Three keys for profitable innovation
From gambling to taking control.
Table of Contents
Why do large companies rarely see returns on their innovation investments?
Innovation isn't a one off "event" or "happening."
It requires sustained attention, commitment, and high quality work in order to pay off.
In this webinar I will show you how you can take a different look of your innovation system, by focusing on the following three elements:
- doing innovation efficiently,
- managing innovation effectively, and
- changing organisation appropriately.
With all of the above in place, profitability ought to follow.
You can find recording, timestamps, summary, transcript, and license information below.
Note: All the webinar attendees also received the How can organisations innovate profitably? whitepaper. Contact me if you'd like it as well.
Webinar recording
Webinar timestamps
| Time | Topic |
|---|---|
| 00:43 | Bruno's definition of innovation |
| 02:17 | On value creation, R&D, and alignment |
| 04:33 | Executives are afraid to invest in innovation |
| 11:35 | The Profitable Innovation Trinity |
| 12:23 | On doing innovation efficiently |
| 15:06 | On managing innovation effectively |
| 19:54 | On changing organisation appropriately |
| 28:44 | Q&A |
| 37:58 | Take action |
Webinar summary
Large companies rarely see returns on their innovation investments. Innovation is not a one-off event but a system that requires sustained attention and commitment. Profitability follows when three elements operate simultaneously: doing innovation efficiently, managing innovation effectively, and changing the organisation appropriately.
Innovation is something new that creates value. Newness without value is invention; value without newness is improvement; only the two together constitute innovation. Crucially, value must flow in both directions: the recipient benefits, and the innovator benefits.
Innovation and R&D are entwined, but distinct, practices:
- Innovation is all about value creation; following the flow of value unlocks innovation potential.
- R&D and innovation are interlinked but distinct: R&D turns money into ideas, while innovation turns ideas into money. An R&D department churning out unmonetised ideas is useless, and an innovation department doing the same is worse.
- Alignment matters more than best practice. A small team of innovation superstars achieves nothing if the rest of the organisation ignores or works against them. Being aligned behind one shared process beats having a world-class process nobody follows.
Executives rightfully hesitate to invest in innovation. They risk losing money, face, and position, and their concerns are legitimate. The evidence, however, says innovation is worth the investment:
| Finding | Implication |
|---|---|
| Incremental innovation affects profitability far more than radical innovation (roughly 30% vs 9%) | Stop swinging for the fences; big bets carry high risk with modest upside |
| Speed matters more than quality | Early, imperfect products win traction; customers buy despite flaws |
| Knowledge sharing improves both speed and quality | Avoid both extremes: no sharing, or sharing buried in bureaucracy; communities of practice work well |
| New products are viable when they meet an existing need | Incremental innovation serves existing demand; radical innovation must create it |
So why the fear? Executives treat innovation as a one-off, all-or-nothing, radical event. If you innovate once a decade, why build a system at all? Such thinking, I argue, is self-defeating. Think of a weightlifter: nobody deadlifts 300 kilos without years of training. Innovation is a muscle that must be practised continuously, so that radical breakthroughs become possible.
The Profitable Innovation Trinity:
| Element | Focus | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Doing innovation efficiently | Ideas to reality | Codified, proven processes (Lean Startup, Outcome-Driven Innovation, TRIZ, Pretotyping) that de-risk the journey from idea to viable business, minimising wasted time, talent and money. Sometimes the outcome is discovering an idea has no potential, which is still valuable. |
| Managing innovation effectively | Strategic choice | Aligning innovation with the rest of the organisation: innovation strategy, portfolio selection, investment criteria. Unlike business strategy, innovation strategy must be revised with market feedback, not left untouched for years. The best innovation managers are former innovators, acting as orchestra conductors who translate between innovators and leadership. |
| Changing organisation appropriately | Organisational consequences | Innovation changes the organisation, and those consequences must be managed. Drop everything onto a single innovation unit and others relinquish responsibility while that unit gets crucified. Let one superstar team race ahead and it will eventually be absorbed or severed, as Zoom's founder learned at Webex. |
The three elements must be executed simultaneously and in balance, like the three coordinated movements of a martial arts throw. Extreme focus on any one element is ruinous:
- Perfect execution without organisational change builds a house of cards.
