Internal Communications as a Key Innovation Enabler

  

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By Jeff Boehm

I had the opportunity to speak at the Open Innovation Summit in Chicago recently about the importance of internal marketing in building a successful innovation program. At first blush one might be tempted to question how internal marketing relates to innovation. Sure – we all know about innovations in external marketing (packaging, naming, pricing, promotion, etc.). But internal marketing? Why do you need to invest there? Well as presenter after presenter at this conference confirmed: if you don’t have good internal awareness and support for your innovation program, it will not succeed.

The allure of innovation is obvious: to compete in today’s global economy in just about any sector it is becoming a situation of “innovate or perish.” A recent Boston Consulting Group report found that 94% of senior business leaders listed innovation as one of their top priorities. But that report, and many others have gone on to cite many reasons why companies are not successful at innovation today. One of the key reasons – and where Invention Machine is helping hundreds of manufacturing organizations – is that innovation remains a largely ad-hoc process. Through the implementation of a strong innovation foundation companies canimprove their ability to innovate on a consistent, sustainable basis.

But, as I have seen time and again at Invention Machine, merely establishing that foundation is not sufficient. Like any other new initiative, simply creating the innovation field of dreams and hoping engineers and scientists will flock to it, isn’t enough. A typical response is to augment that with an executive mandate incenting, or dictating, participation. While having the infrastructure in place and solid management support are important ingredients, they are not enough.

With the increasing pressures in today’s economy, engineers and scientists are not exactly sitting around waiting for the next great program to get involved with. In fact, they are often skeptical of new programs, especially given the failure rates of many “next big things” and mandates introduced over the last decade. To make your innovation program successful – and get the engineers, scientists, researchers, marketing, business development, and the rest of your innovation workforce on board, you need to sell this new program to them. This is where internal marketing comes in.

With a strong internal communications program in place, you will begin to build a groundswell of awareness, support, and demand for this new innovation initiative. In a future post, I’ll outline the four key elements of a successful internal marketing program, but as I have seen at dozens of our customers across the globe, a strong internal communications program can be the make or break ingredient to innovation success.