From Jani Luoma
I’m proposing this five-step framework to allow corporations with, sometimes, large and complex organizations to benefit from, multi-partner, open collaboration platforms. It is not by all means meant to be a perfect model that one can easily follow for success, but I do hope it provides some food for thought.
Counting on your comments, especially those proposing alternative approaches. Such feedback provides a great opportunity to learn from others, and let’s face it, there’s always plenty of room for that.
1. Create Trust
How do you engage in a dialogue sharing your ideas with someone else? If someone calls you from a different country code, will you share your address and date of birth? Most likely not, and the piece preventing that is something very human – trust, in this case the lack of it. Before one can expect any kind of exchange of something of value, let it be money, physical assets or the next great idea, trust needs to be in place. The discussion partner needs to be certain enough that you will not take his / her idea and just run away with it. If you have a personal relationship established, the barrier to share ideas is lower. If you have only spoken over the phone, most likely you will start with an NDA. The other party may even require a tailored NDA for their purposes. In the very early phase, one also recognizes what is the maturity level of the partner to go forward with innovation. If the counterpart requires heavily tailored NDAs and processes, most likely they are not someone you would like quick results with. Usually the partners who want to start contributing immediately based on the trust you’ve created, are also the most productive ones.
2. Form a frame – set the expectation level
The innovation partner most likely wants to understand the context he/she is expected to work within. Again, something very human and we all are familiar with the “blank page syndrome”. As much as we would like to believe we do not categorize things, we all do. It helps a great deal to provide some identified areas or certain boundaries to start within. Again, depending on the maturity level of the partner, it is either a detailed technology area or a broad definition with a lot of room for creativity and vision. Most importantly, try to identify the maturity level, provide enough support for comfort and coach the partner, pushing the boundaries further!
3. Prep for confidence
Once you’ve been able to get the innovation flow going to the point where it’s time to take it to a broader audience, it’s generally a good idea to have a prep talk making sure the first time will not be the last one. Some audiences might be brutal, they might ridicule the idea, even mocking the people presenting it. At this stage, it’s crucial that the innovation partner is prepared for the worst and they accept the fact that failure is acceptable as long as they keep on trying.
4. Clear for landing
It is easy to find stakeholders to present the idea to. The challenging part is to identify the right people with vision, people who have more words in their vocabulary than “no”, people who are not appealing to the always-so-popular “I have too many things to do” argument. Even worse than exposing the innovation partner to stakeholders who tear the idea apart, is to introduce them to a non-responsive audience. With the previous scenario, the idea initiator knows at least the idea has been evaluated.
5. Making the idea become business reality
Four out of five cleared, so close to the goal, right? On the contrary – now the hardest part starts. As we all know, idea does not equal to innovation unless it becomes business reality and revenues are created. At this point of time, you are perhaps more dependent on your network than ever. You eventually need to make your way to the one decision maker who says yes – let’s do this!
Concluding
Based on the previous, there are some good practices and tick boxes which can be prepared, but they do not count even close to being enough to reach the goal – to make an impact in terms of cash flows. Two things stand out to me as the biggest hurdles to overcome: finding the right stakeholders and creating trust. I would raise these as challenges to you dear readers – what is the smart way to have visionary stakeholders and decision makers willing to be at our disposal? How can we create trust if we can never meet the innovation partner in person? What is the approach that can replace human interaction? I know there’s a certain bunch of smart people who can provide answers to these two questions – and this bunch of smart people consists of you, dear readers.