- Excessive change management produces years of training with the valid question: where is the money?
- Endless strategy and portfolios without execution produce nothing that sticks once people leave.
Antidote is the innovation vanguard: a vertical slice of one business unit, from its leader through senior management, middle management, and frontline teams, working together on strategy, portfolio, and execution while the rest of the organisation watches, critiques, and learns. I have used this approach successfully at one of Norway's largest financial institutions.
Key takeaways I wish to highlight are:
- Treat innovation as a system, not a one-off event. Systems, not heroic bets, produce returns.
- Prioritise incremental innovation. It beats radical innovation on profitability by roughly three to one.
- Favour speed over perfection. Getting to market and learning beats polishing in isolation.
- Alignment beats best practice. One shared process, followed by everyone, outperforms a world-class process used by a lone team.
- Move slower, but together. A vertical slice with the business unit leader and respected managers creates emotional investment and prevents the superstar team from being severed from the organisation.
One practical thing you can do today:
Bring together people from two or three teams who have recently worked on something new, and run a one-hour session on what was learned, what worked, and what should be reused. Then discuss the three elements of profitable innovation, and how could you embody them, now, with what you have.
Webinar transcript
Machine generated and cleaned up by hand, might contain errors.
Welcome to Three Keys for Profitable Innovation webinar.
My name is Bruno Pešec, and I help business leaders innovate profitably. I have over a decade of experience failing and succeeding with innovation in different industries like defence, transportation, financial services, entertainment, education, and so on.
Now, before we go straight into the topic of today, I want to draw your attention that on the bottom of your screen, you should have a bar, and there you should see a chat box and Q&A box. So please feel free to use it during this webinar to share your reflections, comments, questions, whatever you'd like, and I'll address the questions at the end of the webinar.
Now, before we delve into these three elements, key elements for profitable innovation, I just want to share my position on innovation and how I see innovation, because that's critical for your understanding and using what I'm about to share with you. Because innovation, like strategy and other concepts, is one of those terms that has many different meanings. If you ask 10 people to define innovation, you will get 18 answers.
And that is why I think it's important that I share with you what is my take on innovation. Maybe it's similar or very similar to yours. Maybe it's different. It's up to you to use what I'm going to share. So, to me, innovation is very simple thing. Innovation is something new that creates value. What that means is novelty or newness without value is nothing more but an invention. There is use and purpose of inventing things. But just because you invented something does not mean it's innovative by and of itself. Creating value without it being new or novel, in a sense, is something similar to continuous improvement.
That also has pretty big value, but doesn't immediately qualify as innovation. What is critical in this value creation that I'm talking about, it has to go in two directions. So the recipient of this innovation must benefit from it somehow, and the creator, the innovator, must also benefit. So that is my take on innovation, and what you can see, the underlying principle is pretty simple. To me and other great practitioners, innovation is all about value creation. By focusing on the flow of value and how value is created, one can truly tap and unlock innovation potential. Now, going further from that, a common question when following this stream of thought is, "Okay, but what about R&D? What about process improvement? What about quality management department? What about these different departments? How do these big processes connect and interlink with innovation if innovation is all about value creation?"
Well, the answer is pretty simple, especially in large organizations. So R&D is about transforming capital into ideas, and innovation is about transforming ideas into capital. So they're interlinked processes. One cannot exist or successfully exist without the other. R&D departments that are just churning out ideas and inventions are useless if these are not getting monetized, and vice versa as well. Innovation departments that confused themselves and are just churning out ideas that aren't monetized are even more useless than R&D department that is doing the same.
And the third thing is, especially when it comes to practising innovation in large organizations, and my experience has again and again and again shown me this truism, that it is more important to be aligned around process than necessarily following the best process. Because especially in large organization, a small team that is the best, innovation gurus or something like that, won't be able to create a lot of effect or change or results if the rest of the organization is ignoring them, or even worse, working against them. So sometimes it is much more important to be aligned behind the same meaning of innovation, behind a single innovation process, than necessarily having the best or the best-in-class or world-class process.
