The future fortunes of the company are held hostage by today’s fears of failure

3M uses a ‘financial renewal’ metric that creates leadership accountability for delivering the levels of innovation that will help the company show up healthy in the future: 30% of revenues must come from products that didn’t exist five years ago.

That creates a chain reaction of innovation across the organisation, both in terms of the boldness of product ideas that it generates, and the kind of leadership needed for them to emerge and thrive.

Takeaway: List the innovation behaviours that your future strategy depends upon. What would need to be true for those behaviours to show up? What must leaders value and reward to motivate those behaviours?

Innovation only thrives when leaders deliberately commit to it. There’s no black art; it is entirely practical and measurable. Start small and learn your way forward. It’s how most of today’s great innovators began.

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