Here’s the thing about most innovation roles: you’re responsible for driving change across an organisation, but you rarely have the authority to make anyone do anything. This article is about influence — specifically, the deliberate, strategic work of building a coalition of support around your innovation efforts.

If you can't demonstrate value early and consistently, you'll find yourself in a familiar trap: defending your team's existence instead of doing the work that justifies it. This article introduces two connected disciplines: measuring progress in ways that capture early value, and communicating that progress to keep stakeholders committed to what you're building.

Here's a mindset shift that's served me well: treat your innovation team like an internal startup. Startups rarely get their business model right the first time. They test, learn, pivot, and iterate. The model they launch with is almost never the model that eventually works. The same is true for innovation teams.

Through my work with organisations across sectors, I've identified three core orientations for innovation teams. Most successful teams have a primary orientation, even if they do some work in other areas.

If you're serious about building innovation capability, start with an honest assessment of where you stand… The organisations that succeed with innovation aren't the ones with perfect readiness scores. They're the ones honest enough to understand their starting point and smart enough to design an approach that fits.

The teams that succeed aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most talented people. They're the ones designed for their specific context, with clarity about their purpose and realistic support for their mission.

Failing to get traction for new ways of working or cultural changes you want your organisation to adopt? That’ll be corporate inertia....

How do you feel about uncertainty? Let’s have an honest conversation… Uncertainty means there are many possible future states and...

How Do I Empower Others Without Losing All of My Own? During recent coaching sessions with executives involved in leading organisational...

Who's helping you help your organisation through its transformation? Anyone who has kids will know that, especially in those early days...

Mutually exclusive or interdependent? How can we lead at pace and still be inclusive? This is the question that was asked by a Digital...

Are you responsible for investing (money and/or people) in innovation? Whether you’re responsible for the continuous improvement of...

When Corporate Innovators Are Their Own Worst Enemy. How impactful is your innovation lab? A number of years ago, when I started as Head...

Are organisational transitions so different to personal transitions? Digital Transformation is one of the most over-used and least...

How to Build Innovation Capability Inside your Organisation. How much money has your organisation spent over the last year on R&D? How...

Allowing new possibilities to emerge Back in 2017, I was responsible for a government incubator that pulled together one of the most...

The Mission Model Canvas is the much lesser known sibling of Strategyzer’s Business Model Canvas and was created a number of years ago...

In an increasingly uncertain and interconnected world, strategy is more important than ever. But the concept of strategy as a plan is...

A complaint I hear frequently from managers is that they haven’t got enough money or enough people to do the work that needs to be done....

“You got this,” someone says to you. “I really don’t.” you think silently to yourself. During the course of my career, I've been a part...