Long-form Interview with Innovation Architect, Nils Vesk
Welcome to the long-form interview with Innovation Architect, Nils Vesk.
Nils has been applying, teaching, and researching innovation around the world for over 18 years. Nils is the author of the innovation book Innovation Archetypes: democratising innovation (2015), Ideas with Legs: how to generate and realise ideas (2011), Life’s little toolbox: tips for a happier healthier you (2003) and co-author of Ideas: original perspectives on life and business from leading thinkers (2006).
Nils was generous enough to respond in late 2016 to an extended series of questions on organisational and leadership innovation which I posed. This discussion covered propogating innovation, how best to lead innovation, develop an innovation culture, how to develop and hire leaders to best enable innovation and where Nils has seen great examples of success and failure. From this broad content I extracted the additional post focusing on more specifically on Innovation Leadership.
How well supported do you feel innovation is within Australia?
Supported by Government or by private organisations? I think in many ways the federal government has been making a big effort to fund and support innovation within businesses yet at the same time they have been reducing funding for science and technology innovation.
Some of my clients have been recipients of Innovation grants which has helped them immensely in being able to fund innovation training and consulting to help develop their innovations.
Organisations on the other hand are still reluctant to innovate, many organisations play innovation lip service by having it on their mission and values statements but fail to follow through with any innovation.
Which would you say is the most significant in supporting innovation: organisational culture, organisational funding for innovation, governmental funding for innovation?
Having an innovative culture is by far the most important. You can innovate without spending a fortune. Yet if you have all the money in the world to spend on innovation but no innovation culture, nothing will happen.
Is innovation a noun or a verb?
Most definitely a verb. It’s what you do that counts – creating insights, generating ideas, prototyping and turning these ideas in to commercial projects.
How important is innovation for success in business?
If you exist in a business with no competition then innovation is not a necessity. If however, like most of us in the world who have competitors trying to do something cheaper, faster, differently, better than what we are, then innovation will give you that edge.
How important is innovation for sustainable business growth?
Sustainable from my perspective means having continuing growth in market share and where possible the creation of new markets with new products, processes and services. Nothing static is sustainable, everything is being improved and innovation provides businesses with the certainty that they can continue to stay successful in business.
How can businesses most benefit from innovation?
Process, Product and Service improvements, new product, process and service creation, differentiation from the market, superior customer/ user experience leading to customer loyalty and increased sales, superior solutions to customer needs, desires or aversions, being able to create trends rather than chase trends
What’s the best innovation you’ve benefited from?
There’s countless. You wouldn’t be reading this without innovation. My life would not be anything like it is without innovation, be that in my love of hang-gliding, my virtual business…The biggest innovations I have created and benefited most in my company are based around process innovation (which too few organisations consider). We have worked hard at making our company innovation processes simple, replicable and effective so much so that we now license them to allow our clients to use them as well.
What’s the best innovation you’ve seen fail?
I’m not sure it would be the best innovation if it’s failed, but there a few interesting ideas that have gone to market that are imaginative yet not necessarily innovative. One such imaginative thinker was a former patent assessor, who had some novel ideas, none of which worked. One of which was having a patent on having the ability to drive a car from the rear seat of the car!
How important is leadership for innovation?
The research is pretty clear on this, people leave organisations because of the people they work for and with ie. the leaders. Therefore if a leader isn’t sharing a narrative (story) about why innovation is important and looking at ways to facilitate, foster and encourage it, then innovation is going to have a tough time surfacing.
Can you give me an example of exceptional innovation leadership?
I had the good fortune of working with Creel (Andrew) Price for some time. Creel’s one of those who built and exited a great organisation for a ‘lotto sum price’ type of guys. His attitude to innovation was that everyone should be allowed to innovate.
For example, even the receptionist had permission to innovate on all the tasks that she was involved in. From meeting and greeting, dispatching couriers, admin communications and the sort. A common mistake is that innovation is only for the privileged, he successfully thought proved thought otherwise.
To what degree would you say innovation is recognised as a leadership opportunity?
This varies depending on organisations and their KPIs both as an organisation and for individuals. What organisations don’t do well is have clear concise metrics around innovation as an output, nor do they have a clear list of innovation behaviours so that they can measure them against an individuals performance. If an organisation has a list of observable measurable behaviours and then go out and observe and measure that in their leaders innovation is much easier to measure and link to profitability.
How can leaders best encourage innovation?
Create the want to, how to, and chance to. The want to means having a continuing narrative (stories) around why innovation is important using emotional stories throughout the year. The how to means having innovation training, let’s face it how many people have learnt how to innovate? Finally the chance to means giving people permission, time and space to innovate. Another successful way is to have recognition (this becomes part of the want to innovate story). Create a “most improved innovator award”& and catch people innovating. Share innovation stories from outside of the industry, go on field trips, and allow people to explore new solutions.
