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Com­mu­ni­cat­ing inno­va­tion is as impor­tant as inno­va­tion itself.

If I look at the past I can bring to you a cou­ple of examples:

• WAP on mobile phones. The claim at the time was “Inter­net in your pocket”. Quite clearly cus­tomers have really been dis­ap­pointed by find­ing out that the inter­net that was sup­posed to be in their pocket was not the same inter­net they were used to browser on their home PCs. Great tech­nol­ogy, bad communication.
• RFID. Ric­cardo is the expert in this field but his post is a good exam­ple of a great tech­nol­ogy that is being com­mu­ni­cated badly.

I think that at the end of the day there is not, in most cases, any bad inten­tion in this. There is a soft pas­sage where inno­va­tion is leav­ing the labs and R&D cen­ter and is mov­ing across mar­ket­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and sales.

This a crit­i­cal pas­sage for an inno­v­a­tive com­pany. It should be man­aged care­fully and you need clever peo­ple to make this pas­sage as smooth as possible.

This is where the liai­son offi­cer comes in place (I talked about that here). I could say that this is my job. I have to trans­late tech­nol­ogy in an easy to under­stand mar­ket­ing sce­nario com­mu­ni­cat­ing the value of it and the poten­tial for our company.

This is not an easy task to accom­plish. You have to talk to so many dif­fer­ent peo­ple, often in the same meet­ing chang­ing your hat every sin­gle sec­ond. You need to explain the tech savvy guys the tech­nol­ogy using their jar­gon, you need to explain the poten­tial to senior man­age­ment with­out using any tech­nol­ogy jar­gon. This changes for any sin­gle entity in the inno­va­tion process.

You need to make this process con­sis­tent across all depart­ments from the begin­ning of the prod­uct devel­op­ment to the prod­uct end of sale announcement.

In your inno­va­tion process you will find three dif­fer­ent lev­els of communication.

• The first one come from senior man­agers of your com­pany. They set com­pany goals and busi­ness strat­egy and the inno­va­tion process should drive the com­pany towards those objec­tives. This kind of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is usu­ally quite sim­ple and direct and makes use of a sim­ple lan­guage that every­one in the com­pany may understand.
• The other level is the com­mu­ni­ca­tion between depart­ments. This is much more hor­i­zon­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion com­pared to the com­mu­ni­ca­tion com­ing from senior man­agers. You do not have any option to force another depart­ment to think that the inno­va­tion you are try­ing to push is really a break­through. You need to use their lan­guage. A direct con­se­quence of this if that you have to find all the rel­e­vant peo­ple in your com­pany to make the inno­va­tion process a success.
• At the end of chain you have com­mu­ni­ca­tion with you cus­tomers. You should pay a great level of atten­tion in this area. This is where you are play­ing your chance to be suc­cess­ful and, finally, this is where you get money (or what­ever you are paid with) from.

All of these are equally impor­tant and I think that any inno­va­tion process should take care of these areas.

Why do I blog this? Inno­va­tion is a dif­fi­cult jour­ney, but it can be made com­fort­able if you plan in advance.

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Related posts:

1. Sources of uncon­ven­tional innovation
2. The four dri­vers of innovation
3. Inno­va­tion is a com­pany culture
4. The quest for Web innovation
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