A strong understanding of the stakeholders involved, and the methods used to measure the impact of innovation on your organisation is crucial to converting your effort into results.
Innovation is not necessarily dedicated by the manager (indeed innovation can be stymied by a manager who is unwilling to allow innovation to flourish from other members of their organisation), but the manager’s role in directing innovation at a company will have a significant impact on the way in which innovation is achieved and documented. To be effective, they must introduce tools and frameworks that structure the innovation process and harness meaningful creativity.
By surrendering to – rather than controlling – the process, a good manager will remove the barriers to innovation and avoid repressing creativity by prejudging outputs against their own perceptions.
A good manager will be able to plot an effective target journey, considering key customer events and the touchpoints and enablers through which an organisation is able to influence them.
“Siloed focus on individual touchpoints misses the bigger – and more important – picture: the customer’s end-to-end experience. Only by looking at the customer’s experience through his or her own eyes – along the entire journey taken – can you really begin to understand how to meaningfully improve performance.” (Maechler, Neher & Park, 2016)
The manager’s direction may expand the scope of innovation beyond conventional, internal considerations. A successful manager might, for example, suggest analysis of other industries when seeking solutions in their own. In Not Invented Here: Cross-industry Innovation (Vullings, Ramon, Heleven, Marc) the authors make the point that Henry Ford revolutionised the automotive industry by creating the vehicle assembly line, something he observed and borrowed from the meat-packing industry. A service innovation example of this includes the medical industry making patients more comfortable by using practices from the hospitality industry, while technological innovation can be seen in the automotive industry adapting lighter construction methods by exploring aircraft construction.
A manager is also responsible for creating an environment that is inclusive, enabling representation from all who can contribute (for example, via open employee forums such as ‘fireside’ or ‘playground’ meetings). They must also be forgiving; only by allowing for failure can an organisation seek to innovate in an unfettered and genuinely groundbreaking way.
“Innovation is about trying new things and taking risks, which inevitably involves mistakes. However, many organisations want to embrace their innovative spirit but fear the consequences of failure … Edison, and many others like the Wright Brothers, didn’t start with all the right answers; they learned from their mistakes until they had something great on their hands (and sometimes even after.” (Coldwell, 2022)
There is of course more than one manager in an organisation, and each must contribute to innovation. While the CEO or founder may be responsible for creating a corporate culture that enables innovation to flourish, the chief operations officer (COO) may take responsibility for the assignment of resource and the gathering of relevant data.
In any case, the manager is responsible for overseeing the process of innovation in an organisation and ensuring a mix of methods and tools, as well as the inclusion of input from multiple sources, both inside and outside of the organisation.
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