A Boston Consulting Group survey reported that 75 percent of executives surveyed ranked innovation as a top three priority with 22 percent selecting it as their top corporate priority. Despite the importance and priority, many organizations are still early in their work of establishing innovation as a competency as the same executives express a need for greater benefits and returns from innovation efforts.
What are the key thoughts or mindsets necessary to improve your innovation efforts and establish innovation as valuable competency? Most traditional organizational activities are thought of as happening in projects and sequential processes in a culture that rewards managing efficiency and risk. Achieving innovation success is different. The process of achieving success in innovation efforts is anything but linear or sequential.
Three Phases: Discovery, Development and Execution
Business leaders should think about implementing innovation in phases and frameworks. An emerging model for innovation includes three phases with the right frameworks or platforms supporting each activity. These three phases are:
- The discovery phase of innovation, which focuses on creativity and identifying new ideas and opportunities to explore;
- The development phase, which takes the promising ideas and creates prototype models or systems to assess viability and value creation;
- The execution phase, which is often the most difficult and takes the new innovation to the marketplace considering both the internal and external value propositions.
What are the structures necessary to support these three phases? Create platforms and frameworks of facilities, tools, and support to enable the three phases of discovery, development, and execution and allow your innovation projects to move among the three. While the frameworks are very structured, the processes of moving among them may not be.
As organizations continue to build their innovation capability, a shift in mindset to thinking about innovation happening in phases supported by platforms or frameworks may accelerate your innovation success.