How can leadership benefit innovation?
Sharing a compelling narrative and facilitating innovation as well as creating rituals that cement innovation into the culture.
How can leadership best foster an innovative culture?
A culture is based on:
- The rituals we act out (eg. how we run a meeting every week is a ritual)
- The values we demonstrate (not the ones stuck on the wall)
- The leaders we follow
- Projects worth doing (projects that go beyond the everyday approach)
- The stories (narrative) we tell about ourselves
Leaders therefore could consider ways of introducing innovative rituals – for example: going on a field trip to visit a different organisation every quarter. Leaders could share a list of innovative behaviours and ask their teams to start acting that way, whilst looking for examples of these behaviours in action and recognising it. Leaders could step up by thinking across three levels of leadership – a) being able to paint a vision and author messages that inspire b) be able to show people how to innovate and what it is c) be able to facilitate others to innovate by asking questions and facilitating innovation activities. Leaders might consider introducing some emotional projects that go beyond the everyday tasks to help inspire their people. Finally leaders can continue to share stories about why innovation is important and look to find examples of these happening in their organisations.
Should leaders be innovators, or leaders of innovators?
I believe they could be either or they could be both. However if they are to be leaders of innovators they need to be able to facilitate and understand innovation and that in turn means they are innovators.
How important would you say innovation is for your organisation?
Being an innovation consultancy wouldn’t be in business unless we lived it and breathed it.
How important would you say innovation is for your sector as a whole?
My company works with all kinds of sectors and there’s not a sector I’ve come across yet they couldn’t benefit in some way shape or form from innovation.
What you say are the key factors supporting successful innovation?
Apart from the want to, how to, chance to – metrics are crucial. If you can’t measure it the CFO won’t support it.
How well supported do you feel innovation is within your organisation?
Once again Innovation is our business so it’s in focus for everything we attempt to do.
Where does your organisation innovate?
Process, Service, Product – all key three areas of business. We have some
revolutionary innovation processes, we work hard at creating a unique seamless, unforgettable experience and that is backed up by the products we offer.
How well do you feel your current organisational practices, hierarchical frameworks and physical structures support successful innovation?
We have an atypical business model and practice that is based on innovative approaches.
How can organisations develop hiring strategies which will improve their ability to innovate?
We see innovation as based on 4 phases:
- Insight generation (investigating what people really want)
- Idea generation (generating lots of ideas)
- Prototyping (testing and piloting ideas)
- Commercialisation (executing projects and marketing them to the word)
Within each of these 4 phases our research and application with clients has shown us that there a number of distinct professionals who innovate well in some of these phases and by identifying who these professional archetypes are we can use their principles to innovate on or to recruit from for their innovation strengths. For example it’s not much use having an organisation of people who are good at coming up with ideas but no one whose good at executing and commercialising it. Whilst you don’t have to a particular expert in each area it can help, otherwise that’s when you need to train and skill your people to be able cover these phases of innovation.
To what extent is hiring ‘out of sector’ beneficial to organisational innovation?
Fresh thinking and industry breakthroughs usually come from people outside of the industry so new, out of sector, recruits can be beneficial provided the culture supports collaboration, change, diversity and innovation.
How can organisations develop leadership development programs that will benefit innovation?
Be strategic by ensuring that leaders know how to develop a culture supportive of innovation(anthropologists call this culturing) and that they know how to facilitate innovation by giving them training, as innovation is not an inherent skill. This may entail learning what innovative behaviours are and how to find them, observe them and share stories with others so as to replicate them. There are many more…
How can organisations best align their structures, hierarchies and incentives to best foster innovation?
Many organisations try to over engineer or complicate matters.
The structure is simple – Four phases
- Insights
- Ideas
- Prototypes
- Projects to market.
Have some simple KPIs eg. number of insights, no. of ideas, no. of prototypes, no. of new products/ processes services etc. Have a simple submission process for BIG ideas, and give permission for people to go ahead with small innovations after they have prototyped. Incentives such as financial remuneration have been proven to not work. Essentially our innovative side responds better to curiosity, challenge and fun. Make a novel award and recognition versus a bonus.
Once again, I, and 4iGroup as a whole, thank Nils for his time and content contribution to this series.
For those that wish read more from, or connect with Nils, you can do so here… https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilsvesk/
I hope you’ve enjoyed this long form version of my interview with Nils, more from our other interview contributors and my own research as the series continues…
Thanks for your time to review and comments…
All the best,
Tim
