If you are wondering how to drive and succeed with corporate innovation, then you want to listen to today’s episode, as I speak to the well-known innovation leader, Tendayi Viki, about just that.

Tendayi is an associate partner at strategyzer, an academic, a winner of the prestigious thinker50 award, a regular contributing writer to Forbes, an innovator an award-winning author of three books, the Corporate Startup, the Lean Product Lifecycle, and the book which we are discussing today, Pirates In The Navy.

In today’s episode, we speak about,

• Tendayi’s favorite definition of innovation.
• What distinguishes entrepreneurs from corporate innovators?
• The myths of innovation
• Why large corporates struggle with innovation and how to fix that?
• What do leaders need to do to drive innovation successfully?
• Approaches to fast-track innovation
• Why culture of innovation matter?
• Why corporate innovators leave and how to fix that?
• In defense of middle managers who stifle innovation
• When Innovation Centres become like a theatre

Links:

• Pirates In The Navy
• In Defense Of Middle Managers Who Stifle Innovation
• The invincible company
• Originals

Interview Transcript

Mo Zaraket: In today’s episode, I am joined by Tendayi Viki. For those who do not know him, he is an associate partner at strategyzer and academic, a winner of the prestigious thinker 50 innovation management award, a regular contributing writer to Forbes. An innovator an award-winning author of three books, the Corporate Startup, the Lean Product Lifecycle and the book, which we will be discussing today, Pirates in the Navy.

Tendayi, I’m super excited to have you on the show today.

Tendayi Viki: Thank you for having me. It’s a real pleasure to be here. 

Mo Zaraket: It’s an absolute pleasure for me to Tendayi.

You know, I really have a lot of question for you today, but just before we move into your book, Pirates in the Navy, could you maybe tell us a little bit more about your journey? Was it always you wanted to work in the innovation world?

Tendayi Viki: No, actually I’m born in Zimbabwe. That’s where I’m from. I was born in the capital city Harari. And I grew up there. I actually did my undergraduate degree at the University of Zimbabwe and my degree was in psychology. And then I managed to get a scholarship to, come to the UK and do a PhD in psychology.

And then I got a job. So my dream was actually, I thought I’m going to be an academic. I thought I was going to have like a career in academic teaching students doing research, writing papers. And I really love my work. S. You know, it, was never my intention to end up coming in innovator. It actually happened by chance.

Mo Zaraket: So from there, where did you move?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah. So what happened was, while I was doing psychology, I went to a conference in Poland. And over there I met a woman, Jennifer Eberhardt was the name Professor Jennifer Eberhardt. I think she’s still at Stanford. And she invited me to come to Stanford to do a research fellowship there for a year.

And so when I went to Stanford, that’s when I sort of started seeing the startup ecosystem and  and how it works then. Every now and again, you know, in life you run into things that are like, wow, I want to, I want to be part of this culture. I want to take part in what’s happening here. So, I decided to shift my career. That’s how I ended up working, working in innovation now.

Mo Zaraket: So, you were planning to go in academia and then you just made a whole shift since then.

Tendayi Viki: Yes. That’s exactly what happened. I mean, it was, it was slow, right? It was. A year, two years, three years. I mean, I went, I was in Silicon Valley in 2010.

We’re in 2020 now. So, I’ve been on this journey of building up to where we are having the conversation today.

Mo Zaraket: so, a lot of the work You’ve been doing is really focused on internal innovation, corporate innovation, or what we call intrapreneurship. But maybe before we dive a little bit into that, I hear many definitions of innovation. I just wonder what is your favorite definition or even better, how do you define innovation?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah, so, so there’re two layers to that, right? When you’re trying to define innovation. The first one is around the distinction between innovation and creativity. Or the distinction between innovation and R and D and technology and, you know, technology development and that kind of stuff. And from that distinction, the thing that matters is innovation is when you take your creative breakthrough ideas and technology, and then attach them to a great business model that allows you to go to market.