Because the great things that exist but don't get executed don't create no results, and that is a pretty trivial thing, but it's often forgotten. Now, one thing that I have observed again and again and again, because I always ask myself, "Okay, why is innovation so difficult, especially in large organizations?" Innovation as an act is a very human activity. It's primordial activity, where we, as a race, have come since our humble beginnings, is all due to our potential to adapt and innovate and to continuously create value for ourselves as a society.
Yes, we are causing some problems along the way, but then we need to use, again, our ingenuity to overcome them. So if I come from that position and I wonder, and I scratch my head, "Okay, what is going wrong? What is happening?" And what I see again and again in large organizations, executives are afraid to invest in innovation. So I started scratching my beard this time, and I asked myself, "Okay, why is that? Is it even worth investing in innovation?" A lot of people are saying, "Innovate or die," or something like that, and you can see a lot of failed investments in innovation where big companies almost went bankrupt, and in some cases, did go bankrupt.
So it's a legitimate question. Is it worth investing in innovation? So besides working with business leaders, I'm also an academic, researcher, et cetera, so I went pretty deep, and I was reading a lot of stuff beyond just my experience and working with other companies, et cetera, and I came to four conclusions.
Yes, investing in innovation is worth it. But remember, one, incremental innovation, think in terms of core adjacents, et cetera, has much more result on profitability, much more effects on profitability than radical or transformative innovation. The numbers are around 30% for incremental innovation and around 9% for radical innovation. What does that say is, forget about just focusing on the big bets. Forget about just focusing on changing the whole world with one idea, one product, one service, one business model, because that is a massive, risky undertaking with actually not such a high upside. So it's something to think about.
Second thing, and this second learning was very difficult for me to wrap my head around, and that is when it comes to innovation performance, speed of innovation is much more important than the quality of innovation. And when I came to that finding, I was like, "How can this be true?" People sometimes reject products and solutions that aren't good enough. But when we start looking at some really innovative things that came out in the last years, first prototypes and MVPs weren't always the best quality. But they were getting traction, and they were getting major growth because customers were buying them despite not being perfect form of what they could be. So it is something very important to remember.
A third point, which is so obvious it is ridiculous, but in practice, so rarely practiced, is that knowledge-sharing within an organization has critical impact on both speed and the quality of innovation. And again, when you go into organizations, you will find two extremes. Either they don't do knowledge-sharing, or they do knowledge-sharing in such a bureaucratic and heavy and complicated way that it makes it almost useless. So it's important to strike a balance between both of these extremes.
The easiest way are communities of practice, especially when they're done well. And the fourth point, again, sounds so obvious and trivial, but it is that introducing new products and services and business model is a viable approach as long as they meet an actual existing need. And this is where it gets tricky. This is where, you know what I mentioned before, incremental and radical innovation. Incremental innovation usually caters to existing demand.
Radical innovation will usually create demand or fulfil demand that we are not even aware of. iPhones, no one was saying, "For iPhones and iPods, this is what I'm lacking." There were MP3 players. There were Discmans. There were Walkmans. People didn't realize that they were missing something like iPod. So that was really radical innovation, but it's not like someone was asking for it. Someone was asking for a problem to be solved. But once it came to the market, it became a superior solution pretty quickly.
So when I take these four learnings and ask myself, "Okay, obviously, there is a huge amount of body of work that indicates that it is worth investing in innovation, that there are returns to be had, that there is better business results to be had. Where is this fear coming from?" And then it clicked to me. The fear comes from the fact that most of executives look at innovation as a one-off, radical investment. It's all or nothing. It's Big Bang. It's swinging for the fences.
