One important lesson I’ve learned the hard way is that transitioning an innovation to a new team takes much longer than one would expect. In fact, sometimes it seems transitioning the innovation takes longer than building the innovation itself. This seems counter-intuitive.
Why?
You created this great whiz-bang thing but might not be able to continue working on it (you know, the day job gets in the way). So you set off to find someone that’s willing to adopt your baby. Now you need to transform from an innovator and become a detective. I call this the Sherlock Stage. You scour your network, your users… frankly anyone that ever asked you about your innovation. You start turning over rocks looking for help. If you’re lucky, you find folks that are interested…. but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Now you need to sell.
The people you are talking to now believe your innovation is conceptually interesting and potentially valuable…. but they need to figure out what you got and how it aligns with what they have or need. Now they start asking about feedback, usage, documentation, etc. This provides evidence to them that “buying” your innovation is a worthwhile investment for them in terms of their resources, goals, capabilities, etc.
Be warned. This is often a one-sided negotiation because you have a higher motivation to find a “buyer” than the folks you are courting as you are essentially asking them to take on responsibility. They will ask you to come back after you do this or that or that. So you often leave these conversations with more work… and you already don’t have time. This happens because as you were focused on building your innovation that you cut corners in order to achieve your vision (limited documentation, non-scalable design decisions, etc.).
OK… so let’s assume after all this you find a team that is going to adopt your innovation. Congrats you made the sale… but the details of the “financing” needs to get worked out. In other words, the team that has agreed to adopt your innovation needs to figure out how to balance absorbing your innovation into all their existing projects and business commitments.
Now is when the waiting and uncertainty begin.
My dad used to always say “beggars can’t be choosers” and that comes to mind. Since you are asking another team to take ownership of your innovation, it becomes harder to influence the speed at which that transition is executed. After the often-times lengthy planning process occurs, hopefully you’ll begin to see more transition. This means that some of the folks involved will start to look at the details of your innovation. This also means they’ll start to realize all the corners you cut when you pulled your innovation hack together. Not following the proper corporate guidelines, not using the “trusted sources”, passing inappropriate data, etc. Any of these things might present unanticipated (and perhaps insurmountable) challenges to the team adopting your innovation.
So a few things might happen.
- They might be coming back to you – There may be even more questions and requests for assistance coming your way. Perhaps this will require even more of your time than you had initially invested in creating the in novation to begin with. You’ll begin to wonder why you should even bother with transitioning if it takes so much time, is hard, and is fraught with risk.
- They might go silent – Watch out if they go silent. They may abandon the effort as the challenges coupled with their ever-changing business priorities may not align. Your innovation may suffer the fate of countless others… death. If this happens, you might have to start all over again at the Sherlock stage…. or give up entirely.
- They might step up – I hope you find yourself here. The adopting team believes and are committed. They take on the challenges and fight the good fight to bring the glory of your innovation to the next stage. They rally the right resources and get things moving.
The common theme in all these scenarios is that they take much longer to work out than you might have guessed at the beginning. Even then, there’s an emotional roller coaster every step of the way and death for your little innovation seems to be around every corner. Its hard to estimate how long it will take even if all the stars and planets align just perfectly. With that said, I’d recommend you plan at least as much time on making your innovation successful as you spend on creating your innovation. So if it took you 3 months to build it and achieve some early adopter success, plan on at least 1-3 times as long for it to get picked up by another team to help take your innovation to the next level.
My experience tells me the best you can do is to get smart about the hard road ahead and try to think about the next stage if your innovation is initially successful. Think about what success will look like when creating your innovation AND when you need to find a new home for it.