The notion of an innovation process presents an apparent contradiction: innovation is fundamentally concerned with creating new things, but a process does the same things repeatedly. This contradiction is resolved by viewing the process at the right level of abstraction – the process of developing opportunities.

In the context of product development, the process of opportunity development should seek to embrace extant traditions in incubating new ideas that may exist within the organization where they are working well, lest we risk alienating the very people we would want to recruit as champions for the programs that the enterprise wants to implement. Typically, when exploring ideas around in the introduction of new innovation processes one of the first questions that gets asked is: how will this be funded?

A common pattern of funding and effort occurs in four phases: idea, prototype, approval, and big bet. Innovation starts with an idea where a few people iterate on a concept. That group gets the visibility of their project team leader, who decides to “angel fund” their effort through direct support. After the idea is developed further and it grows into a product or product capability, the effort is brought to the senior leadership team for formal approval to incubate the idea into a business venture. When incubation goes well, the senior leadership makes a decision on whether to ship the innovation as a product – this is when the innovation makes it to a point where the organization’s ability to take ideas it to market is brought into full play.

So, what perceived problem or problems is an innovation program trying to address? For all of the strengths of a well-run product engineering or business model development process it is, by design, optimized for the efficient execution of a roadmap and scenarios that builds on a rich heritage of what has been built before; it is not optimized for the development of potentially discontinuous scenarios:

• Improvements enable innovation that is in line with current product direction – Improvements must have clear product implications and focus on known value, and customer need delivered at high quality for long-term support. The process strives to make product development as repeatable and predictable as possible; risk is not supported in the schedule.
• Lots of ideas are left unexplored and strategic insights left uncovered – New ideas become rapidly constrained as the improvement process progresses making it easier to cut uncertainty from the product and schedule. The result is a limited ability to develop ideas that are, therefore, usually developed ad-hoc with isolated learning. Ideas need time to concept test, but do not need the rigor of long-term product support
• Socializing ideas is hard – It is typically necessary to have substantial supporting data for a new idea to take root, with no time allowed in the schedule to gather that data. From a people perspective, it can be costly to an individual’s or team’s reputation to support an idea with no data to back it.

Incubation Partners is a leader in Enterprise Innovation Management, helping organizations unleash the creativity of employees, customers, and partners to find and develop transformative ideas that drive growth. Since 2003 our founders have been in the innovation business, developing and honing best practices around employee engagement, idea development, innovation tournaments and large-scale product incubations.

We are proud to introduce our SPARK suite of tools and processes to the market in the hope that for many it will make the process and practice of managing innovation programs in your enterprise a little bit easier.