We all need to recognize the type of innovative leadership personality within our organization, the ones we are working for, as this might help you manage the innovation work a whole lot better and attract the resources you need.

So can you recognize the traits of your innovation leader?

Are they front-end or back-end innovation leaders? Here’s how you can begin to spot the difference.

The thinking about this came from this book.

A book recently published “Innovation Governance- how top management organizes and mobilizes for innovation”, written by Jean-Philippe Deschamps and Beebe Nelson is one I can totally recommend it as it is so rich in thinking around managing innovation.

The author’s view argues that organizations are traditionally tribal and often each group possesses its own rules, and its own judgement of what is important and this ‘creates’ the absolute need to have a mechanism or strong personalities that can ‘cut’ across these potential barriers.

One suggestion coming from this book is recognizing your innovation leaders

According to the authors of “Innovation Governance”, you need the right combination of front-end and back-end leaders, since the two types are complementary. They are able to lead and manage these tribes.

The best way to identify these two types of leaders is often their functional orientation, possible background disciplines and their general management interest and attitudes.

A good example of this ‘divide’ is between Steve Jobs and Tim Cook of Apple, as highly visible and well cited in personality, backgrounds and interests, in what we read. As described well within the book this difference is best illustrated by this Apple leadership comparison.

The front-end leader
Steve Jobs was clearly a front-end leader. He constantly sought out more radical creativity in design and end product results.

• He had a real passion for new ideas, exploring and combining different thinking and designs, and searching for solutions to customers’ un-articulated needs to improve their product experience.
• He was constantly questioning the status quo and challenging (extremely hard) and confronting the team around him with constant how, what if, what else and why not type of questions.
• He had a more entrepreneurial flair and more of a venture capital mentality regarding returns and risks; he kept focusing on ‘big win’ promises, instinct often drove him.
• He had this belief to constantly experiment, to open up new paths and different thinking and he looked to accept risk and tolerate failure by moving through the ‘dwelling stage’ into the ‘learning from’ set of insights.
• He encouraged individuals to have a degree of freedom, he challenged them constantly, and he expected a climate of mental adventure and excitement to attract others into the organization but these were made up of a diversity of backgrounds. Yet he was, by all accounts a control freak. Nothing passed without his agreement
• His own background was rich in diversity and inquiry and he draw often from this and he portrayed himself as a rebel
• He held onto his vision, yet was prepared to adjust the pathway towards one that responded to meet breaking opportunities.
• Finally, his tolerance levels were often ‘explosive’ but he generated a level of commitment to producing some of the stands out products of recent years.

The back-end innovation leader
It is often questioned why Tim Cook took over when Steve Jobs died. He is seemingly the archetypal back-end guy.

He was credited with managing the Apple supply chain, manufacturing and logistics, thus freeing up Jobs to focus on his front end pursuits. Tim Cook comes with more of an operational discipline.

• He focuses on getting products to market flawlessly in cost-effective ways, mastering all the complexity of putting in place the operational foundations necessary to go from concept to launch and roll-out.
• He has an insistence on achieving higher planning quality and expects the process discipline and standardization to make innovation replicable.
• He understands the demand for speed to market through a high level of cross-functional integration and a ‘first-time right’ philosophy in implementation.
• Would have without doubt flexibility in execution decisions, based on detailed operational knowledge and pragmatic risk management.
• That ability to motivate staff for product battles and promotion of the ‘launch and learn’ approach, leads to adapting quickly to improvements, re-launch cycles and even recalls.
• Tim seems to ‘think’ strategically, considers the investment community, amassing cash and systematically picking off areas that maintain Apple’s present higher-end approach.
• He seems to continue to encourage higher value incremental steps, holding on to accepted Apple philosophies and perhaps struggles to ‘go’ for the bold new breakthroughs.
• Tim strikes me as more ‘grounded’, providing for greater stability and managing a maturing organization.

Both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have strong leadership skills, they both have ‘got’ innovation but their approaches and acceptance levels would have been coming from their different approaches, personalities and backgrounds. They both got detail.