So once you’ve taken something great and you’ve transformed it into a product or a service that creates value for customers in such a way, customers are willing to pay for it in such a manner that you become profitable and sustainable and scalable. Then we say you’ve succeeded at innovation. And so that distinction matters because sometimes a lot of innovation labs and a lot of innovation teams, they focus more on the creative technology side and they forget that to actually be considered as successful at innovation.

You need to have also successfully taken something to market. So that’s one piece; which is really the creation of value; value for customers value for your organization that you’re working for. Then the second piece is then making a distinction between different types of innovation. So, you know, innovation can go on this scale where you start from efficiency innovation, which is just improving and optimizing your currently successful products, services, business models, right?

And then you get sustaining innovation, which is where you’re just sort of improving or, you know, taking something you that you’ve got really been successful in one market and taking it to another market or leveraging a technology that you use really well within your organization to maybe create a different product or service.

So you’re kind of moving away from your core business, but you’re doing it by not going too far away. So it’s not a hard kind of jump for companies to make. And then the, at the final end of that is what we call transformational innovation, which is the crazy play, where you’re working on a new idea and targeting new customers,

you’ve never worked with before. Kind of like what Amazon did with Amazon web services where they just went, like so far off their eCommerce business model and created another new growth engine which is a multimillion multibillion dollar international. And so it was really interesting that sort of distinction there.

Mo Zaraket: I’m totally aligned with that. So at its core, innovation is about creating value for the customer and the organization. And there are three different types of innovation, incremental, sustainable, and transformational. Well, this actually brings to my mind another question, and that is, I often found leaders at large companies being good at doing the first two types of innovation, incremental and sustainable, but they struggle with breakthrough innovation. Is there a reason behind that and how can we tackle this issue?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah. So. What’s interesting about breakthrough innovation or transformational innovation is that you’re now looking at customers and markets you’ve never worked in before.

You’re also looking at products and services you’ve never created before. And so what it actually requires the company to change at a deeper infrastructural level. To create new processes, to create new management systems, to create new technology in order to develop the product or service or value proposition.

And then to start figuring out how to enter a new market, you’ve never entered before. So it takes a lot of effort, to actually do that. And so the easiest thing to do is to leverage what you already have and use that to create new value propositions. And so that’s the reason why large companies struggle with transformational innovation.

And so, in order to be successful at transmitting innovation, you have to be deliberate. You have to make the deliberate choice that as a company we’re actually going to create teams and units whose sole role is to create these new businesses and divisions, and actually put them out, into the world. But it takes a lot of effort to actually do that.

Mo Zaraket: So in order for companies to succeed with transformational innovation, they have to make the deliberate choice to change at a deeper level, to create something different and be supported by the right system. That actually resonates very well with me. And I actually know you address this case and more details in your latest book, the Pirates in the Navy, which I’d like to move to discuss now.

To start with, what really first caught my eyes was the title of your book. Can you tell me, why did you picked-up this title Pirates in the Navy? It’s a bit provocative, Isn’t it?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah, that’s a bit provocative. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.

So yeah. It was actually Steve jobs, right? Who started off with this statement where he said it’s better to be a pirate than to join the Navy. And what he was really referring to with this idea that startups are more innovative. They move faster and large company that’s slow moving. And so you don’t really want to join the Navy.

You want to, you want to be a pirate. And he did the whole, we put like the pilot’s flag for the M c  team and all this stuff. And, you know, inspired them to do great things, but what’d, you suddenly realize is that if you’re working in the large company, and you want to be an innovator. You cannot consider yourself to be the pirate against the Navy.

Right? And you don’t have the choice of being a pirate rather than joining the Navy. You have to put the two things together. And so that’s where it came from. Do you want to be a pirate in the Navy? And then, you know, I started digging deep into like, how do you do that? And I discovered that there’s a particular class of pirates called privateers.

