I have become a bit of a fan of OVO, a company that is totally focused on promoting innovation and idea management within organizations. While many enterprises talk about innovation, few actively promote innovation and fewer still manage it with any rigor. OVO has done some terrific work in helping companies create sustainable, repeatable innovation processes and has developed software applications to enable the processes.
They provide access on their site to some solid intellectual capital on innovation processes. Their white paper, Innovation Locations, has some insightful thinking on how to manage innovation across the enterprise to ensure that ideas are nurtured, funded and coached while avoiding redundancy and wasted investment in time and money.
With the increasing focus on innovation as a strategic imperative, it hardly seems necessary to defend the importance of a focus on innovation. What is becoming increasingly important is the manner in which innovation is managed. Most firms immediately recognize innovation as the most valuable driver for organic growth. Yet innovation remains a poorly understood function in most organizations, inadequately defined and staffed, or an initiative that is tucked away in a corner of the business. It is not unusual to find that firms have several simultaneous programs or initiatives in different parts of the business focused on “innovation”. The challenge these innovation initiatives face is their definition, focus and visibility. Innovation should happen in different locations within your business, and the location and strategy of the innovation teams should dictate the kind of innovation, its measurements and metrics. Here we are defining an innovation “location” to mean a team or group within the corporate context that is working on innovation, not necessarily a geographic location.
OVO suggests that formalizing innovation processes inside the enterprise can be made more successful by establishing a small corporate innovation team.
Increasingly, larger firms find value in creating a corporate innovation team or “center of excellence” to sponsor innovation and provide common tools, techniques and processes. This team defines and distributes the common innovation processes and tools that all innovation teams in every location can use and trains individuals in the locations to improve their innovation skills and offers advice and support to the teams in the locations, acting as a facilitator, coach or devil’s advocate. Additionally the corporate innovation team can gather insights and trends and begin to synthesize those insights to provide additional input into the ideation process. The corporate innovation team plays different roles depending on the location and the need for their input and involvement. On a purely incremental product idea within a product team, the corporate team would ensure the innovation team in the “location” used the defined processes and tools. For an idea that is disruptive and not clearly within an established line of business, the innovation team might gather data about the idea, establish evaluation criteria and take more ownership of the idea. Finally, the corporate innovation team can help provide increased visibility to ideas and the investment and return on all the ideas and innovation projects across the enterprise through an innovation portfolio concept.
While creating a corporate innovation team may make the innovation approach, tools and techniques more consistent, the team does risk adding another layer of complexity and clouding the responsibilities and relationships between itself and the “locations” where innovation is underway. In some instances it may make sense for the innovation team to act as coaches or facilitators, and in some instances it may be best for the innovation team to “own” the generation and evaluation of ideas. This level of involvement will differ on a location by location basis.
In an environment of increasing globalization, constantly emerging and evolving technologies, and new and often unexpected competition, innovation is a process that cannot be taken for granted. Investments in time, people and infrastructure are necessary to realize the optimal ROII (Return on Innovation Investment).