge, Lenovys offers the Executive Master Impact Innovation, held online. This program is designed to help participants acquire a structured method, tailored to the times we are living in, to continuously innovate products, processes, and business models, ultimately achieving maximum impact for both companies and the market.

In the meantime, here are 3 tips to start working on innovation right away:

1. Allow ideas that most challenge the current organization and processes to develop

As we have seen, excessive reflection and reasoning based on past patterns can inhibit innovation. In this case, some ideas that are particularly distant from current ways of conceiving business may be discarded even before being developed. Alternatively, they may be launched in a “watered-down” manner because they have been progressively adapted to current logic and organizational structures. To avoid running into these problems, it is advisable to carve out spaces where people can also work on the ideas that most challenge the current organization, processes, and beliefs.

In this regard, it is appropriate to have very loose screening filters for ideas in the initial stages of the innovation process, only to become gradually more selective as the ideas develop and the necessary information to evaluate them properly is acquired.
To avoid wasting time and resources on proposals that are not of interest to the company, it is useful to precisely define the permitted level of development for these proposals.

For example, you could set up 3 steps for idea development:

1. Impact Proposals
2. Solution Brief
3. Concept Paper

For each level of development, the information required to move forward must be defined in detail. For instance, while for an impact proposal it might be enough to have identified a problem to solve for a target customer group, in the solution brief it is necessary to quantify how impactful that problem is for my target: is it a problem experienced by 1,000 people or 1,000,000? Do they experience it every day or once a month?

2. Multidisciplinary and autonomous teams

The progressive development of ideas, as described in the previous point, requires the creation of multidisciplinary teams that can work on ideas to develop them autonomously.
It is particularly important to involve representatives from different corporate functions during this phase.
If people, and consequently the functions they represent, are not part of the process and do not discover firsthand the value of the ideas (especially those that deviate the most from the current status quo), problems could arise during the development phase. In fact, should the company decide to pursue the most disruptive proposals compared to the current scenario, uninvolved functions might try to reshape them to fall back on industry’s best practices, even when those best practices are outdated or poor.

3. Give the process a rhythm

The risk with innovation is that there is always something more urgent, capitalizing on people’s attention and energy. From this perspective, COVID-19 is certainly a source of emergencies and unexpected events that risk slowing down, if not halting, innovative activities.

A particularly effective solution to this problem is to “create urgency” around innovation projects by setting a regular work schedule for the multidisciplinary teams.
For example, scheduling 2 hours of work every week in the calendar, where teams meet and consistently move forward with the innovation proposals they are assigned to.
Several companies have already experienced the benefits of this way of working and approaching innovation.

These work meetings are not optional and cannot be sacrificed to deal with the emergency of the day. It is management’s duty to protect these innovation spaces as a valuable resource for the company’s future.

Today is not the swan song of innovation but a moment that, despite the undeniable difficulties, can help drive those changes and innovations you have always postponed or delayed until now. Don’t be caught unprepared: put the tips described in this article into practice right away, and if you want to learn more, take part in the Executive Master Impact Innovation, the corporate innovation system to successfully generate high-impact innovations in the market.