Pavan Soni - Innovation Evangelist
Let me take you back to your childhood days. Remember the quintessential accompany to your picnics? A Kodak Moment! The camera and those Kodak rolls were very much cherished those days. Then getting a snap was quite costly and time consuming affair, but we were ok with it. Fast forward… today we take more photographs than ever before. Where’s the Kodak roll gone? Is it upsetting for you to know that your (then) mate– Kodak has done bankrupt!! The very company that invented and popularized photography and the one that held an enviable position in your upbringing is gone burst. What had happened? Did it lose out on understanding the customer taste or missed the whole technology shift or simply grew complacent? And by the way, while Kodak has folded, we are happy clicking even more spans. If it can happen to Kodak, what makes you think it can’t happen to your company? Wake up!!
Welcome to the turbulent times. Times where recessionary hits would be more frequent than ever, customers would literally call the shots (thumbs down to Microsoft), things will be all in open (the WikiLeaks era), employees will have more options (look at InnoCentive) and new ways of enticing the customer would be devised (Twitter’s success). The way most organizations reacted to the current recessionary times, won’t take them any further this time around. Agility would be more valued than predictability. Individuals would need to learn being comfortable with ambiguity and still deliver results. Long Term Planning would be trashed. And R&D’s walls would come collapsing. These are exciting times and it is great to be around.
While organizations have perfected most of the disciplines of running a business successfully, innovation management still remains ad-hoc, at best. Right from B-School dormitories to corporate corridors, students and professionals like swear by the concepts of HR, Marketing, Finance, Operations and the likes. These are all necessary to run a business, but not sufficient. Things of the nature of Creativity and Innovation have been given a lip service at most places. Unfortunately, innovation workshops and outbound exercises to an organization are like surgeries to an organism. What is needed is a disciplined exercise regime that allows body to remain healthy and fight external (even internal) toxics. This brings us to the role of innovation agents in the organization that can drive this health regime. Let’s not just expect the top brass to be creative and drive innovation. It is a holistic process. Innovation has to be both bottom-up and top-down. Creative spirits can flourish in an organization due to leaders, but at certain places inspite of leaders as well! The innovation agents have to be crusaders of innovation, not necessarily by assuming titles. I call these agents as Innovation Evangelists.
Innovation Evangelists are characterized by being fearless, restless and having an ability of creating their own luck. They are fearless in the sense of not confirming to the organizational norms and hierarchies; the restlessness is exemplified by their eagerness to take up new tasks without banking on their past achievements; and they create their own luck by being at the right place at the right time.
These Evangelists broadly have three roles to play:
Making people aware of the Imperative of Innovation
Equipping them with the Tools and Techniques of Systematic Creativity
Narrating Success Stories.
All of this results into cultivating a climate of innovation in the organization. Every organization needs these Evangelists who can infuse the vitality in terms of fresh perspectives, ability to take risks and even celebrate failure, as failure is an essential component of innovation. Now comes the question- are Innovation Evangelists appointed or do they emerge from the crowd? My experience says- they emerge from the crowd. Appointing someone with the title of an Innovation Evangelist won’t be farther from assigning someone as an Innovation Manager, and you may just watch innovation strangling as a result. For such evangelists to emerge from the crowd, the leaders have to ensure a conducive environment and of course an eye to spot the talent. How about the age? Once again, though there isn’t any age bar, but the experience says- the younger the better. Also as far as the education goes, typically people with a Management Education turn out to become more influential evangelist, for their holistic viewpoint and interpersonal skills. Now coming to the specifics of the assignments of an Innovation Evangelist, here’re a few of the interventions that have the potential of influencing the climate of innovation.
Idea Lounge:
Ideas to any organization is like the WBC count to a body. These White Blood Cells not only keep the body healthy but also come into action at the time of emergency, and make an organism self reliant. Similarly, an organization needs to have a perennial source of ideas, coming in from all around, such that the vitality never dries up. This Idea Lounge is maintained and mobilized by our Innovation Evangelist. It is not as much about creating a portal, instead it is to do with showing its value to people and encouraging them to open their mind and heart out.
Systematic Creativity Workshop:
It is been conclusively proven that creativity is as systematic as most other disciplines in any organization. It can be taught, learnt and replicated, as much as any other element of science. This notion about creativity is fairly counterintuitive and here again our Innovation Evangelist steps up. The Evangelist hones such skills and helps apply those in creating opportunities and solving problems. This requires a serious investment from oneself and the organization.
Story Book of Innovation:
People die but stories don’t. It is an imperative for every organization to capture and narrate emphatic stories of success, courage and (even) failure to all. The Story Book of Innovation is a repository of stories: technical as well as non-technical, breakthrough as well as incremental, narrated by the heroes of innovation. It forms a living testimony to organization’s ability to reinvent itself on several different fronts.
Innovation Bazaar:
These are the moments where great ideas see the light of the day through collective conscious. It is an opportunity for inventors and innovators to showcase their creations and allow cross-pollination. Happening in a Science Exhibition format, these events are quintessential in rejuvenating the innovation climate of a firm.
Bar Camp:
Great ideas are born at the intersection of disciplines. To solve a problem, often an insight may come from an entirely unrelated area. All you need is to allow such unforeseen connections to happen and be open to the outcomes. The Innovation Evangelist host such camps with people coming in from various runs of life, often unrelated to one’s industry. Each of these interventions depicted above are powerful enough to influence the course of an organization towards being innovative. Here the role of an Innovation Evangelist helps shape this migration.
My career has taught me one thing- The Charm of Personality is often more influential than The Power of Authority. I wish that the young breed of innovators and evangelists believe in the same and make their character strong enough to navigate thought the organizational gravity in cultivating a genuine climate of innovation, for Innovation Evangelism is not a title, it is a Way of Life!!!