Boards are under more and more pressure these days to steer their companies through turbulent times. Gaining more insight into the broad picture and the methods for achieving it can be a driving, steadying, and propelling force.
There are numerous approaches to teach your board about putting the company in a position for difficult times. Here are five key areas of innovation and thought leadership to concentrate on.
- Innovation is crucial regardless of economic cycles or company performance
The board may search for further measures to increase profit margins and overall tighten the belt, particularly during challenging times. While corporate departments such as innovation may be easy targets and considered “overhead” for cost-cutting, this can be a severe mistake since innovation is a strategic investment in the future of the organization. It can also be an integral element of the solution, not the problem, by helping expand revenues and improve profit margins with continual digital enablement and automation. Reducing innovation can also negatively impact employee happiness because many workers are drawn to companies because of their inventive cultures.
Include innovation updates regularly, such as at every other board meeting, to help your board become informed about these topics beforehand. You can also include a comprehensive scorecard or dashboard that outlines innovation’s quarterly contribution to cost savings, revenue growth, and other important areas, like supporting the development of an innovative culture within the company.
Regardless of the state of the economy or the performance of the business, innovation must be viewed as essential. In difficult times, it is necessary to innovate even more actively to change the status quo or even better it.
- Conscious leadership can yield measurable returns
It’s common knowledge that thought leadership may help brands command a larger premium in the market in the professional services and technology sectors. According to the Thinkers360 B2B Thought Leadership Outlook Survey, nearly 50% of participants said that thought leadership increased their brand premium by more than 75%.
Because it’s a less frequent practice, boards at smaller firms or in other industries could doubt the ROI and value of thought leadership. Of course, they are aware of marketing, but thought leadership is a lesser-known concept that may be met with suspicion. To combat this, be sure to educate your board on the strategic significance of thought leadership to your brand and how it’s a vital element of your marketing plan.
Make careful to directly link thought leadership to the sales funnel in addition to discussing and sharing non-financial KPIs like marketing funnel data. This can be achieved by linking products, such as downloads of marquee whitepapers, to particular customers and prospects. This will enable you to gauge the impact of your thought leadership content on potential income prospects and audiences of all stripes. You can learn a lot from this data, including how many of your most important clients and prospects are reading your thought leadership articles and when it’s best to publish them with important new agreements.
- Long-term strategic initiatives centered on innovation and thought leadership
The most successful firms have a programmatic approach to managing innovation and thought leadership, which helps them create organizational competency over time in both disciplines. While its structure is less crucial because it can be decentralized, centralized, or hybrid, it is imperative to have a well-defined program with at least a mission, goal, strategy, and operating plan. For instance, the US Navy created a Hollywood-produced video that outlined its vision for naval information warfare in 2030 and served as its compass, securing millions of dollars in funding for artificial intelligence.
It’s also crucial to consider the areas of interest and the kinds of innovation and thought leadership you pursue. Have a defined list of innovation enablers, such as data and analytics, automation, adaptability, cloud, digital twins, and AI, in addition to an internal and client-facing focus. However, be flexible and open to adding more as needed. The subjects you intend to cover and your editorial calendar for thought leadership are examples of this. Additionally, pay attention to fresh ideas in thought leadership that can surprise you and help your clients.
Moreover, inform the board of your multi-year innovation journey, as well as your goals and objectives. To establish success and demonstrate your worth early on, you’ll probably concentrate on tactical, fast wins. Later on, though, you’ll probably concentrate on more strategic, disruptive initiatives. By doing this, you can change the ratio of tactical to strategic innovation in your innovation focus, for example, from 80/20 to 60/40, and so on. Engaging in these discussions with the board is an excellent way to start your multi-year journey.
- Innovation is similar to governance and portfolio strategy
The board can recognize that innovation can be focused on various areas, including the company’s internal work processes, client-facing products and services, business models, and much more.
Establish strategic objectives, such as a specific percentage of cost reduction through hyper-automation, a rise in revenue per FTE, and a set amount of revenue growth through new business models.
You’ll get a lot more support and interest if you make it directly related to the issues that the board is interested in. Display the organization’s innovation efforts in terms of services and products, as well as data such as refresh rates that are under three years old. Additionally, demonstrate how those products and services are being enhanced by AI and analytics or how they are transitioning from one-time purchases to ongoing income streams. Portfolio innovation is necessary for all of this, and it ought to be a crucial component of portfolio strategy and governance.
- Customers demand creativity and intellectual leadership without asking for it
One popular criticism of innovation and thought leadership is that it is pointless to concentrate on or make investments in it if customers aren’t requesting it. Whether or not they specifically request it, they anticipate it from their service providers. You may see requests for proposals where innovation is specifically included and where it isn’t. In any scenario, it’s critical to know what kind of innovation your clients are seeking.
This can be divided into two categories: innovation that falls within the purview of the job and innovation that goes beyond. They either want to see innovation in the way you provide your daily services using people, procedures, and technology, or they want to see innovation in the way you support them as they continuously innovate within their own organizations and gradually introduce new innovations. This is particularly true for long-term engagements or contracts, where you will be required to stay up to date on emerging developments like artificial intelligence (AI) as a strategic partner and either incorporate them into your offerings or inform your client of the possibilities.
Customers want to know that your business is not just an authority in its field but also that it is forward-thinking and constantly devising innovative methods to address issues more quickly. This is known as thought leadership. You may precisely identify the common demands and interests of your customers by segmenting and classifying their free-form responses to your surveys regarding innovation and what they’d like to see.
Teaching your board about thought leadership and innovation highlights its strategic nature and areas of contribution and demonstrates the return on investment it can generate for the company, independent of the state of the economy. It will all depend on how you define, position, and report it.
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