De-risking innovation

There is no guaranteed blueprint that delivers commercial success from innovation.

Which is why so many pay lip service to the concept.

You won't easily find a CEO that won't say that innovation is important, but there are few that actually risk a portion of their balance sheet investing in the uncertainty that innovation carries.

A useful way to think about innovation is that it is an ongoing practice that 'asks good questions of well-trodden category assumptions'.

And often that well-trodden category ground has been walked flat and dark for a good reason; but innovators aren't afraid to challenge old paradigms, regardless of how often they get funny looks from people who are more comfortable wearing suits.

Innovators know their worth because they rightfully believe that even the most entrenched heuristics can be weakened by change and have an instinct as to where to look for new opportunities, what might change and when the market conditions are more favourable to the successful uptake of their innovations.

There is no guaranteed recipe, but can a process of successful innovation be coded and adopted by organisations wanting to improve their innovation strike rate?

Innovation can't be made completely risk-free, but can a program of innovation be made less risky?

The short answer is...yes, there are proven ways in which innovation decision-making can be improved.

And improvement is best achieved thanks to the transformation of paradigms (in other words, an organisation's attitudes and behaviours towards innovation) rather than simply investing more R&D money into existing programs.

Attitudes towards innovation (explicit and implicit) generally drive an organisation's motivation to innovate, so a purposeful transformation of those attitudes goes a long way to getting a sustainable program up-and-running.

SCENIUS | Opportunity seeking

An innovation-led mindset is one that is optimistic that the future will be better than the present and is then (collectively and individually) always on the lookout for emerging opportunities. Keeping a look out for faint signals of new opportunity is best done by continuously scanning the horizon for changes and shifts that open up gaps into which new solutions and value can be offered.

Scanning happens best by talking to customers and lots of other very different people, travelling locally and internationally, physically getting out of the office and exploring interesting new places, reading stuff from a diverse spread of sources and actively taking note and logically categorising lots of ideas for reference.

If a management team's focus is too much on operational problem solving and not purposefully biased towards active opportunity seeking then the innovation program will not have the kind of open, optimistic, forward-orientated mindset needed to be motivated enough to consistently act.

SKILLSET | Anticipation

From all of the active opportunity seeking information that is gathered, good innovators then spend time making sense of what's going on and understanding the ways in which these changes may play out in the future. They proactively anticipate consequences of change and estimate the timing of possible responses. From these informed estimations, strategies are developed and projects initiated.

If a management team is too reactive to system feedback and not anticipating opportunities and threats before they show up on a dashboard, they'll spend their available energy and focus on maintaining the present trajectory rather than creating new futures. Most management teams are skilled at managing systems that are already operational, innovative teams are competent at seeing what's ahead.

STRUCTURE | A cadence of innovation

The saying goes: "If you want to have a good idea, then have a lot of ideas," and the same holds true for innovation.

Success emerges from a program of innovation that produces a lot of innovations at varying levels of risk. From optimisation innovations that enhance existing market and technological linkages, to radical innovation that aims to completely destroy the status quo - a good playbook of innovation strives to spread risk with investments in a varying assortment of concepts and deliver lots of projects to market.

To be innovative one must take charge of the practice of innovating.

Taking charge is a choice in which a degree of risk is also accepted. The risk can be tamed somewhat thanks to the design of the program, which (at least in my experience) is the logical route to follow.