Innovation teams are often met with a common problem: How do you recoup costs and prove value early?

Hamish Forsyth met with Christopher Bailey to discuss strategies for sustaining innovation and creating value quickly, even in an environment where flawless execution is the standard. The article below summarises their conversation, with key tips for innovation leaders at the bottom. You can also watch the conversation highlights here.

INNOVATION AND DELIVERING VALUE EARLY

At ExxonMobil, huge investments are made in the hope to deliver long-term revenue. Can such a large company wait years to start realizing value from investments? Now more than ever, the overwhelming answer is, no. Corporates need to adapt to become more agile and more entrepreneurial in order to realise value much earlier than previously expected.

The scope for innovation at ExxonMobil is vast and often well away from the core businesses people expect: from creating new forms of harder-wearing rubber or visualizing subsurface data, to developing virtual reality for simulating high-risk scenarios.

However, not every good idea is a good business, and testing quickly became key.

“How can [innovation teams] accelerate the time ideas take to go from ignition to a decision point, where we choose park, continue to execution, or kill - if they’re not going to delivery that value early?”

LEARNING FROM THE GAMING COMMUNITY

The mantra of delivering early value was not easy to embrace. In a company where engineering precision is valued across the board, making compromises on product finish in favour of early release met cultural barriers.

 Christopher used an example from the gaming community to tackle this problem:

PUTTING DOWN THE BABY

For any business team or entrepreneur developing a new product, putting aside “your baby” can be hard. Passion, investment and time have gone into it, and sometimes the human desire to push forward with further investment and succeed against the odds overrides a hard-nosed business rationale.

New innovation ventures, like start-ups, require honest feedback over false positives, vanity metrics and unmeasured hope.

Desirability is the foundational requirement, but often skipped past in favour of assessing feasibility—especially in engineer-rich environments. Sometimes it’s as simple as asking, “Would you buy this?”. If the resounding answer is a no, then it’s time to park it.

THE INNOVATION SPACE PARADOX

As a Senior Product Manager at ExxonMobil, Christopher was faced with what he calls, ‘The Innovation Space Paradox’:

How do you help your team develop high degrees of empowerment – an ability to really be inspired and explore big white space stuff – whilst tying innovation back to meaningful business goals?

He drew inspiration from the relationship between start-ups and venture capitalists, where a healthy sense of accountability is vital. In this relationship, entrepreneurs and start-ups deliver thought capital and expertise in return for space and funding.

Mirror this practice in a global corporation like ExxonMobil and you create a sweet spot for internal entrepreneurship and innovation.

THE HIDDEN VALUE OF INTERNAL COACHES

Counteracting emotional risk is institutional, as much as it is individual. The same way entrepreneurs often seek advice from those who have been there before, ExxonMobil developed internal coaching relationships between senior managers and junior team members to help unpack risks associated with innovation.

The benefits were threefold:

1. Adding an experienced coach throughout the innovation process offers a different perspective on the problem at hand. They can offer up personal insights, challenge assumptions and ask key questions that may have been missed.

2. Coaches can develop individuals’ confidence, but also help cultivate their intrapreneurial mindset.

3. They create psychological safety by often being the capital gatekeepers in the organisation. By offering first-hand encouragement, they create an environment where people are happier to pivot and take more risks.

DELIVERING VALUE EARLY: TIPS FOR LEADERS IN LARGE ORGANISATIONS

Here are Christopher’ key takeaways for innovation leaders:

1. Make sure that the vision is set for what success looks like before you get to work. Refine you why, what and how ahead of starting the innovation process.

2. Balance the attributes of your team and build coaching relationships. You need a diversity of ideas and depth of knowledge to succeed.

3. Use the innovation process as a means of developing wider internal systems and new teams.

4. Recognise that things are likely to go differently than you expected!

If you’ve enjoyed this article, follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter, and subscribe for email updates to be notified when we publish further updates from our Reset series.

Discover how your business can leverage the Reset Moment with the OneLeap Reset Sprint.

Other Articles and Insights from the oneleap team.

Subscribe to the Oneleap Blog.

Add your email to receive regular, quarterly updates from the OneLeap Team.

By clicking subscribe, you consent to allow OneLeap to store and process the personal information submitted to provide content requested. OneLeap will only use your personal information to administer your account and to provide the products and services you requested from us.

We will respect your privacy and you can unsubscribe at any time.