When it’s wise to engage external innovation support (and when not)

We all know it: innovation is essential to every business to succeed. To stay ahead, organisations need to keep adapting and coming up with new ideas. But even the best in-house innovation and development teams can face challenges. These are six scenarios when you should think about bringing on external innovation support – and one when you should not. Read on for solutions to what are probably the most common innovation challenges.

More ambition than resources

We're innovation leaders... right?

This is a challenge if your top-level management expects more innovation output than you and your team can meet.

Getting extra support in this situation gives you fast and flexible access to additional resources on demand – extra hands, more brain power, heaps of creativity, niche skillsets. With this solution, you avoid the time it takes to integrate teams within a corporate organisation or onboard new hires.

Development is stuck

We need speed!

You have projects in progress, and not only that, but an innovation funnel full of ideas … and still things just aren’t moving forward fast enough. This often comes with opportunity costs because plans have to be rescheduled, issues in production are not handled, and deadlines cannot be met. The frustration of stalled progress can dampen morale and hinder productivity.

Enter external perspective. With it comes an actionable boost thanks to heterogenous task-force-like Dream Teams that support your existing team quickly. Using an iterative and co-creative style, we’ve helped clients in this situation develop novel solutions to get things moving.

Lack of innovation skills

Are we doing things right?

This situation can have different appearances. It may look like uncertainty in the organisation’s ability to make decisions about innovation strategy or projects. It can also be that know-how to set up innovation projects or run them effectively is lacking because an organisation doesn’t have that much experience in innovation in general. This leads to inefficient processes and too much investment in just getting the ball rolling.

In scenarios like these, Creaholic has provided tailor-made solutions to complement the strengths that the team already has. External support can be bringing in the expertise that’s lacking, moderating meetings about key decisions, building innovation processes, and if needed, facilitate trainings to upskill employees.

Industry blinders

This doesn’t work in our industry… and we’re different anyways.

Too much thinking inside the box and sticking with the status quo will definitely prevent innovation from happening. And that’s really not good for business in the long run. At the root of this problem could be a fear of risk or a lack of experience in thinking bigger and broader. Or simply, too many years of experience focused on the same domain.

When you get external innovation help, a good partner will bring inspiring examples of successful cross-industry innovation. In these situations, it’s a huge benefit that outside experts intervene – especially if your attempts did not work out. At Creaholic, we support clients facing this situation with inspirational input and keynotes, constructive criticism and encouragement to invest in creating a more innovative culture. We’ve seen firsthand how things change when an external partner says what you’ve known – and communicated – all along. This kind of culture includes an open attitude toward feedback and an environment conducive to healthy risk-taking.

Too much politics

Have you filled out your pre-read PowerPoint for the board meeting? Deadline is EOD.

Unlike the first situation where management expects more innovation, this problem materialises when management doesn’t support it (or says it does but doesn’t act on it). In this situation, managers usually don’t have any, or very little, appetite for risk and there are too many hurdles in terms of alignment checkpoints.

Sometimes hearing the same words from a different messenger is what it takes to get management on board with innovation. This messenger can be an external innovation partner, whose intervention can inspire a sense of urgency and establish and understanding of the importance – and necessity – of innovation. Often, this solution involves shifting mindsets and setting up a focused innovation system to generate a common understanding of how innovation should work.

Core business makes innovation impossible

PI planning is already full – we have to deprioritise your features.

Classic. The main problem here is that short-term thinking takes over. Innovative ideas get deprioritised because of the urgency of core business. And try as you might, your efforts to change this approach haven’t made an impact yet. This is a commonly occurring trade-off every organisation faces and this is why it’s the classic scenario.

In these situations, you strongly need alignment between business objectives and innovation. Creaholic has proved useful in this situation by helping our clients integrate a proper innovation framework that helps make this struggle transparent that sets guidelines on a company level, funnel level and project level. This link between innovation and your organisation’s goals coupled with a system gives space for innovation initiatives to stick and succeed. And keep in mind: innovation doesn’t need to be ground-breaking or disruptive… it can also be related to core business itself.

When you don’t need on-demand innovation support

We’re happy with our innovation results.

When you feel like your fully integrated innovation framework is future-proofing your organisation, evolving your core business and empowering your employees, then kudos! You’re a role model!

But if you’re not quite there yet, we know how to help.

Now what?

Get in touch and let us know which of these situations you’re dealing with right now. Together, we can give innovation new meaning at your organisation with bespoke solutions inspired by our trusted approach.

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