People often ask me why it's so hard for big companies to be innovative. My answer is "corporate antibodies" — the people and processes that extinguish a new idea as soon as it begins to course through the organization.
Corporate antibodies are not just naysayers; they are necessary to protect the company from risk. When they attack an idea, it's because they perceive that idea to be a foreign object trying to harm the stability of the organization. But that doesn't mean innovation can't happen, even in the biggest, most entrenched firm. It simply means that senior leaders need to prepare their antibody system not only to identify ideas that are too risky but to recognize the ones that will strengthen and grow the company.
Easy to say, of course.
At PwC, we learned a powerful lesson in how to engage our corporate antibodies. We learned it through our experience with an internal contest — "PowerPitch" — in which we challenged everyone in the firm to submit a business brief proposing our next $100 million opportunity. It was fun to bring our finalists to New York as if they were American Idol contestants ready for their close-ups. In the end though, the competition wasn't about the flash and dazzle. It was a lesson in how to prime the organization to become an optimal environment for innovation to thrive — an effort that started a full year before the competition was held.
How did we do it? We began by lining up the biggest sponsor to champion the project, identifying the most powerful naysayers to help us mitigate the risks we were about to introduce, and then systematically recruiting our general management structure to do the real legwork.
Getting the Big Gun on Board
We started at the top — by convincing PwC chairman Bob Moritz that he needed to lead the charge in a high-profile way. He manifested his support with two of the most potent weapons a chief executive has — empowerment and sponsorship.
By establishing the Innovation Office, and empowering me with resources to run it, he sent a crucial signal to the organization that innovation is on top of his agenda. By explicitly sponsoring the contest, he put his weight behind the initiative. He launched the contest through a companywide Webcast and reinforced the importance of innovation to the future of the organization through a series of e-mail communications. He was relying, he said, on absolutely every single person to participate. That got people going.
Getting the Naysayers to Join Us
It wasn't hard to identify the most powerful corporate antibodies. They were the people whose job it is to worry about risks to the on-going organization — legal, risk management, finance, IT, and the brand team. To make them into allies, we held a series of highly personalized meetings in which we asked each person to use his or her core area of expertise to help us plan out the details of our PowerPitch initiative. For example, we sought the Office of General Counsel's help in developing terms and conditions for the contest. We collaborated with our CFO to think through the budget and prize strategy. We engaged our brand team to help us increase the impact of the project through our newly launched visual identity.
Getting the General Managers on Board
Third, we had to prepare the middle layer of our organization. For this we enlisted the help of the most relevant guardian of our on-going business — the vice chairman in charge of the markets. He introduced me and the PowerPitch idea to his group of 20 geographic market leaders and laid the foundation that enabled me to seek their support by emphasizing that the new ideas PowerPitch would generate would not be so distracting as to become a hit to their P&Ls.
I talked to the managing partner in charge of each market individually, and asked him or her to appoint a local champion to own the PowerPitch program and do what was best for each location. It actually was not a hard sell.The highly visible support from Bob Moritz, coupled with individual ownership of the program within each market, made our practice partners not only receptive to the initiative but eager to go out of their way to mentor teams and help develop new ideas.This broad support in turn inspired everyone in the firm, from first-year associates to senior directors, to take a chance with their imagination.
Before we knew it, people were not only talking about PowerPitch and sharing ideas but also volunteering to run teams; soliciting team members; planning events like lunch-and-learns and brainstorming happy hours; and lining up internal and external guest speakers to stimulate their thinking. And they were doing it all on their own time, of their own volition. Once people started campaigning for their ideas, communities that had not previously existed started to emerge.
Senior Leadership Follows Through
After a receptive environment for generating ideas had been established, it fell to the senior leadership to follow through with substantial development resources. Upon announcing the grand prize winner ($100,000 cash prize), our chairman surprised us with an additional $25,000 prize for each of the five finalists and another $5,000 for every semifinalist. He also committed to developing all of the semifinalists' submissions.
In the Innovation Office, we assembled resources for nurturing and implementing the ideas, which we dubbed our "Idea Accelerators." These are on-demand collaboration units comprising subject matter specialists from the relevant business units and members of the Innovation Office, who take an idea with a validated value proposition through the process of development, risk mitigation, and prototyping to deliver a market-ready offering. We are now running the top 25 winning ideas through this framework to ensure proper implementation.
For innovation to survive and even flourish in a big company, you must first decide that everyone in your organization is capable of offering a new idea and commit to engaging them all. Then you must prepare the entire management structure to accept the fruits of that effort. It's not easy, but it can be done. And once you do, the real challenge begins: Doing it again. Because as we all know, doing one new, healthy thing for our bodies is a difficult step. But making it a habit and truly changing our lifestyles — that's what really makes a lasting difference.
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