Despite up to 96% of all innovation projects failing to make any return on investment and 97% of large businesses believing digital innovation to be critical to their future success, how do organisations find the balance between challenging the status quo and creating innovative products and services time and time again?
~ @andywicks2000 Strategy Lead at @redbadgerteam
Origen: How to Master Innovation (without the) Labs – Mind the Product
Generally speaking, organisations have three options when starting out on their innovation journey: partner, buy, or build.
There are trade-offs associated with each option:
Partnership – offers the shortest time to market, limited impact on internal resources and provides the lowest switching cost. However, this comes at a price –quite literally. Partnerships offer the least control, increased integration costs, and are likely to offer the lowest margins as any profits are usually shared.
Buy – Buying a competitor (or innovative start-up) allows relatively short time to market and any intellectual property (IP) becomes their own. However, this usually comes with significant acquisition costs and a non-trivial integration headache.
Build – Generally the most favouredapproach (and focus for this post). Enables internal capability, IP is proprietary and offers the most profitable option. However, it comes with high set-up and switching costs and usually results in longer time to market timeframes.
In Summary
You don’t need an innovation lab. You (and your organisation) may just need a shift in mindset.
Creating a culture of innovation is hard and you will struggle to do this alone. Building a successful, repeatable, innovation process requires senior leadership buy-in (ideally they will drive it).
You can avoid innovating in silos by creating small and nimble teams that are embedded throughout the organisation. The only role of such teams is to focus on experimenting to validate new opportunities/ideas.
Understand the goals of your organisation. Aligning innovation efforts to these goals will be a crucial factor in the success of any new product or services – winning support for innovations that potentially cannibalise existing products/service will be very difficult unless your organisation is truly looking to disrupt itself.
Industrialise experimentation. Make hypotheses really specific and continuously run lightweight experiments to validate your assumptions.
Measure only the metrics that matter. Be transparent and define what metrics add real value to customers. Chase these instead of revenue.
Work with your finance teams and set up a metered funding model that encourages innovation with small, readily available, funds to experiment. As desirable products emerge, release further funds to validate the feasibility and viability of ideas.