There is no doubt that having fresh, new ideas is one of the important things you have to have if you are creating an innovation effort. With no ideas, after all, there is nothing to work with. But the problem is that almost everyone forgets it takes more than a great idea to create an innovation which is actually valuable.
If you wanted any example of the challenges of scaling an innovation program to make decent financial return, they do not come much better than Proctor and Gamble, the global consumer products giant.
Ideas are usually a creative response to some problem that does not have a present day solution. People create them as they consider what they have to do to solve their unique problems, and in doing so they draw inspiration from the scenarios they find themselves in day to day. What is often forgotten, though, is that neither their problems, nor the stimuli they draw their solutions from are exclusively unique to them. Many people face the same problems, in much the same situations, at the same time. The result is they’ll almost always come up with similar solutions.
When an organisation starts an innovation program, everything is rosy. Filled with hope, business stakeholders latch onto the innovation silver bullet that will solve all their business problems and wait for thrilling results. In the first months of an innovation team’s life, they can get away with anything.
What metrics do you use you measure the results of your innovation team? Do you count the number of new ideas they have collected? How about the number of new ideas they have generated or the number of new product introductions they have been responsible for?
If you have to innovate, and you have no budget, what should you do?
A key question to be resolved at the start of an innovation effort is who to hire to lead.
Disruptive innovation is any which sets out to change the goal posts for an established operation. Focussing on disruptive innovation has the potential for a small organisation to make strong headway even against a strong, large incumbent. The mechanisms by which this occurs are usually twofold:
Central innovation teams are a model which have been well adopted in many industries. Pharma, for example, is typified by large development budgets which tend to be centralised in teams set up for the purpose of innovating drugs. In banking, as another example, there will regularly be many New Product Development teams who dream up new things for specific business lines. Even in Government, there is an increasing focus on central innovation in the never-ending pursuit of efficiency and cost savings.
Though it seems like common sense, many organisations don’t define what they mean by innovation before they start innovating. Then, they wonder why there are few decent innovation outcomes they can show to stakeholders.