Here is an excerpt from an article written by Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.
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You have an idea for a daring, innovative project that could have a significant impact on your business. However, you suspect that your idea will meet with internal resistance: The innovation would upend the status quo, and chances are good that other parts of the organization will try to stop it. What’s your next step?
The conventional answer is simple: Get a mandate from the top. As many innovation experts rightly point out, only the most incremental ideas pass through the corporate-approvals gantlet unscathed. The more unusual your idea, the greater the risk that it will fall victim to turf wars, myopic incentive systems, or simple resistance to change. For this reason, innovators are often counseled to go straight to the top, secure backing, and build a corporate sense of urgency around their ideas.
The “top first” strategy, however, carries its own risks. CEOs of large organizations are constantly barraged with proposals for new, untested projects, and typically, the ideas get a five-minute perusal followed by a “no.” And even if your idea does win support from the C-suite, early exposure is a double-edged sword: It buys you legitimacy and resources, but it also thrusts you squarely into the corporate spotlight—and that can be a dangerous place for young, unproven ideas. Our experience working with innovative managers has revealed an alternative approach: innovating under the radar.
Consider the story of pfizerWorks. Jordan Cohen, then a human resources manager in Pfizer’s New York office, created the productivity initiative to allow employees to outsource “grunt work” and other routine parts of their jobs, giving them more time to focus on important tasks and allowing Pfizer to make better use of its highly skilled (and highly paid) employees. PfizerWorks, launched in 2008, quickly became an acknowledged success story, and Cohen was featured in BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and other publications. In a 2011 internal survey, the users of pfizerWorks rated it as the company’s most popular service offering, even though they had to pay for it out of their own budgets.
But Cohen didn’t bring his idea to fruition by going straight to the top. To the contrary, he stayed under the radar for more than a year, developing the service, accumulating evidence, and gaining allies. When he finally pitched it to Pfizer’s top executives, he was able to show them much more than an idea: He presented existing users who were passionate about the project, outlined a proven business case, and pointed to the backing of several senior managers. Pfizer’s decision to support the project came quickly, and Cohen received not just a budget for it but a new job as the head of pfizerWorks.
Innovating under the radar carries its own set of challenges, to be sure, but going into stealth mode can often yield better results than trying to get the CEO on board from day one. In our experience, stealth innovation involves four critical challenges. First, you need to marshal allies who can help you operate off the grid and make sure that you don’t lose perspective as you do so. Second, you need to build proof of concept so that when you’re ready to make your case to the higher-ups, you have hard evidence to support you. Third, you must obtain access to funds and other resources to keep your project afloat. And finally, you need a good cover story so that you can work on the project without attracting unwanted attention or scrutiny. If you address these challenges effectively, you can sidestep corporate obstacles and give your idea the best possible chance for success.
Why Early Exposure Can Kill
The conventional overt approach to innovation is more risky than it may seem. Consider a company we’ll call RedTec Media, whose European division came up with an idea for a potentially game-changing consumer product aimed at the luxury market. Excited about the idea’s potential, the European team presented it to leaders at corporate headquarters. The response was much less enthusiastic than the team had expected. While the executives didn’t kill the idea outright, they questioned the project’s technical feasibility and expressed strong doubts about whether there was a market for it.
The European team members, recognizing that their enthusiasm was not contagious, set out to make a better case for the idea. So over the next few months, they built a working prototype and tested it with consumers, with great success. They also asked key retailers whether they thought the product would sell. The response was overwhelming; several of them asked, “Can I get this now?” Even better, the price the retailers suggested was higher than the team had hoped.
The team members made sure that their testing was rigorous and reliable, and carefully documented their findings. Consumers’ reactions, for instance, were not only recorded on paper but also filmed and compiled in a short video that demonstrated their support for the product.
But none of the new evidence seemed to change the minds of the top managers. After a long silence, the team received the news that headquarters had decided to kill the project. “To be fair, there were legitimate reasons to oppose the project,” one team member told us. “But we also got the feeling that the leadership made an early judgment call based on their gut feelings about the first presentation, and then pretty much stuck by that call irrespective of all the evidence we sent them subsequently.”
The phenomenon is not unusual. As research by the behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman and others has demonstrated, people suffer from what is called confirmation bias: Once you’ve made a decision, however uninformed, you tend to look for more evidence supporting it, and ignore or discredit evidence that points in other directions. This effect is exacerbated if the judgment call is made in public or in front of colleagues or a boss. That’s because in corporate life, as elsewhere, it’s often considered preferable to be wrong than to be a flip-flopper. Just look at any political campaign and see what happens to candidates who change their stance on an issue, no matter how legitimate the reasons. As an innovator, you often get only one shot at pitching an idea to people at the top—and their default reaction is frequently “no.” You don’t want to waste your shot too early in the process, before you’ve built sufficient evidence for your idea.
A premature judgment call is just one of the dangers that come with early exposure. Ideas can be held hostage in political power plays; they can be forced Procrustes-style to follow corporate procedures that prevent rapid iteration; they can be appropriated and distorted by other stakeholders with legitimate but differing goals; and perhaps most frequently, they can face crushing pressure for short-term results that either kills them or warps them beyond recognition. In The Little Black Book of Innovation, Scott Anthony shares Clayton Christensen’s concept of the “ticking clock,” a deadline for creating results that all innovators face. “You never know quite how fast the clock is ticking,” Anthony writes, “or when the alarm is set, but you can be darn sure that at some point, it will ring….If that moment comes and all you have is potential, you’d better start polishing your résumé.”
This is where stealth innovation comes into the picture. While aiming to deliver some quick wins is excellent advice, and if at all possible, you should follow it, the nature of your idea may be such that doing so is simply not possible. By starting your project in stealth mode, you can postpone the moment that the clock starts ticking for your idea. Let’s now look in detail at the four challenges of stealth innovation and how to overcome them.
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Paddy Miller is a professor at IESE Business School. Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg is a partner at the Innovation Architects. They are the authors of Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), from which this article is adapted.