How to Incentivize Teams?

The performance of the innovation chain is directly linked to the managerial and HR ecosystem

"In innovation approaches, we regularly talk about strategic issues, creativity techniques, user tests, and value propositions, etc. I find one issue less often discussed: that of the management of the teams that constitute this value chain (or even the HR aspect).
However, this question is essential. To be direct, how is the contribution of a member of R&D, innovation or marketing evaluated within the company? I am not going to go into detail about each of these functions because it is naturally a culture that is specific to the DNA of each company, I just want to contrast two major logics that exist in the launch chain and see what concrete implications they can have on the real quality of the value chain.

An economic angle:
Among all the criteria that make it possible to evaluate the launch chain, one of them may be the ability to contribute to product or service offerings which ultimately achieve real success on the market. A real success will, for example, be a success in line or fairly close to the business plan:

• Positive point: the upstream business exercise is more likely to be worked on to be realistic rather than largely over-promising and based on targets that are too broad and vague,
• Also, this mechanism strongly invites teams to question as early as possible the areas of opportunity (the expectations of their targets) corresponding to the proposals they want to launch,
• A point of difficulty: the real success of an offer is often the combination of several factors of which each member of the value chain only controls part.

An internal angle:
Another approach, set internal rules for respecting the governance of the value chain: respect internal launch procedures and milestones, regularly feed the innovation pipeline with new initiatives, in short, launch offers, regularly and with agility:

• Positive point: this approach sets achievable internal objectives; a good product manager, for example, is a product manager who launches projects in the pipeline. This approach energizes the launch logic,
• Point of difficulty: a possible disconnection with real commercial outlets. If, for example, product managers or innovation managers are incentivized based on the number of launch initiatives they undertake, the innovation pipeline is then clogged with projects of uneven maturity. Taking the time to study opportunities and consumer expectations, in such a framework, amounts to slowing down the ability to chain launches. And in fact, the most successful projects find themselves in internal competition with less studied products, which have not been stopped in their tracks: because no one in the launch chain will really have an interest in prioritizing projects too much if it is this volume of projects which becomes an internal KPI of “success”.

On the one hand, therefore, a 100% market logic based on the ROI of the launch, which can be difficult to “sell” to the teams because it is economically virtuous but probably unfair at the level of each link in the chain taken in isolation,

On the other hand, a 100% internal logic, which promotes almost administrative and bureaucratic behavior and creates congestion in the value chain and the weakening of high-potential projects.

An ad incentive mechanismapté must therefore take into account both the internal individual action levers, which are different for each function (R&D, innovation, and marketing), but also, - probably collectively - the economic success of the launch.

When setting such objectives, teams will therefore need to carefully assess the behavioral and economic consequences that such an ecosystem will generate. There is clearly a managerial and HR aspect to this subject."