Strong leaders with distinct personalities need understanding. Otherwise, you are often forced back to the ‘drawing board’ for deeper reasons than you initially consider. Consider the personality and what ‘ makes up’ their set of experiences and risk profiles to help ‘advance’ your innovative thinking

Balancing the respective innovation clout is always needed.

If you have a front-end leader at the helm of your innovation activities then you need to find the balance of who manages the disciplined operational side, then if you have a back-end leader, who will defend an aggressive front-end agenda?

The appointing of any innovation leader has significant implications, sometimes huge.

This ‘style’ can determine what generates innovation and can determine the passion, commitment and emphasis point that your organization’s innovation will possibly give preference to, and then provide those necessary resources you are needing.

It is well worth understanding where your innovation leader’s personality, background and functional orientation might lie. It might make your task a little easier to attract the funds and resources you need. So many of our innovation concepts die within the organization, often sadly, as they lack sponsorship appeal and simply do not get them excited.

So by appealing to the basic instincts of their personality traits you can perhaps ‘hook them’ into your innovation concept. Once you have their attention you can then ‘open it up’ for why it makes sense to explore further for taking it out into the big wide world.

The post Recognizing your type of innovation leader first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I often have a habit of opening up a file on a subject when I feel it needs further exploring and jobs-to-be-done has become one of these. It is the convergence of many experts repeating sometimes their personal mantras has finally given me a growing realisation on how important this understanding of satisfying these jobs-to-be-done becomes too successful innovation.

Now this ‘light bulb’ moment of mine may not come as such a great surprise to some of you selected few but I’d argue it might be worth reflecting upon by taking a fresh look at this ‘idea’ of jobs-to-be-done a little deeper in your thinking also. There are many who tell you we should.

The power of many innovation thinkers
Firstly why is it that many of those renowned exponents of innovation are all beating the same drum?

There is Tony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn in countless articles and in his book “What Customers Want” talking about “Outcome-Driven Innovation” that really has mastered the methodology of addressing unmet customer needs.

Recently Lance Bettencourt, a colleague of Tony’s , has delved even deeper into customer needs in his book “Service Innovation” arguing we must shift our focus away from the solution and back to the customer and stop taking those often educated guesses into a clear model to guide us to help people solve problems.

Clayton Christensen talking about customers buy products and services, to help get jobs done in his book ‘The Innovator’s Solution”. Christensen went even further into this with in many articles and subsequent books as he expanded on his “Disruptive innovation theory”, including references in the one “Seeing What’s Next” with Scott Anthony and Erik Roth.

Scott Anthony then picked up on this even further when he returned to this jobs-to-be-done in “The Innovator’s Guide to Growth” with Mark Johnson, Joseph Sinfield and Elizabeth Altman. Also Scott brings this out again in his “The Silver Lining”- an innovation playbook for uncertain times”.

You also see further reference in articles entitled “Finding the right job for your product” in MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2007 by Christensen, Scott Anthony, Gerald Berstell & Denise Nitterhouse . There are so many references to this subject you must wonder why it is not more ‘top of mind’ in all that we do in innovation?

Their ‘collective wisdom’ is focused on the job trying to be done.

All focus upon specific techniques, methodologies,  processes to understand the customer and what they are trying to get done, that is a present day potentially  unmet need –something being missed by a product or service in any space applied to business-to-business or business-to-consumers. Some talk of designing a “jobs tree” others a “universal job map”.

A key takeaway is placing unmet needs, jobs-to-be-done BEFORE simply idea generation. Open-ended idea generation gives you an abundance of ideas but if you don’t really understand the customer needs and don’t have a clear standard that defines just what the structure, content or format of a valid customer statement need then all your efforts will potentially not lead to that more predictable innovation expected from all the innovation activity.

In Tony Ulwicks clear view “it is the job the customer is trying to get done will offer the stable, long-term focal point around which value creation should be centred”

He calls these the ‘desired outcomes’ customers want and to achieve this point they ‘hire’ products and services to do the job. It is how we see the world in innovative opportunity that will lead to better innovation and this collective insight argues this well.