We're going to become number one. And when they look, when they take such a worldview, what happens is, if you're going to do something in your life, why would you build a system around it? If you're only going to do this once every 10 years, what is the system for? Every time it's going to be unique. Every time it's going to be unprecedented. Therefore, no point in building the system. And that is where they screw themselves over. And that is what they need to overcome. And if you're an executive or a leader, always remind yourself, you must create a system. You must create an environment that will actually make it even possible to innovate successfully.
Imagine a weightlifter. A weightlifter doesn't suddenly start pumping 300 kilos, 500 kilos, a ton on a deadlift. It takes a lot of exercise. There is genetic predisposition that some people will be able to grow bigger, grow faster, naturally a bit stronger, but they also need to exercise. It doesn't happen overnight. The big personal records are broken in a moment of bliss.
But it's not they don't do anything before that. It's not like they're basically just doing nothing with their life, and then one day, they lift a ton. And the same is when it comes to innovation. We need to practice the innovation muscle continuously. And then radical innovation can happen much easier. So now finally, to the point of today. The three key elements for profitable innovation.
Now, I started to call this the profitable innovation trinity. I just like the sound of it. And the way I think about it are three key elements. And I usually list them in the same way, but they're not one, two, three. They're simultaneous. But I'm going to list them in the same way. Again, because it makes sense to me. So first big and important element is doing innovation efficiently.
The second point is managing innovation effectively. And the third point is leading change appropriately. Every word that I said has a specific meaning and has been specifically selected, and I'll go deeper into it right now. So what do I mean by doing innovation efficiently? As I said, there are a lot of approaches to innovation. I want to say or claim that technical side of innovation is, I wouldn't say completely solved, but we have great approaches to innovation to de-risk. So doing innovation is all about taking that idea and transforming this idea from a kernel all the way to a viable business.
And part of that transformation is maybe finding out that this idea cannot be transformed in a viable business. But that path is not a straight line. It's a crazy journey, and that is what innovators undertake, entrepreneurs undertake, and so on. So efficiency here is reducing the time and investment of human talent and money on getting from idea to a viable business. And there are a lot of processes out there specifically for de-risking that journey.
"Lean Startup" from Eric Ries, "Outcome-Driven Innovation" from Tony Ulwick, "Prototyping" from Alberto Savoia. I wrote an in-depth guide on lean experimentation that's all about de-risking business ideas on this journey from A to B. So there are a lot of methodologies out there that are proven, and if you go into past, you can find older books and older works that also worked. Nothing really new here. So, TRIZ, "Theory of Inventive Problem-Solving" from Russia, QFD, quality function deployment, Osborne's applied imagination.
Again, many, many different ways to accomplish the same goal. So why are we not able to leverage these things? Well, companies are dead. Companies don't exist. It's humans in the companies that do have talent. And of course, there's always attrition, employees leaving, and et cetera.
But what I want to draw your attention to is that there are ways to do innovation that are codified and will work for you because it worked for others in the past. Unfortunately or fortunately, you're not that unique that some of the innovation processes out there won't be working for you. Of course, you need to take it and practice and adapt it to your context, adapt it to your specific organization.
But ultimately, there are very good ways to do innovation. Then your task is how can that become efficient within it? How can every innovator spend the least amount of time necessary to get from A to B, or to come and say, "This idea doesn't have potential in this organization." It's ridiculous because it ties into the second point that I'm talking about managing innovation effectively.
And why did I pick effectiveness instead of efficiency? Well, doing innovation efficient is all about minimizing the waste and the time to get from A to B. But effectiveness in the management style is picking the right things to focus on. And I'm willing to accept that that's not always the process done ideally, but what's important is that the focus is always crystal clear. And that is this managing innovation. The thing is, again, fortunately or unfortunately, there's this predisposition for naturally gifted innovators to not always be also naturally gifted managers.
There is some chaoticism. There is this a little bit of being all around and things like that, and that doesn't always tie into well for managing innovation. And this is critical for large organizations because they cannot afford to have hundreds of ideas that are completely unrelated or had nothing to do with their business. And then everybody's responsible for that. So they, the leadership, cannot blame innovators for coming up with ideas that are irrelevant to the organization.
