Where good ideas slow down, and which frictions are actually doing a job.
I am going to share three tips on identifying and reducing innovation friction in your brand, but first let me explain how and why I use these terms, because innovation has been muddied in definition over the past decade or more.
For us, innovation is the ability to adapt to changes, big or small, in the environment we operate in. That is not restricted to the defensive sense people often mean when they talk about change, which is protecting yourself from disruption. A change in the environment is just as often an opportunity to lead the market. In other words, innovation capability is the ability to respond to opportunities and threats caused by a change in your surroundings.
The pace and breadth of that response is what we call the rate of change: how quickly things go from idea to embedded, and how many things can be happening at once. Organisations with a high rate of change can test a heap of ideas quickly, have a knack for narrowing to the ones that deliver the best outcomes, and keep experimenting as the thing evolves so it is as good as it can be by the time it rolls out. From the outside, these brands look like they can constantly adapt their products and services and introduce new things regularly. Starbucks, Amazon, Walmart and Target come to mind.
Innovation friction is the built-up grit in things like funding allocation, approval processes, team dynamics, culture, leadership alignment, performance measures and technology frameworks that slows the rate of change down. Before you worry, a build-up of innovation friction is nothing to be ashamed of. Think of it as the battle scars you have earned building the business you have now. Every brand has them, including the ones synonymous with innovation.
There are many types of innovation friction. In writing Retail Innovation Reframed we researched dozens of retail brands and innovation techniques and mapped them. After all those interviews and experiments, we found a core misconception about what makes the good innovators good. It is not a dark art for choosing shiny things or technology partners that everyone should copy. It is their ability in the process of innovation. It was not the "what" that made them good, it was the "how": how they align behind their purpose, how they use a formula to select ideas that deliver customer and business value, how they embrace new skills and team dynamics, how they build and test and refine and test again, and how they plan a transition to embed the thing as the new normal.
From those learnings, three tips.
We built a tool for this, but you can get a long way with a simple trick. Find some space where you can draw, and plot the life of a project in your business from the second the idea is spoken aloud to the moment it is fully embedded and the new normal (being used, not just "deployed"). Then get a mix of people from different parts of the business who deliver work for you, whether they sit in an innovation team or are simply expected to improve their day to day. Ask them to score the effort required at each step. Effort is a measure of time, energy and political capital: influence, negotiation, meetings. Five is super hard. Zero is no friction at all.
What you should end up with is a consistent set of hot spots. If you do not, get more people to do the exercise. If your whole process lights up, let's be optimistic and say you have a glorious amount of opportunity to unlock. Once you have the hot spots, be curious. Ask a load of questions about what is causing the friction and what would help most.
The best retail innovators make sure everyone knows their role in innovation and is given the task, sometimes even a KPI, of reducing friction within their own area of responsibility. Use the hot spot exercise as a starting point, but it should be every team's job to assess their own built-up friction and remove or reduce it. There is a lot of politics to play here, including the very human instinct to want to be important and play a role. It takes courage, leadership and a boatload of honesty. The story that fits is the rule created solely to stop the one per cent of bad things, which lands just as hard on the other ninety-nine. Be creative in finding a way to reduce friction without losing the reason the process exists, and celebrate the daylight out of it when someone manages it.
Friction also forms when a bunch of subjective and terrible ideas get through and prioritised, and people defending their own KPIs respond by adding checks and balances. If you have a system that filters ideas so only the best, tested hypotheses make it into the pipeline, you reduce the risk of friction forming in the first place. Stop the bad stuff early, and the rest of the process only ever sees good stuff and naturally spends less time checking it.
Our filter is the golden rule. Retail innovation is only sustainable when every idea passes three tests. It is aligned with your core purpose, why you exist, because consumers want to feel good about who they give their money to and employees want to feel good about the mission they go on every day. It delivers real customer value, with evidence collected rather than assumed. And it delivers real business value, financial or experiential, tested rather than loosely asserted in a business case.
Implement these and you will find project timeframes shrink, costs come down, outcomes go up, and customers and employees get a more consistent experience. Some of it might seem simple. Unfortunately it is uncommon for it to be applied, which is rather the point of the name.
The hot spot exercise in this piece is still the fastest way I know to see where a business's rate of change is being lost, and it is now the first thing we do in the Reset stage of ReFRAME. What I would add six years on is that the hot spots have a pattern. They cluster in two places: at the front, where nobody can say what problem the idea solves, and in the last stretch, where a pilot that worked meets the people who have to carry it. Those are not process problems, though they look like them. They are readiness problems, purpose and people, and no amount of streamlining the approval flow fixes them. The friction map still works. It just points to a different diagnosis than I gave it in 2020.
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