Depending on the type of business you are, the area you’re working in, and the people working for you, most organizations tend to aim for a balance of incremental innovation and radical, disruptive innovation.
The former takes a more ‘continuous improvement’ stance, focusing on making relatively small process efficiency gains or performance improvements. It relies on leveraging existing knowledge and resources to solve already pretty-well understood problems. Low risk/moderate return … unlikely to bestow any major competitive advantage or shake up the industry you operate in. Some may be reluctant to even refer to it as “innovation” at all (though it can certainly share some of the same process stages, albeit on a smaller scale).
On the other hand, the latter — with a more disruptive ethos — aims for transformation impact that brings step changes in performance, new offerings, flipped business models, etc. It’s a much more challenging affair and requires the injection of new knowledge, skills and resources in order to see any bright new idea through to production. Unsurprisingly there’s no guarantee of success on this scale every time, so Really Big Wins can be quite rare.
A twin-pronged approach that embraces elements of each can help spread the risk, with more evolutionary tweaks to business-as-usual offerings perhaps able to address the more immediate change imperatives faster and with less pain (although lacking the revolutionary jolt needed to achieve more seismic shifts and hit longer term goals).
Making innovation work for you — options and opportunities
There’s not a one-size-fits-all magic innovation solution, and most organizations learn to work in a number of complementary ways concurrently in order to get the best results from the hand they’ve been dealt (in terms of their available time, money and personnel).
Activities range in terms of the level of investment required (time and money) from relatively low-cost internal idea crowdsourcing campaigns through more organization-heavy elements like hackathons, boot camps and competitions. The range can escalate right up to strategic commitments in the form of innovation marketplaces, partnerships and acquisitions (essentially buying the ideas and idea-development capability you need).
But whatever innovation vehicles you employ, they do need to be managed according to whatever style of innovation approach(es) you’ve chosen — and that’ll govern the way in which information flows and collaborations manifest.
Open innovation
Siloed innovation strategies are out of place in the modern, interconnected digital era. They lack context of what might already be happening elsewhere (in the same organization, or what you may learn from looking further afield … from existing partners, or even successful initiatives in other sectors that show strong transferability). These siloed innovation strategies also tend to lack the ability to scale or move quickly enough (because of their blinkered beginnings), and that loss of agility can lead to lost opportunities.
Whatever your sphere of endeavor, knowledge is unevenly distributed. As (Bill) Joy’s law states: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”
Open innovation approaches aim to leverage this principle and represent more of an ecosystem approach, providing a mechanism for partners to share knowledge, risks, expenses and rewards. It utilizes cross-boundary information flows, both to accelerate internal innovation and also to expand the potential market for the external application of that innovation.
Innovation hubs
But how can you reach out and effectively manage a wider-cast net of innovation work?
A network of innovation hubs can help. Through these, a system of partner co-design initiatives (potentially co-financed too, which often helps solidify collaboration relationships) can be coordinated to take a distributed funnel of ideas and organize their progression through pilots and into production services, etc. — often across traditional sector boundaries.
That organizing function is more than simple sharing.
There’s an intelligent brokerage role such hubs can perform too:
- Helping to identify where information and assistance should flow for greatest benefit for the ecosystem as a whole (not just to facilitate the action itself)
- Identifying which ideas stand the best chance of development through which partnerships, and how, etc.
- Providing targeted support to smooth and speed the journey
Spin-offs
Organizations often spin-off innovation activity from the main business, allowing them to work-up and apply ideas in different contexts and also away from perhaps a more risk-averse culture closer to home.
However, there is a danger here that the shiny new spin-off starts to become estranged and actually loses its cultural connections to the organizational core, to the detriment of the innovations under its management.
Best practice is if parent and offshoot venture can establish a mature ecosystem relationship with some degree of mutual support flowing both ways (with each taking a bit of the best of both their worlds to learn, adapt and grow together). One way to take this forward is to have the main organization take on incubation duties of late-stage innovations to close the loop (this also provides ready-made battle-testing scenarios in the context of main business).
External assist, internal catalyst
Another way to bring in fresh perspectives and experiences (not to mention spread the workload) is to build close relationships with a trusted innovation/technology partners in a consultative role.
They can act as an internal catalyst (accelerating the development of a pro-innovation culture throughout the organization), provide extra capacity (by providing specialist help to get things off the ground quickly) and build long-term capability (by ultimately up-skilling the internal workforce so the client organization becomes better equipped to innovate and act on innovations itself in the future).