It used to be hired by institutions to go out into the world and sort of target enemy ships or explore new lands. And so they have a commission from an institution to do the piracy work that they’re doing. So that’s kind of where, you know, the notion of pirates in the Navy came from, which is how do you become an innovator, do something disruptive, but do it with institutional support. And that’s the paradox of intrapreneurship right?

Mo Zaraket: Maybe, given what you’ve just said, I guess it would be helpful to define the role of an intrapreneur. So the question is are corporate innovators actually the same, like entrepreneurs, who just happen to work inside large organizations, or other qualities they share, but others that distinguishes the two?

Tendayi Viki: I love that question. It’s actually my favorite question right now because I’ve been addressing it quite directly in most of the conversations I’ve been having. So, in our culture at the moment we celebrate entrepreneurs, a lot. Entrepreneurs has become celebrities, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, Jeff Bezos, like we love entrepreneurs.

And so we also start to celebrate entrepreneurial behavior. Which is, you know, being, being innovative, taking risks, being confidence, all of these things that, entrepreneurs have to have believing in your vision. These things are, I think that entrepreneurs really do need to have. But then entrepreneurs also have other things that are kind of counterproductive in terms of, especially in corporate environments, like ego, brashness, breaking rules, you know, no regard for authority, all of these kinds of things, they don’t really work within corporate environments.

And so, my, my goal is to say as much as we celebrate entrepreneurs and there’s things we can take from entrepreneurs, like innovativeness, believing in your idea, testing the market, all of these things. I think that intrapreneurs, innovators working inside large companies can take some of these things,

but, what they cannot do is take the other negative behaviors that entrepreneurs have and bring them into the organisation.  What makes an intrapreneur a unique person is the combination of entrepreneurial know or the ability to be entrepreneurial and the ability to navigate corporate politics and build relationships. Those are the two super-powers of an entrepreneur.

If you have one of those and not the other, you will struggle. Right. If you have only politics and no innovation, you’re just a corporate politician. And if you have entrepreneurial skills and no corporate politics, you’re a pirate, you not even a pirate in the Navy. You’re just, the pirates, and then you’re much more likely to not succeed.

So you need to combine those two things together. But it takes a lot of effort to actually do that successfully.

Mo Zaraket: I love the distinction you just made here between entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. So for innovators to succeed within corporate setup, they need to have an entrepreneurial spirit, a great network, and have to be humble as well. But then, I assume leaders have a role to play, to ease the way for entrepreneurs to succeed in their mission, right? In fact, those days we actually hear almost all leaders talk about the need to innovate, yet, they seem to struggle to make innovation, a repeatable process. What do you think the underlying reasons behind that and how can we maybe address this issue?

Tendayi Viki: So it’s interesting, right? Because leaders want innovation. They want teams to innovate. But they actually don’t know what management systems to put in place to drive the right behaviors. That’s where people really struggling. So what we do when we’re working as strategizer, that is try and bring that to them to say, We understand your passion, we understand your dream. One of the reasons why you’d be stifling innovation is because you’ve been taking this project and you’ve been managing the music in your current system. And your current systems are not designed for managing innovation. They’re designed for managing businesses that already have scale with an operating history with known customer with known value proposition.

When you’re managing innovation, you need to make small bets in a large number of ideas. Track how much, how much progress those teams are making double down in investments to those ideas that are making progress and kill the ones that are not. In order to do that they need this toolbox, which is different from the toolbox you use for managing your core business.

And so, helping managers understand that there’s a distinction there, in terms of management style and tools and structures and processes; it’s like almost like step one. You cannot build innovation as a repeatable process until you understand that distinction.

Mo Zaraket: Right, so leaders must make the distinction between how to manage existing offerings versus new business model, and importantly use the right tools and processes that are geared toward new business models in order to succeed in their innovation efforts. This is actually a good lead to my next question.

