A Centre of Excellence for Innovation.
They shouldn't exist. Here's why:
One of the main topics I speak and consult on is: helping companies and brands be more creative and innovative. It seems to be the hot topic of the year, and most want to know how Amazon was always so innovative.
Amazon does not have a CoE for Innovation/Creativity.
And generally speaking, I am against one core team whose focus is innovation. However, these teams do exist, and they can do very well. A classic example is a creative or strategy (media/planning, etc.) team inside an advertising agency. These teams are constructed purely to build creative campaigns for clients, and their inputs in the form of creative briefs are somewhat defined (most of the time). A user experience team (or even a future experience team), is similar.
What is an Innovation CoE?
“To demonstrate how bad Innovation really is, and how people don’t understand Innovation and Creativity, do a Google search for an image on innovation - it is hard to find a decent image without a lightbulb.”
An Innovation Centre of Excellence is a singular BU that spans and has tentacles throughout an organization. My global experience across a variety of industries indicates that most give lip service to innovation and lack the critical elements required to have an Innovation Centre of Excellence.
More importantly, they lack focus. And they are tasked to reach across business units, understand their problems, and make a plan (a mighty big ask).
(Enough has been written about how to build a CoE - if you need one). You may see the team doing presentations and hosting talks on innovation, yet they don't know why they are doing it, don't have the metrics to prove it works, or have the culture and organizational efforts to sustain the program.
Two Core Goals & Diversity
I have built Innovation and Creative CoE's in Tech and CPG brands (and I have delivered keynote speeches on Innovation and Creativity to the same companies countless times); and when I build CoEs, I always start with two core goals:
How do we innovate on behalf of the customer, not the brand, product, or service?
The goal of a CoE is to infuse innovation into the company, and not do the innovation themselves. Therefore there must be a timeline and a working backward plan set for the CoE to be disbanded.
Innovation and creativity thrive on diversity. Diversity of experiences, thinking, talent and life. It’s important that to understand your customer, and to understand your customer, you need diversity in people. One CoE team will struggle with diversity purely based upon the size, headcount and budget of the team.
The Desired Customer Experience
It's 2021. Everything must be about building the right Customer Experience - and this is a part of my job I love the most.
Since its inception, most of Amazon's products, services, and initiatives have had one thing in common. They have all aligned to a mechanism called Working Backward - - meaning, start with the final and ideal customer experience, and work backward from that point.
In the past, I have written about the Working Backward documentation. (You can find that here.)
Innovation is at the core of Amazon
Higher up on this page, I mentioned that Amazon does not have a CoE for Creativity and Innovation. That's because when you're constantly looking and building the Desired Customer Experience, you're naturally innovating - every person, every department, and every team has the power to invent at Amazon.
One of my favorite Jeff quotes is:
If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.
The End
The World Economic Forum says Creativity is at the heart of every company's future. To grow, you must change. Do I believe in everything that Amazon does? No. However, when I started, the share price was about $300, and when I left, it was well over $3000; so they must be doing something right.
And one final Jeff quote:
"I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate."