Product Innovation Best Practices Series
Do You Have A Chief
Champion of Change?
Reference Paper #31
Michelle Jones
Compliments of:
Stage-Gate International and
Product Development Institute Inc.
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This article appeared in Whatify Magazine
Issue 3, pp 14-15
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issue 3
Innovation and change are
inextricably linked, though the
processes involved in each will be
markedly different, sometimes
calling for different leadership
skills. Being the owner of the
innovation process isn’t always
enough, so consider one question
carefully…
Among the many important roles the product
innovation process owner plays, Chief Champion of
Change is one of the most underrated yet most
relevant roles of them all. Why? Simply put, apathy is
the kiss of death in the business of product
innovation. Implementing an innovation process is
not something you learn and implement only once. It
is a continuous evolution of practices, skills,
behaviors and ideas that grow and change as the
people and the organisation using them also grow
and change. Still, many organisations are genuinely
surprised when they discover that the static process
they put into their dynamic environment has
become problematic – complaints, slow adoption
rate, poor results.
Your innovation process should look different today
than it did one, two and especially five years ago,
because the purpose of the innovation process is to
serve the organisation’s strategic business goals. It
is the roadmap that will accelerate alignment and
collaboration across the numerous stakeholders who
take part in the complex business of driving ideas
from inception to launch, effectively and efficiently.
Your process must, therefore, keep pace with
changing business strategies and goals.
Doyou
have a
Chief
Champion
ofChange?
Companies invest serious time, money and effort to
design and implement an innovation process that,
for many, contributes significant value straight to the
top line – new growth. The last thing you want to do
is destroy precious value-creating practices and
processes because someone new to the
organisation did not fully immerse themselves into
understanding the process well enough to add the
necessary value, instead of simply changing it for
the sake of change.
14
Five Tips for Process Owners to
Effectively Champion Innovation
Change
1. Ensure your process is designed for the
types of projects that are important to the
business.
For some organisations, you may have multiple
innovation processes – each process is designed to
drive a specific type of project (i.e. Technology
Development Process, New Product Process, Low
Risk Product Improvement Process, etc.). An easy
way to stay on top of this is to examine your pipeline
of projects periodically. List all of your projects and
categorise each project by risk level (High, Medium,
Low) or by project type (New Technology, New
Product, New Service, Improvement). If the mix is
changing, or about to change due to a shift in
business strategy, prepare to evolve the process (or
introduce a new process) that can effectively drive
these new projects to success.
2. Survey people using the innovation process
to confirm it is enabling their success.
Listen carefully to all stakeholders and seek to
understand. Probe more deeply when conflicting
complaints are presented so you can differentiate
between process improvements that can lead to
better performance, versus complaints that may be
indicative of isolated cases of resistance to change.
Don’t hesitate to call upon a neutral, external party
to survey and interview stakeholders if
confidentiality is an issue, it can have a positive
impact on stakeholder participation rates.
3. Stay on top of innovation best practices
and benchmarks.
Knowledge is confidence and, for process owners,
confidence translates into continuous improvement.
When process owners are well equipped with facts,
answers and solutions, they report that it becomes
easier to communicate, justify and effect change on
a more regular basis. It is important to note however,
that not all change is equal – a change to an
innovation process that does not ultimately lead to
improved performance is a poor use of resources. Be
sure to validate and justify expected performance
results before implementing any improvement.
4. Be disciplined in executing Post Launch
Reviews (PLR).
Encouraging teams to temporarily pause after each
major project experience (whether the product is
launched or is killed off part way through the
WHATIFY 03.2011
process) to reflect on their experience – the good,
the bad and yes, the ugly. Often referred to by many
process owners as ‘a no-brainer’, it is rarely
executed properly. The process owner can play a
significant role in ensuring these reviews occur, and
can produce meaningful improvement
recommendations. The most effective way to
conduct a PLR is to arrange for an objective,
seasoned facilitator to run the event (definitely not
the project leader) and keep the discussion focused
on key questions that the team has access to in
advance of the meeting.
INNOVATE
COLLABORATE
CHANGE
5. Fix innovation process conflict
immediately.
Driving a new product from inception to launch is a
complex business. It involves numerous decisionmakers and a wide range of professionals, all trying
to solve your clients’ toughest problems within
serious time constraints. So it’s only natural that
some level of conflict will occur within projects.
However, when conflict occurs, possibly because
key stakeholders across the organisation cannot
agree on how best to approach the product
innovation process, we have a bigger problem. This
type of conflict is serious. It destroys productivity, as
well as the collaborative culture that is so necessary
to be successful in product innovation. This type of
conflict should be managed immediately, and the
most effective approach is to leverage ‘facts’.
Evaluate your innovation process against industry or
global benchmarks and lay out these facts – the
strengths and the weaknesses – for everyone to
review, digest and discuss. Ultimately, most people
will not risk their professional reputations to argue
against facts, especially if they become the minority
concern. More often, those who resist are simply
seeking to understand before they give you their
whole-hearted buy-in.
What matters most is not that you can pinpoint the
drivers of change that are pertinent to your
organisation with certainty and precision. Rather, as
process owners, we learn to recognise when a
process improvement opportunity presents itself
and we jump on it. Often, the first signs of
improvement opportunities arrive in the form of
complaints. Unfortunately it is common for process
owners to mistake complaints as personal attacks
on their performance. It is important to note that
most complaints simply serve as a trigger point that
indicates it might be time to evolve the process.
Michelle Jones
Executive Vice President, Stage Gate
www.stage-gate.com
15
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