So ‘jobs-to-be-done’ is a fundamental building block to presenting possible business opportunity as customers want to buy solutions. An often quoted comment from Professor Theodore Levitt “people don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill- they want a quarter-inch hole”. We need to learn the difference through closer observation and clarity of our thinking perhaps?

Recently we are going one step further- Jobs-to-be-done for Business Model Innovation

Mark Johnson in his recent book “Seizing the White Space– Business Model Innovation for Growth & Renewal” returns to jobs-to-be-done as essential for future Business Models.

They form the customer value proposition and he suggests three important metrics come from this approach. 1. How important the job-to-be-done is to customers. 2. How satisfied customers are with the current solutions and 3. How well the new offering gets the job done, relative to the other options.

The more important the job, the better the match between the job and the (final) offering will generate a potential new value proposition for Business model innovation- discovering unsatisfied jobs-to-be-done that might take you beyond the existing offerings in the market into a new terrain.

He argues you must first develop this ‘eye’ for discovering the most-promising opportunities, his ‘white space within’ so as to alter the basis of competition.

Needs-based is different

I think it is important to clarify something here. This jobs-to-be-done is not needs-based analysis. You must stop asking “what do you need?” and start asking “What are you trying to get done?” In Mark’s view and all the others before him “this will set you down the road to the jobs-based approach”. Reduce asking “what is desired?” you need to certainly delve a little deeper it seems.

Equally when you get into this unfilled jobs-to-be-done you have not just the functional aspects but you can explore the social and emotional aspects that all make up the experience to accomplish something.

Service approaches need to think more about the social and emotional parts; again you can gain a greater insight into this from Lance Bettencourt’s book “Service Innovation” to grasp the real differences that could make a product, service or new business model truly innovative.

Adding even a further voice to this jobs view is Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur

Additionally Alex and Yves are lending their innovation weight to the value of jobs-to-be-done and often refers to this in focusing here in the application of their book “Business Model Generation” aim- a book for visionaries, game changers striving to defy outmoded business models to design tomorrow’s enterprise”.

To describe the rationale of how and organization creates, delivers and captures value it has to go back to the job-to-be-overcome. His suggests value proposition needs to seek to solve customer problems and satisfy customer needs (and unmet ones especially) with a newly selected bundle of products, services, concepts etc.

It can be an aggregation of existing combined in new ways or a new, sometimes disruptive offer.

Jobs-to-be-done offers a clear way to innovate

So whatever we do, we need to understand the unfilled job that needs satisfying, no matter if it is a product, service or business model. It comes from a distinct mix that could be quantitative or qualitative but it must contribute to new customer value creation.

This could be in the form of newness (entirely new set of unmet needs), performance, customization, design, reduction on the existing offer (cost, price, risk, and complexity), giving accessibility, convenience and improved usability.

When thinking ‘collides’ we do need to understand it far deeper.

I’ve tried to step into this specific jobs-to-be-done intersection of thinking so you can see how such diverse innovation thinkers can converge too finally given me a growing realisation on how important this understanding need of satisfying these jobs-to-be-done becomes so important for successful innovation.

It requires plenty of backtracking, researching and reading to fill in the gaps but if you recognise “Outcome-Driven Innovation”, “Disruptive Innovation theory”, the assorted guides to growth and wants, “Service Innovation”, “the Silver Lining” along with “Seizing the White Space” and “Business Model Generation” you realize this is a powerful point of convergence we cannot relegate or delegate, we need to fully understand it totally to make it connect in most of what we do in innovation discovery.

One final caution though is from Scott Anthony in his book ‘The Silver Lining”, “really nailing the job-to-be-done is not an easy task. It typically requires blending together multiple market-research techniques and acting like an investigative reporter or detective piecing together multiple clues”.

Who said successful innovation was easy anyway? It is certainly my ‘job-to-be done need’ in exploring the DNA of innovation.

The post Grounding innovation through convergence and intersections first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.