Have they ever sat down and created an innovation strategy? Did they select their innovation portfolio? Did they decide what are their investment criteria? What are the stock criteria? So all of that falls under managing innovation, and that is a raising practice. So that is something relatively new, and that is something that we have learned a lot about. And I have worked with large companies in Norway implementing different portfolio approaches, innovation strategy approaches, and things like that, and it's beautiful and it works and it's simple. It's not rocket science. It is about making decisions together.
What makes innovation strategy different from, let's say, traditional business strategy is more around the approach. Because what's critical for innovation strategy to work is to accept that it's not set in stone. That does not mean changing it from day to day, but it does mean accepting that it has to be revised based on the market feedback. That could be every quarter. Usually, when you do your business strategy, you might not touch it for two to three years. Nothing wrong with that unless the world around you changed. Do I need to say more than what has been happening in the last year and a half? No strategy survived impact with that. And those that didn't change their strategy after March 2020, what are they doing today? Can they really say that they have a North Star? Can they really say that they have a very focused way forward? Most likely not.
When it comes to selecting people to manage innovation, innovation managers or give them whatever title, you don't need to introduce chief innovation officer. I think it's more of a gimmick than really a viable solution, but okay. People need to be testing so we can see what works or what doesn't work. But In my experience, and again, this is a little bit of my bias because I'm an innovator, so I believe that the best innovation managers should be recruited from the ranks of innovators that can actually be either taught management skills or are already showing a penchant for a bit of social skills, managerial skills, organizational skills.
Because ultimately, innovation managers, or those that perform the role, they're like conductors of an orchestra. So they need to connect a lot of different parts of the organization, and they need to be speaking so many different languages. So they need to have the respect from the innovators and speak their language. But at the same time, they need to be able to speak the language of management and leadership and basically act as a translator between these different layers of people and these different parts of the organization, because they don't always see face-to-face.
Innovators will say, "Oh, they just don't understand my idea," like, "Why, again, these stupid questions?" While at the same time, a manager or executive who is investing their budget into idea will be scratching their head, "Okay, I don't get it. Why is this guy now asking me for this? I don't understand how this is connected to our strategy, to our goal." Well, they both have the responsibility. The leader must clarify the goals and what's in and out explicitly, while the innovator must do their best job to actually explain the value proposition and what is it that they're bringing forward. These things are intertwined. And then what flows out of them is a very harsh lesson for many organizations, and that is what I mentioned under leading change appropriately. Because you see what happens in large organizations.
If you have a smaller, let's say, superstar team, or you set up an innovation unit, a small innovation unit with chief innovation officer and things like that, what will start happening is people will start relinquishing and expecting, "Well, there's this group. Aren't they expected to innovate?" And if you go back to what I said about my position, innovation is about creating value. Ultimately, that means that investment in innovation should create changes in your P&L, profit and loss statement.
There needs to be changes on top line first and then bottom line second. So if you suddenly drop that all to one unit, that then is crucified in the organization because they're expected to help others innovate. At the same time, they're supposed to innovate and create money. But there are so many different approaches to innovation, as I said. Creates a horrible scenario. But moving away from that, imagine a business unit, a single business unit, thousands of employees, let's say. So they have all the management ranks, et cetera. And imagine that you have a small group of people. They've been going to innovation workshops. They work with people like me. They read all the books, everything, and they really get it. They get what innovation is about. And they actually do have the skills to do it. So they start pushing the envelope little by little, and they're accelerating faster and faster, and faster and faster. And they're pushing the envelope.
They're going out. They're testing their ideas. They're reducing the risk. But the rest of the organization is stagnant, and they don't understand what is happening. Maybe they are first impressed. It's like, "Oh, this is pretty cool." But they are not following them. And this team is moving and moving, and moving and increasing the distance. And after some time, what's going to happen, they're either going to be pulled in by the organization, or the tie is going to get severed. And then that is horrible outcome for everybody. And this is when you read about Zoom has been created by a guy from Webex because he couldn't fulfill his ambition or vision within Webex Cisco.