In your book, you write that there are nine myths that often leaders think of when they think about innovation, can you maybe share some of those with me and help demystifying them?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah, I’ll just share a couple of items. I think if I talk through all nine of them would be to much. But no, absolutely. So one of the things that for example, leaders will say, and I’ve heard loads of innovation leaders say, let a thousand flowers, bloom, let thousand flowers bloom, right?

Which’s just like, go work on random stuff. And what happened when teams work on random stuff is that nobody’s ready to take that stuff to scale. What leaders need to do is to make sure that they’re providing strategic guidance to their teams, right? So that the teams know that they’re working on something, that the leaders are interested in, rather than just working on random ideas.

Also there’s this myth that leaders have, where they think they can pick the winning idea themselves on day one. So I’ve heard leaders say, bring me a 10 X idea, like as if they know the 10X idea, if they saw it. They think that by making big bets is how you get big returns. But actually what we say is, leaders cannot pick the winning idea on day one.

They can only create the context in which the best ideas emerge. So we just want them to make small bets on a large number of ideas and then see which ones of those ideas have legs through testing and iteration.

And then maybe the last one is, innovation is about technology and R&D put more UX in it. I want that cool technology. I want that great R and D and then, and then let’s just launched that, right. And leaders just forget that actually, you need to combine that technology with really great business models and they don’t lead their teams to drive them to find great business models. They lead them to execute, develop, and then launch the technology.

Right. I’ve been in companies where the focus is on the launch date. Are we ready for launch? Are we ready for launch? Rather than do we have a business model? Which is the question that leaders should actually be asking?

Mo Zaraket: So, is this, one of the reasons also why companies struggle to exploit and scale innovation or what is the reason behind that?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah, so one of the reasons why companies can fail to scale innovation, is what we call premature scaling, which is finding something cool, really getting excited about it, and then launching me to market without really testing. Whether it’s the right value proposition for customers, whether you found the right channels to reach those customers, the right price point for profitability, all of these things are really important questions that never get answered.

We just think because we’re a large company and with a big brand, we can put anything into the market and it’s going to be successful. And that’s where sometimes scaling can actually fail. I often say to leaders, the main question when you’re leading an innovation team is to ask them, how close are you to finding a business that actually works?

What evidence do you have that you’re close to finding a business model that works. That is the most important question for innovation. It is not, are you ready for launch. Right, but that’s not the right question.

Mo Zaraket: So basically, having an innovative mindset or innovative culture actually matters.  As it would help entrepreneurs to navigate all the internal politics and bureaucracy and possibly expediate the innovation process from ideation all the way to launch?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah. So, I mean, you’re right, culture does matter.

You cannot. You cannot build a repeatable innovation process without building the right culture. One of the reasons why companies can fail to scale ideas is because they’re launching ideas too early. Another one is that they just won’t launch the idea. Like they’ll just block it. Even though like the team has done really great work and they found a business model that works.

And the reason sometimes they block those ideas because those ideas are not a fit, a strategy or a physical culture or fit for structure, or structural fit within, within the organization. So that culture really, really matters. But the question that I often ask people, is, you know, what do you think culture is?

People treat culture. Like if, if it’s some sort of warm, fuzzy vibe that comes down from the mountain to bless the people, right. And I often say, that’s not what culture is. Culture is in one sense, the things that people are embarrassed to do in public. Great. The thing that people are embarrassed to do in public, it is what a community and organization teams, punish and reward. The distinction between the things that culture punish and reward, those are the behaviors you’re going to see. And so the specific behaviors we want, for innovators to have, we want them to test their idea before they scale that we want to make, we want them to make small bets, you know, run cheap experiments before the run expensive ones.

We want to test first and then scale. We want to accept failure and celebrate. These are all behaviors We want to see. So the fundamental question then becomes, what is it in our organization that is blocking these behaviors, right? What is it that we have in our organization that could enable these behaviors?

