Want to innovate? Here’s why a diverse ecosystem is essential
Innovation is all about taking existing ideas and knitting them together in a new context for a completely different purpose. It’s something that all businesses should strive to do, in order to stay competitive. Therefore, if you are just incrementally improving your product or developing a new radical discontinuous innovation, bringing in different types of expertise is essential.
The bottom line is that you can't optimally innovate without diversity. If you’re truly looking to make an impact, you have to start by being properly inclusive.
I love using the pub quiz analogy to illustrate this point. Who would be on your ideal team to win a pub quiz? Would it be lots of people that think the same way as you and have had the same experiences? Or would you choose a variety of people who know things that you don't know and have different interests?
The second team would undoubtedly be able to answer a wider range of questions, and solve a lot more problems, and the same goes for innovation. If you want to get the best ideas and iterate on them effectively, you’ll be much better placed with a more diverse team.
Hand curate your early adopters
So, how do you get diversity of thinking for the greater good of your business?
No matter how technical your project is, remember that your mission is not just about techies talking about platforms. When you roll out your project, its success is about the outcomes that you achieve for all of your stakeholders.
Innovation involves getting buy-in from a number of third parties, because you're using bits of their services and experiences to put your idea together. This could include customers, service managers, engineers, architects, finance people, procurement, logistics and suppliers.
These are the people that need to be involved at the very beginning, when you're at the idea stage. They’re your early adopters who will become an important part of your team in terms of how you develop the product, roll it out and then scale it.
“Find a broad mix of people with different experiences and bring them together at the ideation round so they can help construct it and roll it out.”
When it comes to investment, that means making sure the entrepreneur you’re backing is learning from those stakeholders. It’s unlikely they have every discipline on a founding team, but advisors, beta customers etc. should be in place to ensure they’re listening to those voices.
Take in a broad mix of experiences
I saw this in action first hand when I worked at BP, leading global programmes based on technology change. Advances in technology meant they could easily deploy different capabilities to meet the changing needs of their user base. But what did that mean to users across the globe, in different locations and in disparate business contexts?
The infrastructure and network coverage for people in Alaska is not as great as for people in Houston, for example. So how could we roll out new capabilities in a way that protected operational integrity and also protected the user experience?
The answer was the same: finding a broad mix of people with different experiences and bringing them together at the ideation round so they could help construct it and roll it out.
Without this, it’s easy to develop a beautiful thing that works well in your world, but it’s unlikely to meet the needs of the people using it in Alaska.
Build an effective ecosystem
Your success hinges on your ability to create an effective ecosystem. With the right people on board, you can spread out the effort of idea creation and drive innovation more quickly.
Each project will have different diversity requirements. With the BP programmes, it was about picking people from locations across the globe that best represented what we were trying to do.
It’s important to start with an ecosystem where everyone has common beliefs and values that are driven towards the same outcomes. Then, look to different places and contexts to find diversity within your shared set of values.
The idea of context is crucial when you’re reaching out to find people to help you innovate. Think of it like a big melting pot of ideas where you need to include different people in the mix with different experiences, and from different contexts.
So, how do you reach out and find people?
1. Tread the pavement and meet people. Look for new environments with different contexts. Go to events, seminars, membership bodies, networking groups, local community groups, educational settings and anywhere else where you might find people that believe in what you’re trying to do.
2. Don't be constrained by routine. You can cast the net a lot wider now, thanks to online meetups, forums and new collaboration tools, so put these to use.
3. Know what you don’t know. Then you can find the people who do know it. Once you’ve identified the subject you can gravitate around the places where experts will be.
Put purpose at the heart of your startup
If you’re running a startup, the scale and setup may differ to global corporates like BP, but there are other diversity traps waiting for you.
A common pitfall is hiring staff or taking on advisors from your friendship group, which may make for a fun environment, but ends up encouraging homogenous teams.
The solution? Centreing your innovation around your core purpose and vision by finding people that have the same values as you. But it has to be the right purpose that aims to change society for the better.
Then base your startup in spaces that concentrate activity, that have a culture conducive to risk-taking and entrepreneurship. They should also contain people with the necessary knowledge and skills, sources of capital and networks, to support your business scaling and growth needs.
At Ethical Equity we have a clear vision of what we want to achieve, and a clear mission of how to get there.
Our platform exists to break down the disparities that founders from minoritised backgrounds face when they’re trying to get finance. In doing so, we gravitate towards value-based businesses that might have ethical processes, be B Corp certified or follow Sharia principles, among other things.
Building this ecosystem ensures that our purpose stays strong. And, with that at our core, we naturally attract founders and investors that value what we value.
Create and capture value
Diversity is about more than variation. For the business benefits of diversity to be realised you also have to fully embrace inclusion. To make it work for your business – whatever its size – you need to start with what matters most to you and work out from there with a wide range of expertise and backgrounds, and ensure that everybody’s contribution is valued.
Bringing in a broader cohort of people at ideation stage allows you to spread the load of generating innovative ideas. With a diverse range of people curated to suit your needs, the important job of creating and capturing value for your stakeholders should happen naturally.
