Some weeks you really are reminded of what it is you enjoy about what you do. Last week was such a week for me. There were two things that made me feel that way.
On Wednesday, one of our Fortune 500 clients sent their corporate jet to transport a few of the folks from our office to a meeting with their CEO, COO, and VP of Innovation. (Note to self: flying on a corporate jet is not as glamorous as it sounds.) It was a great meeting.
The CEO of this company understands the importance of a focused innovation strategy for his company. Like many companies, his organization is under relentless pressure. Growing foreign competition from emerging countries, the looming sunset of key intellectual property protections, aging products in need of reinvigoration are all on the top of his mind as issues. He sees innovation in products and technology as a strategic factor in his battle to avoid getting dragged down into commodity hell.
It was terrific to see another clear validation point of the need for corporations to employ structured and informed innovation best practices as a driver of sustainable corporate value. This CEO is making the investment in such systems and is demanding accountability and attainment of clear metrics of ROI for that investment. I look forward to helping this company implement their innovation vision as they make the transition from an Accidental Innovation organization to a High-Performance Innovation organization.
The only thing that gives me greater pleasure than helping others become innovation leaders is practicing innovation. That is the other activity that dominated last week and made it such a revitalizing week.
In my role as CTO at my company, I have the pleasure of being an in-the-weeds technologist. One of my teams is a world class researcher group. We routinely explore how to make possible things our clients can’t imagine they could ask for. This week six of our skunk-works projects reached that stage where we know enough about them that we are promoting them to fully supported engineering projects. These game changing projects have been years in the conceptualization and pre-prototyping phase. The excitement of seeing these projects achieve this status is tremendous.
Yes, last week was great. I was reminded of how much fun it is to live innovation. Of course, this is a new week, and more innovation is needed. That’s the way it is with innovation. It is a never ending story.
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