And then what we want to do is we want to reduce the blockers and increase the enablers, right? And so we then start working on stuff like leadership support, right? The more leadership support you have in terms of strategic guidance, portfolio management investments, or time, you know, the more likely you are to succeed.

In terms of the org structure, you know, do you have the right incentives in place? Do you have the, does innovation even appear on the org chart at all? Right. That, that also matters. Right. And then you start to, to build a culture. And then of course, what we spoke about before, making sure you have the right tools and processes for managing innovation. The moment that people realize that they’re being managed differently, they start behaving differently because you’ve increased the enablers for innovative behavior.

Mo Zaraket: You make really a lot of good points here Tendayi, culture is a very interesting topic. And actually I will be dedicating a full episode next to discuss Scott Anthony’s new book on culture of innovation, but for now, let’s touch base on few things you just mentioned. When it comes to blockers organizations structure and incentives. Do you see middle managers are the one who stifle innovation, or do you think those criticisms are unfounded? I’m just bringing this up as you wrote an article in Defense of Middle Management, which I found actually very intriguing.

Tendayi Viki: So the criticism is that it’s not that the criticisms are unfounded. Right. It is true that middle managers often stifled innovation. But, so what I’m actually saying is my article, wasn’t saying that middle managers don’t stifle innovation. I was defending middle managers who stifle innovation. So it’s an interesting topic, right. But we were like, why are you defending middle managers who stifle innovation? But, the point I’m trying to make is that the thing that makes an entrepreneur successful inside a large organization is the fundamental recognition that they are trying to do something within a company that’s already busy doing something else, right?

And so the company is busy running the current business that’s paying your salary. The middle managers are being rewarded and incentivized to deliver aginst that business. A lot of middle managers don’t have any incentives around innovation. They just don’t. Every time you come up with your idea around innovation, it goes to their PNL on the cost side.

It doesn’t come up on the revenue side. Meanwhile, the CEO, the very CEO, who actually calls for people to become more innovative and inspired you to take your idea to the middle manager is not managing the middle manager, through innovation metrics. They only managing the middle manager through execution metrics.

So the middle manager knows that even though you come up with your innovation idea to them, they can’t then say, that my PNL is running at a loss this quarter because I invested in the innovation. Cause then they’ll get in trouble. They won’t get their bonus. They won’t get that promotion. So my argument is just that all the way from the CEO through middle management to the teams, you have to align the incentives.

The middle managers also have to be incentivized to invest in innovation.

Mo Zaraket: So aligning incentives from top to the bottom is important. But also I hear you saying organization structure matters. And so I wonder in that case, have you seen any structure that is unique, that other companies can replicate to push innovation across the board?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah, absolutely. So I won’t name the company, but just today I was working with a pretty large pharmaceutical company, with one of the European divisions. And so the first piece of work we did was they got in touch with us and said, listen, there’s something that’s happening in European law, around digital health technologies.

And we’re going to have to respond to it as a company. So our leadership wants us to be able to put our company in a position to respond to these things. So we’re going to kick off a strategic, an innovation strategic project. But we’re going to get together and define what the implications are of this new shift in our market for our business model and how we can use digital technologies to innovate, to respond.

So that’s already like a really great way to start right they didn’t go let’s do an idea competition. Then let’s have an idea jam, right? they were. Let’s, let’s do this in a, strategic way. And so we went deep, we analyze the market disruption, trends, you know, shifts that are happening because of the emerging law.

And then we came up with eight themes. That could potentially be spaces around which innovation can actually happen. And then we analyze those things again, using strategizer tools and we help them select four themes. That then became the focus. And then we said, okay, now we’ve got four themes. What is the next thing you do when you have four themes? You don’t go to your boss and go, which ideas you should be working on. Right?

