This webinar ran as part of Grandview’s Product Management View (PMV) webinar series. It is available on demand here.

Some say innovation is a process, others that process kill innovation. Few talk about the behavioral side of innovation. In this webinar, Mike Morrison explores how and when to engage people to leverage innovation as a competitive advantage for your organization.

Mike shares a quote from PricewaterhouseCoopers: "The most valuable organizations of the future will be rich in ideas, embody a culture where innovation is a core capability and value, and will embrace new and unusual ways of fostering innovation."

It is critical to make innovation a core capability. Most of the time, we approach innovation from a technology and process standpoint, but fail to address culture. Mike proposes three pillars of innovation: Building Individual Capacity; Building Organizational Capacity; and Building Team Capacity.

Looking at the individual first, what is their performance readiness? Are they physically, emotionally, mentally, and competency-wise able to innovate and drive change? When we have that in our individuals, do we then harness that in teams? Do we enable teams to work well together? When we have a team innovating, is that capacity carried over to the organization? We have to wonder just how much innovation is stifled by the culture of an organization, as opposed to process and technology.

To build innovation as a core capability, Mike discusses the items above and presents some models and methods to develop a culture with innovation capacity.

As members of a product management team, we need to ask ourselves, do we have everything in place that supports collaboration, asset sharing, and training at the individual, team, and organizational level. Yes, technology and process is part of this endeavor, but Mike indicates that cultural design and development is critical.

A transition from an ad-hoc to formal culture needs to take place – one that grows the individual, team, and organization's innovative capacity using specifically-designed activities supported with tightly-integrated process and technology.

If you're wondering how you can prevent your process and technology investments from becoming yesterday’s fad, address the cultural issues. This webinar will get you on the right track. This is critical in product management, where new practices are being developed somewhere in the innovation process every month. For a continuous improvement capability, this formalized culture is critical.