Tag: "product innovation"

Leadership and Management of Innovation Environments

Bridge Over Snake RiverLeadership and management are often confused and used interchangeably by many executives. Both involve such an overlap of activities in many situations. Leadership is viewed as the soft stuff needed to build and maintain teams and to motivate everyone to follow the strategic plan, the outcome of management activity. From my experience leadership and management represents a continuum of actions and thinking that are interfaced and interactive. Without a strategic plan to follow and people motivated to follow it, an innovation environment will flounder and stagnate.

To me it all centers around treating people as unique individuals. People tend to think first as individuals, speak often with self-interest in mind, react like people, behave like people, and they change (as people) and only if they decide to change. In my experience as a research executive and a management consultant, leaders who treat people as unique individuals create collaborative successes, they build successful teams, they continually act with integrity, and they build sustainable, innovative platforms to meet the strategic plan of the organization. They need to bridge the gap between leadership and management skills and apply to the situation as needed.

Many executives need to develop their exterior focus on other people. Many are still challenged by their own ability to be introspective, they need to be challenged to evaluate how they think, especially their own behavioral patterns, how they react to certain triggers, learn about their own fears, how they see people, and how they communicate and come across in general. A leader needs to have a great level of self awareness, before even being able to start effectively dealing with other people.

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Jul 06, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Outsourcing Innovation for Greater ROI

Large companies appear to have all of the skill sets necessary to sustain innovation, yet appearance can be deceiving–one cannot valuate what they cannot measure, lost opportunities. Companies have begun to outsource innovation (a.k.a. open innovation) to maximize their opportunities, yet it is important to minimize transaction costs of administering projects, whether outsourced or not. In fact, streamlining R&D processes including outsourcing can provide returns of up to 10 to 85 cents on every dollar of R&D expenditure.

As one develops their cast of headshops and other outsource partnerships, one needs to balance their internal and external resources of skill sets, experience base, and congregate their core competencies to satisfy the need of the corporate strategic plan. Once the system is established, one needs to establish leadership practices to ensure sustainable management of these resources.

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Jun 28, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Aligning Your Stakeholders to Maximize Competitiveness

DSC01758Leadership is often not about the leader but about those surrounding the leader.

Balancing the needs of your stakeholders with those of the greater organization can streamline your innovation process to make your organization more competitive. How does one assess their own str

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May 26, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Leadership Styles in Technical Environments

Wild MustangsMany technical environments are traditionally heirarchical in nature, so in many R&D organizations leadership styles are often the outcome of lord-serf relationships. This situation is an archetype of the academic environment from which so many technical professionals emanate. This leadership style fits well within the heirarchical corporate culture, yet how does one adapt their style to other types of cultures, namely, the market, clan, and adhocracy cultures.

Short answer: flexibility is the trait one needs best to adapt and align with other stakeholders notwithstanding the type of corporate culture, like the approach taken by Strategyn. Clan cultures are typically family owned and dominated by a single dynamic and sometimes charismatic individual who runs almost everything So in some companies, a it is best to be willing to share the limelight and credit yet simultaneously provide “push-back” toward an organizational tendency to switch research initiatives prematurely before fruition. Instead of succumbing to an opportunity du jour environment, a sturdy hand on the rudder approach wins in the long run–in the end, we all need to deliver to provide value.

Market cultures tend to be highly driven from the view of the marketing department’s needs (typically a good thing), which can quickly change from week to week or month to month, depending on the industry. For most companies with the market culture, the research agenda is set well in advance so it is helpful for sustainability to have small skunk works to augment the innovation effort. The adhocracy culture is innovation driven, so the opinion of the technical leadership looms large in the direction of such companies. Most any leadership style that is non-hierarchical can work, because the company’s progress largely depends on the pace of new deliverables.

In sum, flexibility to the particular culture and adaptability to change helps direct the leadership style that best fits with the culture and align with stakeholders.

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May 08, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Leadership Styles in Differing Corporate Cultures

captain-planet_www-txt2pic-comLeadership and management work in concert to shape the path and then drive the organization along that path. This is just as true for innovation environments yet with the added dimension of fitting in with the corporate culture of their organization. Innovation environments are comprised of technical leadership and those relevant stakeholders in the company that enable commercialization of novel goods and/or services.

In one viewpoint, innovation environments need to adapt to the culture of the corporate host. Put this way, the technical leadership of the research department and relevant stakeholders must understand the needs of the greater organization. What type of research organization fits best into a particular type of corporate culture? To answer this, it is best to define the corporate culture that “hosts” the research organization.

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Apr 26, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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