You start generating ideas about how you might innovate around those four themes. And so we’ve now moved into a point where we’ve got two to three ideas, but theme. We’ve put them in, in fact, in the innovation portfolio, each idea has a team allocated to it with a small amount of investment and they’re testing, whether there’s a potential value proposition or business model there.

And our assumption is that maybe three or four of these ideas will become anything at all. And maybe one or two of them will become really, really successful. Like the, you know, the five or six of these ideas we might have to just throw away. And so that’s really the process that we’re using. And you can see that the, you know, it’s kind of structured and layered in a, really nice way there.

And so that’s what we’re trying to get companies to do on a more regular basis and at a wider scale within that.

Mo Zaraket: That is a great approach to follow and implement, but then the question becomes, how do you convince leaders that there will be projects that are going to fail? Just like in the example you have given, and still expect them to bless those projects. is that by positioning failure as a way of learning fast, or doing cheap experimentation? Help me out a little bit there.

Tendayi Viki: Yeah. so the goal is never to fail, right? You don’t start a project going, we want to fail, you start the project going, we want to succeed, but we want to actually find the right way to succeed and in trying to find the right way to succeed,

we acknowledge upfront that we may fail to do that. And if we fail to do that, and we use evidence and learning to say, actually, you know what, this is not going to work. Customers don’t want this. We should stop doing this. That’s important. I actually think that that is probably the most important thing around, innovation and creativity.

In the book, Originals, Adam Grant, that’s his name, right? He wrote the book Originals. He says something really powerful where he says the best way to find a good idea is to have loads of ideas. And then he goes through the process of the greatest creative that goes with Shakespeare, we only know like 10 or 12 of his plays, but he wrote like hundreds. With Mozart,

we only know like 10 or 12 of the best pieces, he composes, but he wrote like 500. And so any creative endeavor, any innovative endeavor, acknowledges the vast majority of the things that you’re going to create, you’re going to throw away, but in throwing away those things, you’re going to find the beautiful things, the great things, the things that have impact.

And so actually, if we’re saying that, you know, Shakespeare wrote 500 plays, but we only know 10, it means that he threw away 490 things that didn’t have as much impact as the 10. So if you have 10 in 490. Which ones of those is more illustrative of what happens with innovation; the 490 is really the more illustrated in rather than the 10.

But when we’re doing storytelling around innovation, we celebrate success a lot, right? For every Amazon, there is hundreds of e-commerce startups that failed, for every Facebook there are hundreds of social networks that failed, for every Apple, there are hundreds of, you know, computer hardware companies that actually failed, but we don’t see what’s in the graveyard be behind, we see the successful startups.

And so, we often say, you know, the victors write history. But actually that history is a false narrative. If you really want to know what happened with entrepreneurship, go to the graveyard. That’s where you’ll see the truth about innovation, right? So once we get leaders to have knowledge that then we move to the second piece that you said, which is okay.

We know that very few ideas that ever succeeded, if they are, then very few teams that will become successful, then the question becomes, how do we discover quickly that this thing has no legs? And how do we do that cheaply? Right. But first we have to acknowledge that most of the majority of things, we’re going to work on are going to fail.

And then the questions become, let’s do that quickly. Let’s do the cheaply and then keep doubling down investments on those things that are showing legs, right. And that becomes the way that we manage our innovation.

Mo Zaraket: That also sounds like a good approach, but then how do you go about the business case, right, which is often demanded from the business or even the finance team prior to get any funds for any idea?  Or do you actually, uh, ask for funds, for example, in the form of a whole portfolio, instead of a single idea?

Tendayi Viki: Yes. So we understand that from a corporate venture capital investment framework, the returns are always in the portfolio, right? So that’s the first conversation you want to have with them. It’s like the returns on the portfolio. And what I love about finance people, by the way, if you ask finance people.  You say to me that I need to promise you a certain return before you go give me money and they go, yeah, you must, otherwise they won’t give you any money. When you say to them, okay, how many people have come here promising the same thing with me that have actually been delivered in the end. And you’ll just hear them open up. They’ll be like, oh man, yeah, these people will come up with, made up numbers. They just make them and we give them money.

