The client wanted our fresh eyes into the organization. They understood that we know what really matters when it comes to innovation. We helped with benchmarking, explaining what needed to be in place, and made clear what success looks like.

1. Spot the gaps: growth ambition vs innovation capability (ambition capability gap)

As a new innovation leader you first need to identify whether your company has an innovation ambition capability gap. What is the gap between the company's growth ambitions and its ability to get there. The ambitions should be derived from the strategy in terms of growth objectives and types of innovation. You need to ask how much growth will come from organic sources, from acquisitions, from investments, or from innovation.

Organic growth is something that happens fairly automatically. Acquisitions and investments is the more traditional approach to growth but of course there is a limit on how much you can acquire. Lastly, is growth through innovation. And in our work, we rarely see companies make this very explicit and is acted upon in a way that meets their ambitions.

With my colleague Tendayi Viki, we came up with a framework on how a company should assess its innovation maturity. This will give you a strong understanding of the company's growth and innovation ambition and capability gaps. There are three things you need to assess to understand a company's innovation maturity:

• You start by analyzing how much growth has been generated by innovation so far. In other words, is there an innovation portfolio and has it delivered?
• Then you dissect the culture. Ask what blocks innovation today and what enables it?
• Finally, you study all the company's current and past innovation programs and look at the results.

2. Identify innovation catalysts

One of the most important and most underestimated roles of the innovation leader is that of the ambassador. Companies develop incredibly strong antibodies against anything that looks differently than the core business. Therefore, the job of the innovation leader is to create alliances and build bridges from day one with the people who can catalyze innovation within the organization.

Your Innovation Maturity Assessment will provide you with the key blockers and key enablers in the company. Use that to build alliances and spark change. Address stakeholders who may be blockers with a charm offensive and the backing of your CEO or leadership. Use stakeholders who are enablers to launch first projects and create quick wins. Identify the true innovation catalysts in your company.

There are two areas that are crucial in terms of alliance building. Identify who you bring onto the growth board that resides over innovation portfolio investment decisions. Ask how you will convince key business functions to play ball and support innovation projects. Finally, identify great innovation projects that are stuck and see how you can help them break through. Teams that are exploring new ideas will need support from marketing, legal, and other areas depending on industry and project. You can act as the bridge to enable their work. These type of projects are your best opportunities for quick wins!

3. Craft your roadmap

Based on everything you've learned in your assessment, you can start outlining your innovation objectives and how you will get there. 100 days are certainly not enough time to implement big projects, but it is enough time for you to present your innovation plan for the next year. What are the  programs you want to implement? Also, just as important, which are the zombie projects that should be eliminated. These projects that go nowhere suck up a lot of resources that you need for more promising ones. From our experience, most companies are really bad at killing zombie projects despite the evidence they are unlikely to deliver on promises.

In your plan you should try to make three main areas explicit:

• Growth objectives for your Innovation Portfolio: What growth or impact will you deliver after a year, two years and beyond? The right mix of projects for your innovation portfolio will really depend on your growth ambitions and the kind of Return on Investment (ROI) from innovation you are looking for. If it is more conservative you can opt for more quick wins from efficiency innovation. If more ambitious, aim to build a portfolio of projects focusing on new value propositions and business models. It should not be either or, rather, a mixed portfolio of all three types of innovation: efficiency, sustaining and transformative

• Innovation programs: Outline which innovation programs you intend to invest in to achieve the portfolio and culture results outlined above. This may include leadership training, intrapreneurship programs, innovation metrics implementation, or any other innovation vehicle imaginable. Most important is to highlight how they will function as an integrated mix to achieve innovation strategy, deliver results and shift corporate culture. This is also a point to be bold and propose projects to eliminate. Projects that are just not going anywhere. Eliminating them will also free up resources to allow you to implement programs that will have real impact on the organization.
• Innovation culture & governance objectives: How do you aim to transform the company's innovation culture and adapt its governance? What kind of process do you intend to put in place to make innovation systematic, repeatable, and scalable. This includes topics like creating a growth board or investment committee and setting up evidence-based investment criteria.

To learn more, join our webinar on the May 30, 2024 on the same topic: "Your first 100 days on the innovation job". Tendayi Viki and myself will go deeper into the topic and provide some useful case studies to guide your work. Come along with any questions you may have. We would love to hear from you.