5 ways to kill your innovation initiative

by: JP Nicols

I often write and speak about the “Business Prevention Department” that lurks inside financial institutions. Devoted to sniffing out and stamping out anything that looks “risky”, the Business Prevention Department is staffed with members committed to “protecting” their financial institutions from those scary people who want to try unproven ideas.

As banks worldwide hurriedly launch accelerator programs, venture capital funds and internal innovation initiatives aimed at finding the next hot FinTech idea and separating themselves from the competition; here are five surefire tips from the Business Prevention Department to make sure those efforts fail.

1. Give Your Innovation Initiative No Power or Funding

One of the easiest and most common ways to make sure your innovation program goes absolutely nowhere is to staff it with junior-level people and make sure they can’t spend any real money. Senior people have real jobs devoted to protecting real products and revenue streams, and they can’t afford to be distracted by such folly.

Let the kids have some fun by meeting in the boardroom and playing around with the video-conferencing equipment, and have them present a PowerPoint to the board about every other quarter. Then you can teach them what it’s like in the real world when you grill them about all the ways their ideas won’t work and explain to them why you would never let them actually launch anything that could siphon business from any of your existing products.

continue reading »