And then they don’t even track whether the thing has hit the targets that we’re setting. It’s all hidden. We never get to see anything after they’ve taken the money from us. So finance is also frustrated. With the fact that they kind of pouring money into this black hole, but somehow the company is staying afloat, but they don’t, they know that some of the things that they’re investing in is not ever hitting the margins or returns that they promised.

And so then we say to them, okay, well, what if there was a method through which you can actually just invest a little bit and then see whether that idea has legs before you decide to give it more money? You know, how much money would you be willing to invest in that? And so I’ve had this conversation several times, the last one, the last big one was at Pearson where we did the Product Life Cycle.

And finally, and it’s agreed to give us $50,000 for discovery phase and then $250,000 for a validation phase where you build minimum viable product and test them out in the market. So the deal was for 300,000. You don’t have to write a business case, but after that, you must write a business. And so from a portfolio perspective, we now know the upper limit of how much we can spend on a single idea. And then we can sort of start to put that out, into the world.

Mo Zaraket: Right. This is a certainly a great approach to follow. Otherwise, getting stuck with writing a 20, 30 different pages for a business case could delay things forever. And at times, it leads to a lot of frustrations amongst innovators, which actually this is a good point to bring me to another question I have.

In your book, you speak about 10 things that actually might drive innovators to leave their jobs. Can you share a little bit more about that and how can we address them?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah. There’re loads of things that drive corporate innovative to leave.

Right?  first thing is, you can’t talk to customers because the sales director owns that relationship. Meanwhile, in the background, it’s me, Tendayi iki going you have to talk to customers to validate your idea. You have to talk to customers, but they’re not allowed to do it. And then they’re like, okay, so, well, how do I do my work?

So that’s frustrating. Or something like, yeah, you need to go, to the business model, canvas workshop and get training and coaching, and then they’re like, okay, that was nice. And I’ll get back to work. Then you get, you get all this training and you can’t even use the tools. And then you jumped through all the hoops of the company forces you to jump through you’re write the business plan, you write the business case, and then they tell you, yeah, just wait a little bit because of the budget is not yet signed, off in the meanwhile the clock is ticking. So all of these things just like frustrate innovators. And even if they become successful, even if they manage to dodge, all those bullets and they finally talk to customers and they come up with a beautiful product with a really great business model, then they can’t convince anyone in the business to take it to scale.

And that’s like the last straw on their back. And then they are just like, I’m out of here. Right? So we try to encourage them just to not manage the innovators in that way, but you allow them the space time and structures that support them to move fast and, and test direct.

Mo Zaraket: I know there are quite a few more, which are very interesting and I do encourage all the listeners, to read Tendayi’s book, but also all the other articles he writes for Forbes or in LinkedIn, or just beyond that. Tendayi, you just touched base on giving innovators a space to help driving innovation.

I’m interested to hear your views about the physical innovation spaces, many organizations are building; knowing that in your book, you actually call them innovation theaters. And also does innovation need a physical space? Or should there be other spaces that are more important?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah so that’s interesting, right? Because just because you have a physical space, does not mean that you’re engaging in innovation theater. So I have to say that upfront. You are engaging in innovation theater. If you have a physical space with sticky notes and foosball tables and business model canvases, and you’re working on all this stuff, but you’re not actually creating anything of value.

Remember we said at the beginning, that innovation is defined by how much value you end up creating an end. So a lot of teams will use these rooms of idea jams idea competitions. You can submit your idea online or upvote it. And then like, after all that has happened, nothing of value then, emerges to go to market.

And so that all, that’s all-innovation theater. It’s just stuff that looks like you’re doing innovation, but doesn’t create any value. And so, we have to think beyond the physical space, right? Because the stuff that happened in the physical space is actually less important compared to the stuff that happens outside the physical space.