That doesn't happen because people are trying to hoard their ideas to themselves. It happens because they cannot fulfil their idea. They cannot bring it to life within an existing organization. And that happens because of this phenomenon that I just described. So it is critical to maybe sometimes move slower, but together. And that is, for example, I'm a big proponent of something I call innovation vanguard. So take again the business unit. So now instead of just having a small specialist team somewhere, imagine that you take a vertical slice of the organization. So the business unit leader must be involved.
Then imagine few from the management group, few from the middle management, and few teams from the frontline. So you have a whole vertical slice. Now they're working together on everything from defining innovation strategy to executing innovation strategy, from testing ideas to formulating and updating the innovation portfolio. So you have whole vertical slice of organization making those first steps. The rest of the organization can see, can enjoy, can watch, can critique, can learn from it. Establish communities of practice, establish exchange of knowledge.
Everything's starting to roll. People starting to talk. That is how I did it in one of the biggest Norwegian financial institutions. Of course, I was not alone because that work isn't done by a single person, but that was a great success because it creates this real emotional investment of people, and that is critical. That is critical for leading a change that is required. And in doing such an approach, what you also create is an opportunity to actually learn what is really important for you and what isn't, so that you're not doing some generic innovation management system, but you're creating your own unique way of innovation. And as I said before, you're not so unique.
That's true, but at the same time, you do need to create the things that you own. Toyota Production System is one of the best production systems in the world. It still hasn't been copied successfully because people try to copy it just as it is. But the thing is, Toyota Production System is for a reason, has this big T in the beginning. It was made by them in a very difficult period of time for them after World War II, and it continues. It continues to be made by them, for them. So why go and autistically copy a whole production system and try to apply it in your organization?
Inspire.
Inspire yourself. Use it as a starting point. Whatever. Learn from it. But don't try to just mindlessly copy it. And the same thing is for innovation management systems. The thing is, which I think is to benefit, we don't have such codified innovation management systems, so you're kind of forced to build them ground up. But that isn't a problem, because I just shared with you three critical elements. You don't need to get a doctorate in innovation or something like that. You don't need to hire big consulting agency to come up with the massive innovation management system training 10,000 of your employees.
You just need to be aware that there are three pillars to creating your profitable innovation management system. And that is, you must institute a way to do innovation as efficient as possible, you must institute a way to manage innovation as effective as possible, and you must always be aware of how to lead this change appropriately. I've been training martial arts for over 20 years. And how I like to explain this, there is a concept in throwing, striking three points at once. And I cannot show this to you because we are online, but maybe if we were in person, if there was some volunteer in the audience, maybe I could show it depending on the floor and how people feel like.
But unfortunately, I can't do that now. So I'll try to explain it. So when you go for a throw, what is happening, you need to push with one hand, pull with another hand, move the hip. That is how you enter. And then you drop down, raise up, and pull down. Again, three. So that is move in, throw. If any of this is too much or too little, it will fail. If the push is too strong, opponent will go too far. If the pull is too strong, I won't be able to enter and throw. If my hip entrance isn't good enough, I will miss and there won't be power. So going into extreme with any of those will nullify and will make me fail.
So they need to be synchronized, and they need to be executed with a roughly similar amount of force for it to work. The same is applied for these three systems. If you go all the way in, in doing innovation perfectly, what you're risking is building a house of cards that will fall apart the moment the organization severs the ties with whomever has been innovating in the organization. If, on the other hand, you focus so much on leading change appropriately, what might happen is you might be sending people to great training programs, doing a lot of awareness building for two to three years, and then someone's going to ask, "Where are the results? What has changed? Where's the money?" And that's appropriate question. That's appropriate question.
Innovation is about value creation. And if you haven't created any value in many years, it's a valid question. Again, extreme, not good. And what's the extreme in managing innovation? Well, that would be coming up with different innovation strategies, with different plans, with different portfolios, but they don't get executed. And it doesn't really stick, because when people leave, it leaves with them. So you can see easily how these three elements, if they're drawn to extreme, will ruin the organization. So it's critical to think about them. These three are existing at the same time, and they need to be done appropriately, with appropriate force, with appropriate dedication. And it's possible, because it's been done.
