How to Build the Innovation Brand

CIOs can better build IT's innovation brand by explicitly linking it to their customers' perceptions of innovation. You build your innovation brand not by doing things you think are more innovative but by doing those things your customers and colleagues find more innovative. How will you know this? Because they'll both tell you and show you. They'll effectively explain how e-mailed URLs and seat maps can become innovation springboards for IT.

The hard problems materialize when IT's internal and external clients can't answer the simple question. They don't know, don't care or simply take for granted what IT does for them. Even worse, they understand the question perfectly but genuinely believe that IT is not an innovation partner or supplier. What should CIOs do then?

The best answer is, "Take ownership". In the spirit of turning a bug into a feature, I've seen CIOs successfully exploit the total absence of their shop's innovation brand by personally going out to the business units to learn how they defined innovation. The CIOs, out of their own budgets, had a SWAT team of trusted lieutenants present IT-enabled innovation ideas to key business units, then ask them what seemed like valuable innovations to them. These CIOs were savvy enough to recognize that "supporting the business" was no longer enough; IT's role in "supporting the business's innovation agenda" also had to be explicit.

Bring IT Innovation to the Business

Of course, CIOs can also boost IT's innovation brand by successfully exporting their own innovations. At one Fortune 200 company, the CIO informally asked his people what they thought was the most innovative thing IT was doing. To a person, they declared that their extreme/agile programming effort was an innovation initiative they really liked. This CIO immediately had a couple of his lieutenants scout for XP project opportunities in business units that wanted a new, more agile way of working with IT. The methodology became a platform for collaborative innovation.

There is no way a CIO can be an innovation leader without a real grasp of how IT's innovation brand is perceived. More importantly, there is no way that IT can successfully become an innovation leader unless it learns how its internal and external customers define what's innovative. While there are many detailed, comprehensive and expensive ways to determine these things, simple questions sincerely asked offer a lot of bang for the buck.

Instead of asking: "Are we doing a good job for you?" or "Do you think you're getting good value for your time and money?" CIOs need to ask the business users a few simple questions about what IT does for them when they try to innovate. While perception surely isn't reality, it's where reality starts. It's where innovation begins too.

Michael Schrage is co-director of the MIT Media Lab's eMarkets Initiative. He can be reached at schrage@media.mit.edu