Changing it up: reviving innovation in the enterprise

In any business, innovation is necessary for long-term survival. At one time, the lifespan of a business was measured at around 40 years; today it has fallen to less than two decades. Rapid change demands innovation keeps pace – but many struggle to sustain it. Jeff Bezos has predicted the demise of Amazon more than once and emphasises the need for a "Day 1 mentality" based on the sense that, however dominant his company is, it isn’t too big to fail. 

Lockdown demonstrated that it is possible to innovate swiftly when there is little choice. Those businesses that found it difficult to pivot struggled badly and, given the acceleration of digital change, more will follow unless they continue to learn the lessons and nurture the art. 

“The need for innovation has always been there, but Covid forced companies to innovate faster by necessity,” says Chris Pacione, director, CEO and co-founder of LUMA Institute, a company that prepares people for the future of work, and that has created a system of human-centred design methods to help teams innovate. “Innovation thrives on constraints, but now things have settled down, companies are asking how can they retain that innovation magic without the pace and burnout that came with that pressure?”

There are any number of reasons why businesses struggle to innovate, not least the daily demands of running operations, motivating staff, controlling costs, satisfying customers and posting profits. Innovation requires focus, funding and, above all, a strategy that places it at the heart of everything a business does. 

“The vast majority of business leaders recognise that we're in a fast-moving world with technology driving change,” says Jonathan Wyatt, Managing Director and European Leader at global management consultancy Protiviti. “They recognise the need to innovate – but it's easy in a lot of organisations to become risk-averse and maintain the status quo, particularly if your business is successful.”

Innovation is elusive. Ideas may even come easily yet be difficult to iterate, or a struggle to execute because of internal politics. Often it is not about headline products or services but incremental gains, and only rarely does it emanate from a genius mind – a Steve Jobs or an Elon Musk. One solution is to identify innovation as a process, rather than the result of inspiration, so it can permeate through a business and be repeated. 

Given the complexity, it is little wonder that organisations turn to consultancies, placing the onus on them. But who teaches the teachers? Protiviti has spent nearly two decades bringing expertise and insight to organisations and has served over a third of Fortune Global 500 businesses. It is expected to be at the top of its game every time it’s brought into a consulting role, but that doesn’t happen by accident. Rather, in order to offer truly insightful support, it puts innovation at the core of its own business. 

Two years ago, Protiviti's directors turned to the LUMA Institute to teach its human-centred design principles and its system of methods to staff. LUMA’s approach to innovation is to equip people with a fundamental set of skills and a modular set of tools to demystify the feeling that innovation requires some sort of alchemy. “What we've done, in a sense, is deconstruct the act of innovation into the more fundamental principles of looking, understanding and making,” says Pacione. “The methods we teach, which are organised by way of these principles, allow people to adapt to the many kinds of situations they can find themselves in.”

A select group of 500 senior Protiviti staff was put through LUMA’s full 90-day programme, while the bulk of the company’s remaining 7,000 global employees are being taught the fundamentals of the system through workshops. “As consultants, we know that the whole point of bringing an outside organisation in is to introduce an external perspective with fresh ideas,” says Wyatt. “We're still learning, like everyone else, and what our innovation training programmes have really enabled us to do is to give our people the confidence and tools that they need to foster their creative sides, and to unlock ideas – whether they consider themselves creative or not.”

Building on this culture of innovation, Protiviti has set up three incubator "INNs" at key offices in London, New York and Chicago, precisely to promote innovation. Diverse teams are given the chance to explore internal and external problems, and clients are invited in for workshops and events and allowed to work in partnership to solve their innovation puzzles, away from the daily grind. 

“Every client has a different problem, and the interesting bit of the innovation process is identifying the problem – because it’s not always obvious,” says Wyatt. “Once you isolate it you can begin to solve it. We help organisations to do that, and LUMA’s techniques are very effective ways of doing it, but you still have to implement them and empower the organisation to address the problem." 

Wyatt believes one of the consistently best things that Protiviti does is getting leadership teams engaged, focused and thinking creatively. “But the greatest value is where we get them to converge and align behind one or two ideas, having gone through the technical processes we follow," he says.

The attraction of LUMA’s system of methods is that it is agnostic and can be applied to any sector from financial services to healthcare. In fact, Protiviti’s London office used them to work with Guy’s and St Thomas' Hospital at the start of the pandemic, to solve the issue of patients being unable to receive visits by providing staff with tablets to hand round. It was a simple solution, but it still needed implementing, and Protiviti was able to make sure it happened by turning to its ecosystem for support. Above all, it demonstrated that innovation is a collaborative, systemic process and that its value can be measured in more ways than one.