Sustaining a reliable innovation capability requires attention to a range of organizational elements.
Each entry in this blog series provides a quick tip for improving your organization’s climate for innovation. See the full series here.
Challenge: Organizational culture can be hard to change when it is comprised of the same people always behaving in the same ways.
Quick Tip: Look for innovation competence in every new hire.
I was speaking with a client recently when this question came up:
“What’s the difference between a brand promise and a customer experience vision?”
I thought it was an interesting question that deserves discussion.
The brand promise is a key input to the cX vision that informs the vision of what the brand explicitly stands for through a concise set of statements (much of which is also used in advertising).
The cX vision suggests how those brand value statements will be interpreted by the organization as it goes about intentionally building out the activities within a certain touch point or its system as a whole. The cX vision can also help the organization distinguish how it plans to optimize the business (type of customer, use of technology, cost structure, etc.), so it provides those who need to produce the experience an idea of what the organization expects (and visa versa), especially for situations like yours where you have a system at scale.
Think Disney. They do a good job to embody their brand values in every experience they produce, especially when their employees are interacting with the public in places like Disney World. You would know immediately if something was “off brand” because their values are so carefully and consistently applied.
In my opinion, a company cannot do a good job on customer experience without a solid set of brand values because the brand values serve as the “north star,” the primary reference point in bringing differentiated experiences to life. But brand values serve a different purpose in the equation than a vision does.
Challenge: Innovation initiatives can come across as “something completely different” (to borrow a phrase from innovative comedy troupe Monty Python), which leaves people feeling like they don’t know what to do.
Quick Tip: Leverage past successes—big, historical successes as well as more recent accomplishments—to convey that innovation is an extension of things that are already occurring.
Sustaining a reliable innovation capability requires attention to a range of organizational elements.
Each entry in this blog series provides a quick tip for improving your organization’s climate for innovation. See the full series here.
Challenge: For a variety of reasons, innovation teams can flounder without strong support from management.
Quick Tip: Every innovation team needs an executive-level sponsor.
Open any business publication to the article on innovation and you are likely to learn about the glitzy “front end of innovation” – idea generation, crowd sourcing, and problem solving. While these practices continue to capture interest, sustaining a reliable innovation capability requires attention to a range of more mundane organizational elements: leadership, culture, communication, process, structure, roles, skills, incentives, commercialization, etc.
Although these topics can be ponderous, there are plenty of good approaches that can be adopted quickly. Each entry in this blog series provides a quick tip for improving your organization’s climate for innovation.
Challenge: Innovation requires risk, but this term has been confused with “failure”, one of the most toxic words in all of business.
Quick Tip: To communicate effectively about innovation, you need to choose terminology that carries the meaning you intend to convey.
Words like “failure”, “risk”, and “learning” are often loaded terms for executives who deal with innovation. Here are some ideas to help you get your messaging right.
As you probably know, mapping a customer journey helps identify both the points at which a company interacts with its customers and the customer emotions at each of those touchpoints.
While marketing and customer service teams typically use this tool to identify areas for improving the customer experience, operations teams can use customer journey mapping to simultaneously create happier customers and improve a company’s bottom line. Keep reading »
Open any business publication to the article on innovation and you are likely to learn about the glitzy “front end of innovation”— idea generation, crowd sourcing, and problem solving. While these practices continue to capture interest, sustaining a reliable innovation capability requires attention to a range of more mundane organizational elements: leadership, culture, communication, process, structure, roles, skills, incentives, commercialization, etc.
Although these topics can be ponderous, there are plenty of good approaches that can be adopted quickly. Each entry in this blog series provides a quick tip for improving the organizational climate for innovation.
Challenge: Innovation teams working in isolation often fall off the radar, making them more susceptible to interference and reduced motivation.
Quick Tip: Launch innovation projects in a focused and organized team-based competition.
What is the patient experience?* I think most people would agree that our system, comprised of diverse stakeholders with priorities and objectives that often compete against each other, seldom puts the patient first. Some of the resulting common pain points that characterize today’s traditional patient experience include:
Fortunately for us all, things are beginning to change. As organizations put more emphasis on the patient experience, I am optimistic that we will soon find ourselves in a system where some of the pains described above are less common, or even eliminated. In this blog series, I will focus on patient-centric methods, tools, and technologies that are being discussed, explored, and implemented across the healthcare industry.
Founder and president of Motiv and a nationally recognized thought leader on innovation management and design strategy.
is an engagement director, who has overall management responsibility for the various work streams involved in our consulting work.
is a co-founding consultant at Motiv, and drives the business and analytical thinking on projects.
spearheads business development and marketing efforts as well as support for client engagements.
