I was recently asked what the invisible challenges of innovation are in small and medium-sized businesses.
Over the years, my experience has shown me that challenges are often hidden in what the innovative company assumes to be a detail.
Because yes, the devil is always in the details..!
I like this phrase. I like to remind myself of it, especially to exercise my own vigilance in the face of avenues that seem all mapped out and easy to descend.
The ' there's nothing left to do ', or the ' no but that will be easy ' sound like little red alerts, indicators that there is certainly everything, except ' there's nothing left to do'.
So to answer the question I was asked, I went through the " there's nothing left to do but " that I had heard most often.
Below, I share three of them with you, which you may find, considered outside of action, monstrously banal, even crazy obvious! But in practice, in action, the temptation to minimize the gaps and take refuge in the 'there's nothing left but that' is much greater than we think.
#1 When we talk about innovation, we still too often think about the heart of innovation, that is to say, concretely, invention .
Depending on the biases of the innovating company, we can tend to put aside part of the integration of the invention on its market and/or in the company's value chain. A fragile link with the team and the commercial work? 'all that's left is to sell' ..
A customer service department that is not sufficiently trained or informed? 'We'll see when we get there'..
To avoid these pitfalls, it is essential to consider that innovation does not stop at technical, scientific, technological prowess. The work of innovation continues beyond the development work, even in its integration into the current operations of the company.
Although this integration is often considered as “the last few metres” of an innovative project, they are by no means a formality:
- Market success depends on complete transmission between the development and operations teams and must be approached with as much seriousness and rigor as the development phases.
- Integration must be anticipated as early as possible in the project in order to create the necessary bridges between developers and integrators to meet the challenges of both adhesion and fine-tuning of innovation.
#2 Innovation is not an absolute concept. It is a relative value!
What is new to me is not necessarily new to a colleague or competitor. Failure to appropriate this notion runs the risk of not properly identifying where the innovation work begins for my organization and therefore risks leading to a poor assessment of the effort and/or complexity of the project.
An organization that sells a product and wants to innovate through a new service offering will have to understand the innovation work to be done not only from the point of view of the content of its offering, but also from the point of view of the service approach. If we take the example of the sales team, we will have to question the 'Services' culture of the sales team, its ability to assimilate a new language, a new sales cycle. Invest the necessary time and perhaps external support to train this team. In any case, we will have to try not to take refuge comfortably in quick presumptions of skills, since this is new territory.
Finally, I will note a third and final item on the checklist.
#3 Innovation always disrupts the established order. Movement, transformation, innovation always impact the deep system of the company, its culture, its relationships. The cultural side effects of innovation are therefore inevitable! However small the innovation, however small the movement, it will project and shake up small pieces of imagination, which, put end to end, contribute to the evolution of the company. In my opinion, it is important to be aware of this so as not to be surprised by the questions, frustrations and new desires that innovative projects generate in the organization.
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