Create an Innovation Strategy
March 2nd, 2010 at 17:51An innovation programme has, on average, 18 months between the time it’s started and its cancellation. Most such programmes are cancelled because the innovators involved haven’t connected themselves to results quickly enough.
What is the number one reason innovators fail to get timely results? Surely, it must be that they don’t have a firm idea of what they should be achieving up front.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve discovered a group of innovators who don’t have any idea what their organisation’s innovation strategy is. Usually, you can tell this is the case because the innovators are unable to answer the question “why do you have an innovation programme?”.
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Deciding the future direction of an innovation team is a critical, fundamental decision that will shape everything that happens subsequently.
It is a decision, though, that isn’t especially complex, as there are only three options from which to choose.
Option one is simple: don’t bother with innovation at all. Instead, continue doing what has traditionally worked well, and accept that “back to basics” – meaning eliminating things which are not core – is very reasonable. Continuing the business practices appropriate two decades ago can, in many cases, work well.
Making the choice not to innovate is perfectly reasonable, as long as everyone agrees up front.
Another innovation strategy is Play-2-Win. This is the strategy you’re adopting when you can say, without any doubt in your mind, that innovation will the centre of competitive advantage for your organisation in the future.
Making the strategic decision to do Play-2-Win innovation is not something undertaken lightly, since it will usually require relatively significant investments at the beginning. Of course, the payoff will probably be, given enough time, extremely significant.
The third kind of innovation strategy is Play-Not-2-Lose. Play-Not-2-Lose accepts that doing new things to maintain parity with competitors is the primary reason to have an innovation function. You may not get the market windfalls that accompany a big breakthrough, but you do get relatively good returns in the short term.
Deciding which of these three strategies to adopt is really a matter of deciding the risk appetite of the organisation wanting an innovation programme.
Deciding which strategy to adopt up front is a critical thing to do, because everything that follows will be different depending on which choice you make.
If you want to find out more about Innovation for your organisation, then visit James A Gardner’s free online book which contains a chapter on Innovation Strategy.
Tags: Entrepreneurs, innovation, innovation program, innovation strategy, management, strategy