Part 1: Accelerating the impact of Innovation Campaigns

Part 1 of 3: Innovation is the core driver to meet critical business needs

In a 2007 McKinsey Quarterly article on “Leadership and Innovation,” the authors made it quite clear that “Innovation is a core driver of growth, performance and valuation.” One thing has changed in the past 10 years: innovation has evolved from being “a” core driver to now being “the” core driver.

That’s quite evident from an examination of global CEO surveys over the past 2 years, and the essential role innovation plays to meet the top CEO challenges. From the Conference Board’s CEO Challenge 2015 (with data from over 900 global executives), KPMG’s Global CEO Report 2016 (with 1,300 global executives), and Gartner’ 2016 CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey (400 global executives), these are the top challenges that CEOs say they face today:

After those, the Conference Board and KPMG also name:

CEOs also see the necessity for, and perhaps the inevitability of large-scale, transformative change in just about every facet of their companies. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) describes what this means in their 2015 New CEOs Guide to Transformation: “We define a transformation as a profound change in a company’s strategy, business model, organization, culture, people, or processes… a fundamental reboot that enables a business to achieve a sustainable, quantum improvement in performance, altering the trajectory of its future.”

And that level of change is just what CEOs have begun to carry out, as KPMG further reports:

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Such “profound change” requires profound levels of innovation. And it leads us to the conclusion that being innovative is the fundamental core capability for responding to key business challenges and addressing top strategic priorities. The reports by the Conference Board and KPMG illuminate some of the specific targets for innovative solutions that can deliver the top CEO priorities. For example:

To transform GROWTH, innovative solutions are needed for:

To transform HUMAN CAPITAL, innovative solutions are needed for:

To transform CUSTOMER CENTRICITY, innovative solutions are needed for:

To transform OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE, innovative solutions are needed for:

To transform SUSTAINABILITY, innovative solutions are needed for:

To transform the generation of DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES, innovative solutions are needed for:

To transform MARKETING AND BRANDING, innovative solutions are needed for:

But that brings up the question: If CEOs want growth, and innovation drives growth, who drives innovation? The leaders in Product Development? Technology/R&D? Marketing? Operations? Quality? Human Resources? Strategy? Organization Development? Customer Relations? Sustainability? Chief Innovation Officers? All of the above?

The need for innovation is urgent across the entire organization. Even when there is a Chief Innovation Officer with strong CEO support, innovation sponsors are needed in senior leadership positions throughout a company within every function.

To meet the widespread needs and urgencies for innovation, many innovation sponsors are utilizing IT-based platforms that can reach across functions and stakeholders to involve a wide range of people in innovation campaigns (which include “crowdsourcing” and “idea campaigns”). These innovation management platforms are either developed in-house or provided by vendors such as Spigit, BrightIdea, Qmarket, Imaginatik, and Hype Innovation. Internally, they are most often co-sponsored by IT departments and the innovation sponsors who have specific business challenges.

What are the goals of these innovation campaigns, how successful are they overall, and what is the need and opportunity to accelerate their impact on business success?

To address these questions, continue to Part 2: Professional knowledge and motivation: essential, but not sufficient

• Download the full white paper
• Watch the "Accelerating Innovation Campaigns" video