Anahita Baregheh is an Associate Professor at Nipissing University’s School of Business and Research Director for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada.
Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, Executive-in-Residence with the Monash University Faculty of Arts and a former Associate Vice-President at the University of Waterloo
Gina O’Connor is Professor of Innovation Management at Babson College. Dr. O’Connor is a recognized thought leader in the field of innovation and lead author of Beyond the Champion: Institutionalizing Innovation Through People.
All organizations face the challenge of sustaining strategic innovation over the long term, regardless of the sector in which we operate – corporate, public, community, SME or higher education[i]. This can be a particular challenge as organizations mature, for example as a young startup moves past the founder-led stage or as a young university which broke new ground settles into its own routines and loses its disruptive edge.
At one point, a decline in innovative activities was thought to be inevitable as organizations matured: well-established corporate giants or public sector agencies would often struggle to embrace disruptive opportunities. However, more recently it has become evident that even dinosaurs can disrupt themselves.
We’ve previously outlined our new project to explore how research insights from corporate sector research could be adapted to guide strategic innovation in higher education. In this post, we’ll consider the research evidence from one stream of research from the corporate sector about sustaining strategic innovation through new management structures and talent development approaches. In subsequent posts, we’ll describe our progress with potential prototype studies to explore adapting some of these insights to sustain strategic innovation for teaching and learning in higher education.
We summarize below three of the research insights on sustaining strategic innovation which caught our interest for the higher education teaching and learning context…and why. They are cumulative results of a research collaboration by Gina and her colleagues with corporate sector innovation leaders, over more than two decades, as described in the following books:
1995-2000: Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts [2000]
2002-2008: Grabbing lightning: Building a capability for breakthrough innovation [2008]
2010-2017: Beyond the champion: institutionalizing innovation through people [2018] (from which all the quotes in italics below are taken)
Each of us approaches these insights from a different perspective. Gina was involved in all three stages of the research and is the lead author of Grabbing Lightning and Beyond the Champion. As a Workplace Innovation researcher, Anahita recognized that the research insights reflected an exemplary research approach as well as a unique opportunity to engage with strategic innovation over a long term.
As a former institutional leader for innovation strategy in teaching and learning, Thomas had a practitioner’s ‘if only we had known that’ reaction to the research. If you have a leadership role for strategic innovation in teaching and learning, please let us know if these ideas have similar resonance for you – and what other issues in Strategic Innovation they raise for you!
What is Strategic Innovation (and why is it hard to sustain)?
Development of strategic – or breakthrough – innovation requires different processes and structures from incremental innovations or new product and service development for existing markets. Breakthrough innovations are often characterized as innovations that are new to the world, that offer order of magnitude improvements in existing performance features or dramatic reduction in costs, or which may open up whole new domains of opportunity. Development of breakthrough innovation involves a high degree of uncertainty in technical, market, resources and organizational areas.
Organizations have adopted various approaches in their efforts to increase their success with breakthrough innovation, including process-based approaches, promotion of an innovative culture (which could be effective when the founder runs the organization), structural approaches (dedicated or special programs which are often short-lived) and finally financial incentive approaches. These efforts have met with varying degrees of success as it is challenging to sustain breakthrough innovation over the long-term.
Three key insights from the corporate sector about Sustaining Strategic Innovation
#1: An Innovation Hub structure is necessary but not sufficient
In the early stages of the research, most of the projects studied had originated and progressed solely because of the strong will and persistence of a talented champion with protection from a senior level sponsor…Much time was spent fighting against the norms of their companies, because breakthrough innovation doesn’t fit easily into existing processes that emphasize leveraging our current knowledge base, markets and networks.
A few of the companies studied were developing radical innovation hubs as a central locus for breakthrough innovation…But these had a critical dependence on specific individuals at the champion and sponsor level…And each of these was snuffed out by the end of the study period. Interesting, and discouraging. The shortcomings of an innovation hub approach for sustaining strategic innovation in the long run provided the impetus for the Innovation Function approach discussed below.
#2: An ‘Organizational Function’ approach can sustain talent development and continuously improve the organization’s expertise.
Establishing Strategic Innovation as an Organizational Function, with a distinctive playbook set at the top level, allows the organization to strategically – and systematically – identify, nurture and retain talent, to hone its practices and, over time, to develop a sophisticated expertise in managing highly uncertain but potentially game-changing innovation. In the corporate sector, an analogy can be made to Marketing, Purchasing and Human Resources as emerging organizational functions which over time became professional career areas with distinct expertise, values and culture. (A good analogy for higher education might be the rise of Learning Designer as a professional role with its own career paths and Academic Technology and Instructional design as a function within most universities today.)
The Strategic Innovation Function needs distinct resources and long-term processes to plan and operate. As well, it needs to assess breakthrough innovation as a strategic concern, with accompanying top-level processes for governance and for leveraging and scaling up breakthroughs. An Innovation Function should be parallel to – and yet governed by and linked throughout with – the existing management system of the organization.
#3: Strategic Innovation requires multiple capabilities and management structures
Multiple activities support the development of a new idea to the point of contributing value for our organizational mission, requiring different knowledge, skills and mindsets. These distinct sets of activities evolve around the three competencies of discovery, incubation and acceleration of strategic innovations as discussed below:
Discovery activities identify and contextualize opportunities, through research and both internal and external “opportunity hunting” to elaborate the opportunity and ensure it is ‘big enough’ to warrant increased attention. Discovery is driven by the organization’s Domains of Innovation Intent, which are the big problem/opportunity fields its sees emerging over the 5 to 10-year horizon to which it commits itself to pursuing.
Incubation activities, where experimentation on the opportunity domain is conducted to translate it into a portfolio of potential new products, services, business models, processes and structures, are often the most time-consuming. The result is an emerging new platform of offerings that brings new value to the market.
Acceleration activities ensure that the emerging new platform resulting from Incubation is fully implemented and scaled. Acceleration ensures that this new stream fulfils its potential as a source of growth and can take its place as part of the mainstream organization.
The Innovation Function works at three different levels of Project, Opportunity Domain and Portfolio: multiple projects explore varying facets of a new opportunity Domain (e.g., new markets, new supply chains, new delivery structures, new learning approaches) or multiple Domains of Innovation Intent. All of these together comprise an overall Portfolio for Strategic Innovation.
At the Project level, the opportunities are assessed in terms of their contribution to learning about the robustness of a domain and how it can be shaped into a new platform given the many options available. The Domain is assessed in terms of its overall potential for creating new value propositions in the market, and, consequently, growth and renewal for the organization. Over time, organizations evolve wholly new capabilities as a result of Strategic Innovation. (If you are writing up job descriptions for your innovation team, you’ll want to look at the Appendices in Beyond the Champion which specify roles across the three Activities and three Levels…and also describe some of the Leadership traits for your role!)
What would “Strategic Innovation as Organizational Function” look like in Higher Education?
We believe these insights from the corporate sector have lessons for sustaining strategic innovation for teaching and learning in higher education. In a future post[TC1] , we’ll describe our plan to use scenario-driven pilot studies with higher education partners in senior-level innovation roles, who are helping us explore how these ideas could be adapted to higher education contexts.
[TC1]Links to 2020.11 post