As an innovation leader, you need to help your team understand the role of innovation in executing specific corporate goals and strategies. Employees can become distracted by irrelevant ideas when there is no guidance on the strategic outcomes that your organization values.
To help your team better focus its efforts, pick apart your organization’s larger corporate strategy. Find out what’s important to your organization? Is it customer service? New product development? Organic growth? After selecting what’s important, define the particular outcomes and goals your organization strives toward. Now work backwards and outline how innovation can help you attain those goals. Customer service excellence, for example, can be attained by coming up with new ways that your organization can communicate with its customers.
As you work backwards, keep narrowing your focus until you arrive at a set of tasks and ideas that your innovation team can work on. Keep asking “how?” By the end of this exercise, you’ll end up with an innovation project list that is directly linked to your corporate strategy, which is something senior managers throughout your organization can get behind.
