Governing innovation - You get what you plan, manage and measure

How do you do innovation in your organisation?  Or more importantly how do you govern innovation within your organisation? This can seem like a contradiction in terms to ask the question “how do you govern innovation?”.  Surely innovation is meant to be free and open to let the creative juices flow! However, I propose that in order to achieve successful innovation you need to have it governed – if it does not have some formality then it is not important or being done.  If it is worth doing then you should be planning, managing and measuring it.  The main issue I see with organisations trying to govern innovation is that the governance is not appropriate for the job.

One of the frameworks we use within Equinox was identified at the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR).  They have identified four innovation processes based around the type of innovation (see figure below) which provide a great framework for you to consider and manage innovation in your organisations.

Firstly, there is the level of platform innovation that is being performed, either exploiting an enterprise platform or a greenfield innovation project.  A greenfield innovation is one where everything is new and organisations are looking for new breakthroughs, as opposed to platform exploitation which is looking at innovating an existing platform (process or technology).

The second dimension is the organisational control or governance that is exhibited over innovation initiatives.  Innovation can either be performed across the whole enterprise so that it affects everyone or localised to a particular area, region or business unit.

When you look at these two dimensions together you get four different types of innovation each providing its own benefits, its own risks and having significantly different levers to govern and manage the innovation.

When looked at this way it becomes obvious, however more often I see organisations only considering greenfield innovation and not considering innovations to a standard platform.  Looking at the research, MIT CISR shows that the platform exploitation innovation projects have a greater chance of delivering tangible benefits.

Organisations look at how much they time and money is spent on “maintain the business” and how much is spent on “grow the business”.  Often with this metric innovation comes under the “grow the business” category.  I would challenge all organisations to think of innovation through all aspects of how they operate and certainly including thinking about innovation through those “maintain the business” projects.

So while I am not saying we should abandon greenfield innovation initiatives, I am saying we should look to leverage our platforms more.

At Equinox one example of where we are looking to innovate is through the early idea stages and changing the time and effort required to take an idea/problem/opportunity through from concept to business case.  Leveraging lean start-up approaches and requirements visualisation we are able to take a concept to a working prototype business case in 4-6 weeks!