The first is of an ivory tower—of researchers pondering scientific mysteries on a leafy university or corporate campus. 

The second is of a burning building—of researcher superheroes swinging into action to save the day in the face of some overwhelming threat or challenge. 

Neither image, of course, is remotely accurate, but given the choice, I favor the burning building. Certainly, the heroes of the past year and a half have been the researchers who produced the lifesaving vaccines now being used to combat COVID-19—a true burning building, if ever there was one.

But the burning-building image also captures an important truth: Innovation often occurs in response to a pain point or burning need. It could be a literal pain point, as in health care. Or it could be a source of frustration, inconvenience, or annoyance experienced by users of your product or service (e.g., “Why isn’t there an app for that?”).

Not all innovation, of course, comes out of an R&D center or involves a new product or service. Pain points exist in all areas of a company’s operations—in supply chains, manufacturing systems, sales and marketing functions, distribution channels, HR and legal departments. As business leaders, we need to foster an innovation mindset among all our employees so that we can address pain points wherever they exist within our organizations. 

We need to do more

As committed as many companies are to innovation, we can still do more. According to a recent Pulse of the Profession® survey conducted by the organization I lead, Project Management Institute (PMI), 74% of project professionals say their organizations have sponsored or invested in innovative ideas brought forward by teams. But only one in four requires their teams to dedicate time for innovative thinking or ideation, and just one in five has hosted a creativity lab or hackathon. 

One way to foster innovation is to identify pain points, either internal or external, and bring them closer to the people actually doing the innovation. That means having excellent “sensing” mechanisms in place to track market developments and truly understand what your customers are experiencing—good and bad. 

That, in turn, means connecting your R&D folks more directly with the strategy, marketing, and sales teams. As McKinsey put it in a recent report, “The age of the insular R&D organization is over.” Indeed, McKinsey argues for close collaboration between R&D and the corporate strategy and commercial functions, so that researchers are clear about both the company’s long-term priorities and day-to-day market realities.

Power to the people

The other way to foster innovation is to bring sources of innovation closer to the people experiencing the pain—empowering them to address their pain points directly.  

That’s not as fanciful as it may sound. Thanks to the emerging citizen development (CD) trend, more people are leveraging technology to improve their work lives. CD platforms use intuitive low-code and no-code tools, so that even nontechnical employees can create apps, software solutions, and even enterprise-grade applications without having to learn to code. It empowers teams to take control of their work lives—to automate and scale work processes so that they can do their jobs faster, better, cheaper. An added benefit: It takes some of the pressure off overtaxed IT departments that would normally need to support such business unit requests. 

There were many examples of citizen development during the COVID crisis. A group of physicians, for example, created a text-message service to communicate with patients concerned about possible COVID-19 symptoms. New York City used a web portal built on a no-code platform to gather information about where outbreaks were occurring within the city. There were even web applications like Help Main Street that allowed people to support local businesses by buying digital gift cards.

Citizen development promises to improve enterprise productivity by making application and software development significantly faster and less costly, while also accelerating value delivery and enabling organizations to achieve outcomes more quickly.   

And citizen development will only continue to gain steam. According to Gartner, 41% of business leaders report having active citizen development initiatives underway, with 20% either evaluating or planning to start CD initiatives. Gartner further estimates that the number of active citizen developers will be four times that of professional developers by 2023.

Creating an innovation culture

Fostering innovation, however, isn’t just a matter of working around pain points. Organizations also need to create a culture that allows innovation to thrive. To maximize the benefits of citizen development, for example, people need to know it’s safe for them to experiment. I like to say they need a sense of belief and belonging—they need to buy into the organization’s mission and purpose, so they’re motivated to innovate. And they need to know they have the support and resources of their organization behind them. 

The same, of course, holds for researchers in the lab. But R&D teams also need the support of their organizations to get their innovations out of the lab. The commercial side of the business doesn’t just provide input into the R&D process. It serves as a conduit for R&D output—as the channel for moving a product or service into production and ultimately into the marketplace. Business development and marketing should therefore be an integral part of the entire development journey. After all, innovation that’s stuck in a lab is just overhead, and that’s the last thing we need today. 

As we emerge from the COVID crisis, we’re all understandably anxious to get our businesses back on track as quickly as possible. Innovation will be key. But to get the most out of your innovation efforts, put those operational and customer pain points in the center of your sights. 

Sunil Prashara is president and CEO of the Project Management Institute.