Developing an Innovation Strategy

Rob Hulme from Smith & Nephew spoke at the first of our Business Fitness workshops in Hull on developing an innovation strategy. He emphasised their strategy has moved from closed innovation to a more open approach to embrace ideas from outside. Another of his themes was the concept of teamwork and cross-functional approaches noting that breakthroughs often occur at the interface between two disciplines.

A interesting observation was on the competing pressures of Process & Bureaucracy and Passion & Anarchy that a company needs to find an appropriate balance between to maximise its potential. Too much bureaucracy and innovation risks being stiffled in favour of the status quo. But equally too many mavericks trying to change and tinker with things then chaos reins.

This complemented my discussion in the previous session on Business Strategy & Planning where I focused on the chasm between Visionaries and Pragmatists. Visionaries are by definition more driven by passion and a quest for radical improvement, whereas Pragmatists are looking for more incremental, managed evolution to improve the current situation. Most managers coming from larger companies have these pragmatic skills in spades, but may lack the open mindedness and willingness to experiment and even fail that sets out the visionaries from the rest.

There are four more seminars in the series which promise to be equally inspiring! Click here to find out more...