If you haven’t been to the IMPACT conference, mark it on your calendar for next year. In October, Wellspring attended InnoLead’s marquee gathering in Boston, and it was an absolute pleasure. Where else can you chat with the co-founder of robot company Boston Dynamics, the President of the Recording Academy (aka, the Grammys), the former President of Walt Disney Imagineering, the Chief Product Officer at Target, and the Chief Customer Officer of United Airlines – all in one place?
It's been several weeks since then, enough time for our heads to stop buzzing from the excitement. Now that the buzz has faded, we’re left with a takeaway that is more sobering than exciting – a looming sense of change that’s hard to shake.
Corporate innovation is at a crossroads. And it’s high time we started talking about it.
For a decade or more, the driving force of corporate innovation centered on the twin engines of startups and digital transformation. From in-house venture hubs to digital labs and accelerators, there has been a surge of corporate investment in new-wave innovation schemes. At this year’s conference, these trends were on display in full force.
For example: this year at IMPACT, AI was on everyone’s mind – and rightly so. And in one sense, the new focus on AI feels like a continuation of what we’ve all come to expect. AI is a digital technology. It is poised to transform the workplace. And startup activity has been a primary driving force. But AI’s effect on the economy also transcends what we’ve come to expect from the status quo. It’s bigger and broader than “just another fintech application”. It is creating ripples across society, well beyond the corporate world.
Increasingly, it feels like we are in a “new normal”. The extreme pain of COVID’s supply chain disruptions may have ebbed. But across manufacturing industries, background sourcing issues refuse to go away. Whether you make candy bars or airplanes, you’re likely still struggling to balance the cost and availability of your materials or components against price sensitivity, speed to market, and product performance. And that’s before we consider the costs of achieving sustainability – given the very public carbon-neutrality commitments that many large companies have already made.
Geopolitically, the world has become a very different place, just in the past few years. The semiconductor industry is changing fundamentally, and not just (or even primarily) because of AI’s effect. The emerging grand game between the US and China is likely to reset how companies in a wide array of sectors think about “value creation”. For many companies, success increasingly means delivering shareholder returns AND national competitiveness.
As the world turns, it’s hard to imagine that the “innovation” profession (if that’s even what we should be calling it?) will come out looking the same. Ever before we began to exit the post-Cold War order, there were already looming questions about how the Innovation department(s) create value. If the executive team decides to add more salespeople, or to increase the advertising budget, they can model the impact on growth and profitability. But what if they redouble their innovation investments? How many companies can predict the business returns with confidence? Small wonder that so many innovation teams end up supporting top-down efforts designed to improve operational performance (e.g. digital transformation). By comparison, direct bets on “pure innovation” lead to a backdrop of executive unease.
What will this ultimately mean for corporate innovators? For now, we’ll say this: it’s a good time to get your house in order. Don’t expect to sleepwalk into the same innovation activities you’ve been doing for years. And don’t expect that pivoting from one “strategic priority” to the next, at the whim of quarterly business needs, will be good enough.
Instead, carve out time to think broadly about how the business expectations of innovation are likely to evolve. What will “competitiveness” look like in your industry? What kind of value will you need to drive for the company? What role will innovation need to play? And how will you equip your team to deliver strategic leverage and demonstrate its impact on the business?
We don’t expect these issues to go away, so think of this as the beginning of Wellspring’s content and advice. Starting in early 2025, we’ll dive headlong into the mid- and long-term implications of these trends…and how the modern innovation function needs to evolve.
Is your innovation house in order?
Wellspring’s Accolade empowers innovation leaders with structured tools for planning and tracking projects, ensuring alignment with strategic goals and delivering clear, measurable ROI.
Schedule your demo of Accolade now and start preparing your team for the future of innovation.
Learn more about the Impact Conference at innovationleader.com/impact