Well, at least I done it. So what I'm thinking right now, I've been speaking long enough, and I really miss looking at people, but I think sharing this knowledge and insight is much more important than waiting to be back to in person to share these things. So what I'll do now is I'll take a sip of water, and I'll take a look at the questions that might be coming in. Mm-hmm. Okay.
"This all sounds interesting, but how can I start?"
Okay. Good question. Thank you. So I'm happy to hear it sounds interesting. I hope it sounds profound as well, or at least that you will think about it a bit later, about all the nuances that I have shared. And what I didn't say, but you're going to receive the recording, as well as a white paper that I wrote on this topic. So you will be able to re-watch this and study this in peace. How to start? Well, I already touched upon it when I said changing organization appropriately.
So if you're a large organization, and I'm considering large multiple business units, multi-billion P&L, thousands and thousands of employees, et cetera. And this approach also works for SME, but it's much easier for them. So that vertical slice that I said, this is what I believe is the best way to start. So first, starting at a big organization, don't select a support unit. In my opinion, you should select one of the business units.
What I mean by that is a unit that actually is bringing in the money. They do have revenue. They do have P&L responsibility. So don't start with the corporate finance or with legal or with IT or technology department or something like that. Pick a business unit. So when you start with that, you have the direct connection to the revenue-creating activities. And remember what I said, incremental innovation has much bigger effect on profitability than radical innovation.
Start small, start humble. Nothing wrong with that. You don't need to reinvent your business or your industry overnight. You can do that over a decade. Why not? The result is going to be great, much greater than revolutionizing it overnight. So pick a business unit that has P&L responsibility, and then start working on selecting your vertical slice. And here it really pays off to understand how organizations work, how people breathe, and so on.
So I'm going to describe an ideal case, but often you deal with the set of cards you've been dealt. So ideally, you must involve business unit leader. It can be the CEO or managing director of the business unit. Three to five people from the senior management group, depending on how big the management group is. Let's say it's, I don't know, 11 leaders, so you would want at least three. And at least one of them should be very well-respected person, someone who has a lot of formal and informal authority.
Imagine if that person invites someone to a meeting, people don't even think about should they say yes or no. They immediately say yes. You want that kind of people. Then the middle management, again, you want people that are a little bit more willing to push the envelope. People that are also in that position of their career where they're willing to risk it a little bit in order for some sort of payoff, and they're looking for a little bit of personal challenge. When it comes to selecting the innovators and innovation teams, there are multiple ways to do it. So if you start from what I said, and you're able to actually create an innovation strategy, then you can do call for ideas, ideathon, innovation challenge, things like that, and allow people to surface.
My preference is actually allowing everybody in the organization to pitch an idea, especially if you have a clear innovation strategy and clear innovation challenges. So allow everybody to pitch in, and then don't steal from them. But invite the person that has pitched the idea. Invite them, give them an opportunity to assemble an innovation team around them. If they reject that, then you can find a new idea owner and assemble a team around it. So by taking such a vertical slice, you have the critical mass to actually realistically stand a chance to execute on the innovation strategy and the ideas that have been selected.
There are a lot of mistakes that can happen on the way, but in a nutshell, this is a good approach to begin with actually professionalizing corporate innovation in a large organization, and building a system, innovation management system, that is taking in these two principles that I just said. So doing innovation efficiently, managing innovation effectively, and leading change appropriately.
Thank you very much for great questions. So please feel free to follow up with any questions or anything that comes up with you. And I will not repeat myself again what is the profitable innovation trinity. I think I said it plenty in this call. But what I always say, the most important thing is what you heard now.
Knowledge is great, insight is great. But if you don't do anything with it, then it was all for naught. So even if you take just one idea, just one thought that I shared today, and try it tomorrow in your organization, and then next week in your organization, then next month in your organization, every day, you will be much better off than just enjoying this great and so insightful webinar and then not doing anything.
I hope you implement this knowledge that I shared with you, and Godspeed.
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