How many innovators does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: none. Light bulbs aren’t changed by innovators because they’re too busy solving other problems (e.g. how do we get the light bulb to change itself) and defending their solution to their peers. Traditionally, innovation is a lonely sport, filled with too many great ideas and not enough collaboration to build the right idea.
It’s really not their fault. Corporate leaders often shoo the big thinkers into the corner with an admonishment to “go innovate” without clear direction on what they are trying to accomplish. Do we want new solutions? Different customers? New markets? A better way to operate? The feeling is that giving innovators the creativity to explore without bounds will yield better ideas than defining their sandbox.
I disagree. You may get may get more wild and crazy ideas, but you won’t get ideas that move your business forward. And ultimately the point of innovation is to create an inflection point for growth and scale, while delivering more value to customers. The last few blog posts have discussed how engagement with customers helps to set a direction for your innovation efforts. But how do you keep these efforts on track and manage innovation?
Manage Innovation Using OKRs
I am a fan of OKRs, Objective and Key Results, as a tool for managing a team’s progress towards a big goal.
After all, Google has used it successfully since its inception in 1998. They use OKRs to track a team’s progress toward a lofty goal and to track an individual’s contribution to a team goal. And Google certainly sets big goals – their objective is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
You can read more about OKR’s here, but these are the basics:
- Set an objective based on alleviating a pain point for a customer. Make this big, something that you have a 50/50 chance of reaching.
- Establish three to five key results that will quantitatively show progress towards meeting your objective. For example, create a deadline and a measurement such as number of prototypes tested with customers.
- Capture tasks for the next week and projects for the next month that will work towards your objective.
- Capture health metrics – what do you need to protect to ensure you can continue working towards this goal? This is a good place for team or customer health measures.
- At the end of each week, score your progress towards each key result by percent completion. Cross off tasks you have completed and add new tasks for next week. Most important – celebrate the team’s accomplishments!
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I especially love how this process works with Design Thinking. Your “How Might We …” statement becomes your objective and your key results help you measure your customer insights. How well are you solving your customer’s problem? OKRs also provide a way to build transparency in the innovation process, giving leadership a way to measure progress that is different from their core business measurements. This is the right way to manage innovation – based on customer value.
How do you measure your innovation team’s progress towards delivering value to your customers?
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