In the field of innovation, the closest thing we have to a professional association is the InnovationNetwork and its annual Convergence conference (produced in association with the Institute for International Research), which just took place in Minneapolis. I’m on a plane heading home to California as I write this, and I have to say, this was the best conference I’ve attended in quite some time.

The talk in the hallways was about the increase in the number of companies that are launching innovative makeovers. Just as some of us predicted, as the global economy has improved and CEOs move beyond their crouch / cut costs / survival mindset, the question of how to drive growth begins to haunt them. But getting top management to act on innovation often needs a catalyst.

To address this issue at Convergence, I led a panel of CEOs / Senior Management titled “How to present innovation in a way that reaches the yes”. We removed the traditional discussion table and moderator podium and replaced it with a more dynamic talk show format. Everything went well and was very well received. Guests from the joyous program included Carol Pletcher, Cargill Innovation Officer; Stephen N. Oesterle, MD, senior vice president of Medicine and Technology, Medtronic, Inc; Virginia Albanese, vice president of service for FedEx Custom Critical; and Alex Cirillo, Director of Business Graphics for 3M.

Advocate for innovation as an engine of growth

In my opening monologue, I noticed that every time another company says yes to innovation, you can be sure there is a champion behind that decision. And very often also a team of committed people. They did their homework. He amassed the evidence. And he championed the idea of ​​embarking on a new approach to innovation as a way to drive growth.

With surveys from PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Accenture showing that innovation has become a top priority for CEOs, you might think this would be easy. It is not. CEOs know there is a great need to master innovation. But there is a lot of concern.

Top line vs. bottom line growth

As a result, companies have long favored interventions and initiatives that promise immediate returns: Lean Manufacturing, TQM, Reengineering, Six Sigma, and many others. These process improvements, none of which are easy to implement, have the benefit of showing short-term cost savings and the elimination of inefficiency, the need for fewer staff. So they are easier to sell for outside consultants and / or inside advocates to the guys in the head shed. But this is what is often unclear: They do nothing to generate top-line growth. They only improve the bottom line, and after a while you run out of places to cut.

Sure, growth can be achieved from M&A, hence the M&A boom of the 1990s. Guess who did a phenomenal job selling to CEOs on that strategy? Banks, lawyers, accounting firms, M&A consultants, etc. The only problem: study after study shows that this is a strategy plagued by problems of integrating incompatible cultures and turf battles. But the big aha is that they just don’t create shareholder value, as the longitudinal studies by McKinsey and others clearly show. Again: Innovation is the only way to unlock organic growth, and the only way to sustain it is with an innovation strategy that is metric, comprehensive, company-wide, and cross-siled and cross-functional.

Innovation initiatives require patience, commitment

Innovation will never be easy to sell because it cannot promise a quick payback. It took agribusiness giant Cargill, for example, almost a year of internal debate and study of best practices in innovation before people were clear about how they should define it. With nearly 100,000 employees, they knew it was a journey, but that they had to start somewhere if they were to transform the organization. And as the energetic and outspoken Carol Pletcher, Cargill’s innovation expert, told the audience at Convergence, they are now on their way.

Cargill has the advantage of being a private company. Many CEOs of publicly traded companies, with Wall Street growing impatient for stable quarterly earnings, tend to be shy. Innovation evokes investment sinks and lost profits, and the ax too soon. So if you’re in an organization that hasn’t gotten to yes yet, you’ll have to overcome many of the objections that professional marketers call, both real and imagined.

Building a winning case for innovation

How can you make a stronger case for innovation? How can innovation be presented in a way that reaches yes? Doing your homework. Staying up-to-date in this ever-evolving field and knowing what works and what doesn’t. By constantly benchmarking what they are doing and discovering other companies that are adept at innovation. And selling benefits (growth, transformation, talent retention), not features (it works like this, isn’t it smart, etc.?).

Most important of all, it is critical to identify and refer to companies that enjoy the fruits of your systematic approach to innovation. Whirlpool, for example, added a whopping $ 100 million in top-of-the-line revenue during the first 12 months of the launch of its now-famous innovation initiative. Deloitte-Touche Tomatsu of South Africa doubled the size of its company in the two years after launching InnovationZone, its idea capture system. And companies like 3M and Medtronic cite innovation as their success year after year. When you build the case for innovation, it won’t be long before other companies are reaching out to you to find out how you did it.