Is your organization full of Hackathons, Shark Tanks, Incubators and other innovation programs, but none of them have changed the trajectory of your company/agency?
Over the past few years, Pete Newell and I have helped build innovation programs within large companies, the U.S. federal science agencies, and the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community. But it’s only recently that we’ve come to understand why some programs are succeeding and others are failing.
After doing deep dives into a variety of organizations, we now understand why individual innovators are frustrated and why corporate success requires heroism. We can also explain why innovation activities have produced spectacles but few results, and why innovation in large organizations doesn’t look like startups. Most importantly, we now have a better idea of how to design innovation programs that will deliver products and services, not just demonstrations.
Starting from the knowledge of the “Innovation Stack” – the hierarchy of innovation efforts that have emerged in large organizations. The “Stack” consists of: Individual Innovation, Innovation Tools and Activities, Team-Based Innovation and Operational Innovation.
Individual Innovation
The quest for innovation within large companies/agencies is not a 21st century invention. For as long as companies have existed, there have been europe cell phone number list people who saw that something new, unplanned and unprogrammed, was possible. And fighting against the status quo of the existing process, performance and plan, they built a demo/prototype and through heroic efforts managed to get a new innovation beyond the target – shipping/deploying a new innovation.
We describe their efforts as “heroic” because all the established procedures and processes in a large company are designed primarily to execute and support the current business model. From the perspective of someone managing an engineering, manufacturing, or operations organization, new, unplanned, and unscheduled innovations are a distraction and a drag on existing capabilities. (The best description I’ve heard is that “unconstrained innovation is a denial-of-service attack on core capabilities,” i.e., an attempt to make a system’s capabilities unavailable to its users by overloading them with requests.) This is because, until now, we had not required any requirements, rigor, or evidence from the innovator to understand what it would take to integrate, scale, and deploy products/services.
Finally, most corporate innovation processes funnel
Innovations” into “demo days” or “Shark Tanks,” where they face an approval/funding committee that decides which innovation monitor your employees’ home office work are worth pursuing. However, without any measurable milestones to show evidence of the evolution of what the team has learned about the validity of the problem, customer needs, pivots, etc., the best presenter and the flashiest demo usually win.
In some companies and government agencies, innovators even have informal groups, known as an Innovators’ Alliance, where they can exchange best practices and alternative solutions to the system. (Think of it as an innovator’s support group.) But these innovation activities are ad hoc, and innovators lack the authority, resources, and formal process to make innovation programs an integral part of their departments or agencies.
Innovators vs. Entrepreneurs
There are two types of people who engage in innovation for large companies/agencies:
- Innovators — those who invent new technologies, products, services or processes;
- Entrepreneurs — those who have figured out how to get innovation and delivered through the company/agency’s existing procedures and processes. While some individuals operate as both innovators and entrepreneurs, any successful innovation program requires an individual or team with at least these two skill sets (More details can be found here ).
Innovation Tools and Activities
Over the past decade, innovators have cnb directory that they need tools and activities that are different from the traditional. Project management tools for new versions of existing products/customers. They have adopted innovation tools and activities that, for the first time, help individual innovators figure out what to build, who to build it for, and how to create effective prototypes and demos.