So you want space on the management strategy, right? Cause you want them to allow you to do this work and to value the work and think that is important. You want space in their portfolio of investments. You want space on the incentive structure within the organization. You want space with legal and compliance, so they can approve your experiment.

So these are all things that you want to be working on, and those things cannot happen in your physical space. They happen in the bigger company. And that’s where we should be spending most of our energy. So I’ve seen a lot of the innovation teams succeed. They don’t have a physical space, but are really good at collaborating with their organization and building a bridge between themselves and the corporate.

Mo Zaraket: Indeed, innovation shouldn’t just be limited to physical space, but it has to take place everywhere. 

Conscious of time. I’d like to move to another section, which I basically call a quick round, where I ask you a question that you would need to answer it within a minute or so.

So, for a start, the first question I have is, what is one of your favorite innovation books?

Tendayi Viki: Books at the moment, the Invincible Company, Alex Osterwalder.

Mo Zaraket: That’s a great book. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m reading it right now.

Tendayi Viki: I just said three books there.

Mo Zaraket: Yeah, absolutely. And of course, Alex is your colleague.

So, the other one, what is the best advice you’ve ever received?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah, so, it is design like you’re right, but test, like you’re wrong. And so that’s what we tell teams. Right. You know, when you’re working on your idea, be as creative as you can be. But when you’re done with the creativity, just do a reality check just like you’re wrong. So always design, like you’re right, but then test like you’re wrong.

Mo Zaraket: It is important to do those reality check. I absolutely attest to that.

And last one in here, if you could solve one problem in this world, what that would be?

Tendayi Viki: Authenticity. I don’t even know how you can solve such a thing.

Right. I’m really interested in, people being really authentically true to themselves. I think that especially successful people that interests me a lot, successful people have a tendency to become complacent. And complacency is really where all the problems start. And so, if I can solve one problem would be to help people be authentically interested in always becoming better at whatever it is that they’re doing.

And you’ve every everyone who knows me. It’s not surprise that I’ve said this to you, by the way. I am always saying like get better at your craft, get better at your craft, get better at your Craft, to everyone I talked to. So that’s something that I I’m quite passionate about.

Mo Zaraket: Absolutely. And you live that I can attest to this.

So, before I just bring this to an end, are there any final thoughts you would like to share with the listeners?

Tendayi Viki: Yeah, it’s just this idea that have you ever watched in an NFL game, right?

When you see those big guys has really massive guys that are like the block of whatever the defensive line or the offensive line, right. They like big, big guys, but when they do their work, they have feet move like ballet dancers. And you’re like, how is that big guy able to do that? It’s just like, contradiction of like, how is it possible that a guy like that can have feet that nimble?

And that’s really what an innovator has to be. Right. They have to be this mix of like, how is it possible that he is this creative, and also this able to work with non-creative people and bring them through to collaborate. So like mastering that contradiction, that’s the job , of the entrepreneur.

That’s a really great quote in, Innovation From Within, a book by Kaihan Krippendorff, where he talks about how one of the leaders of the Nike, Nike fuel band team and the leader says when you’re working inside a large company, It takes a lot of time to like line up the cannons.

Like you’re talking to legal, you’re talking to finance, before you can launch anything, you have to line up all these cannons. But if you succeed at lining up the cannons, then when you just let it rip, you’ve got much more resource than, you know, small startups have. So that’s really the tradeoff.

You get more resource, but then you have to line it up in order to make it successful. And so that’s what I would leave as a thought. And that’s what makes a successful Pirate in the Navy?

Mo Zaraket: That is a great thought to leave us with. Innovators have to be able to work with everyone, regardless if they are, creative or not. With that in mind, I’d like to bring this episode to an end and thanks to everyone listening to this episode.

Tendayi, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today.

Tendayi Viki: Thank you.

Mo Zaraket: Thank you.