Innovation Perspectives - Trench Innovation

This is the first of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on the following question:

"Where should innovation reside in an organization, and who should 'own' or manage innovation?"

To kick it off, here is 'Trench Innovation':

by Steve Todd

Where should innovation reside in an organization?

For many decades the answers have ranged from 'dedicated research facilities' to 'globally distributed research teams'. Hewlett-Packard has HP-Labs in Palo Alto. IBM has eight distributed research teams.

The highest executive levels within a corporation have looked to these teams and asked "where do we go next?"

These research teams often 'hand off' the latest innovative ideas to dedicated development organizations.

A recent article in the NY Times is questioning the efficiency of dedicated corporate R&D labs.

The truth of the matter is that innovation cannot solely reside in these organizations any more.

Innovation should reside in the corporate trenches.


Innovation by Pain

Consider a salesperson that loses a deal to a competitive rival, or a field engineer being raked over the coals for a product bug or feature deficiency. Are they motivated to come up with an innovative solution?

Consider a software engineer with a legacy software architecture that's hard to maintain. Consider a manager leading a team with a seemingly impossible deadline. Think about the pressure they feel when sales and support report the urgent laundry list of problems. Are the developers motivated to come up with a better way of doing things?

The people in the trenches are feeling the pain, and they operate with a sense of urgency that maximizes productivity. If innovation is all about the delivery of ideas, then the trenches is where innovation truly belongs.

Employees in the trenches are not motivated by solutions coming from a corporate R&D lab. They often view the research facility as an ivory tower.

My message to the trenches is this: you don't need permission from your corporation to innovate. Just do it. But it's a lot easier if the corporation knows how to leverage intrapreneurs. Here are two ways that a corporation can 'own' or 'manage' trench innovation.


"What are you working on that I don't know about"

Line managers working for a company with a 'trench innovation' mentality should be regularly asking their employees the above question. They should challenge their direct reports to pursue answers to pressing customer needs by researching creative solutions in a skunkworks fashion.

Some managers will punish their employees for working on solutions that are outside of their core job. I'm suggesting that managers encourage them to do just that. This is the most direct way to 'manage' innovation.


Corporate Ownership

Ownership of this type of innovation should be loosely coupled. A central monitoring entity should exist, typically in the office of the corporate CTO. They should be innovation ringmasters under the big tent of corporate, academic, and industrial circles.

The final piece of corporate ownership is a strong social media strategy. There needs to be a corporate backbone that enables collaboration between corporate intrapreneurs, academia, industry, and customers. Managers and employees should 'bubble up' their ideas through this mechanism.

When the highest levels of corporate executives asks "where do we go next?", they should look to their innovators in the trenches.

They're the ones standing right next to the customer.


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles published so far from the different contributing authors on "Where should innovation reside?" by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Steve Todd is a high-tech inventor and author of the book Innovate With Influence. An EMC Intrapreneur with over 140 patent applications and billions in product revenue, he writes about innovation on his personal blog, the Information Playground.

Call for September 'Innovation Perspectives'

September's opportunity to contribute your Innovation Perspectives is now here.

This monthly feature presents our loyal readers with different perspectives on a single topic all in one place - from several different authors. It gives our innovation community the opportunity to compare, contrast and discuss them in the comments here on Blogging Innovation and in the Continuous Innovation group on LinkedIn.

If you missed August's Innovation Perspectives, you can find them here.

Here is this month's topic for publishing the week of September 21-27, 2009:


"Where should innovation reside in an organization, and who should 'own' or manage innovation?"

• Thank you to Jeffrey Phillips for submitting this month's topic

Several contributing authors will be writing articles on this topic, but you are also welcome to submit an article by the end of September 18, 2009.

I'll publish all of the accepted articles during the week of September 21-27, 2009 for discussion.

If you would like to suggest a topic for October, please leave a comment or contact us.

We look forward to sharing September's Innovation Perspectives with you and hearing your thoughts!

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Innovation Perspectives - August Wrapup

Innovation Perspectives is a new monthly feature to present our loyal readers with different perspectives on a single topic all in one place along with the ability to compare, contrast and discuss them in the comments here on Blogging Innovation and in the Continuous Innovation group on LinkedIn. This month's topic was:


"Describe the importance of innovation strategy to the success of an organization's innovation efforts."

• Do companies need an innovation strategy?
• What role does it play?
• What are best practices in setting innovation strategy?
• How should organizations integrate their innovation strategy into their corporate strategy?

Here is a list of all of the authors that participate this month and links to their articles on this topic.

1. Rowan Gibson - What exactly is an innovation strategy?


2. Dan Keldsen - Strategy From Above?


3. Drew Boyd - What/Why/When/How/Where/Who


4. Mike Brown - Yes, No, and Everything In Between


5. Steve Todd - Leveraging Intrapreneurs


6. Hutch Carpenter - Making Your Own Luck


7. Jeffrey Phillips - Do you need an innovation strategy?


8. Braden Kelley - Directed Innovation for Strategic Success

If you would like to suggest a topic for next month's Innovation Perspectives, or would like to contribute, please leave a comment or contact us.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Innovation Perspectives - Do you need an innovation strategy?

This is the sixth of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on The Importance of Innovation Strategy:

by Jeffrey Phillips

I've thought for a while that it would be great to get a number of bloggers to write about the same topic, which would allow readers to have different perspectives about an innovation topic from noted (well, at least some of us are) experts in the field of innovation. Braden Kelley asked us to write about the need or importance of innovation strategy, so here's my response to his request.

First, let's set out that there is really no such thing as innovation strategy. Strategy is about setting out the vision and goals for your company, and what your long term objectives are. Most firms set out some vaguely worded strategy which does not lock them in too much, and which they ignore and settle into a comfortable middle ground. Innovation, on the other hand, is about finding new opportunities or new markets and creating new products, services or business models. Innovation should be in support of, and an enabler to, corporate strategy. There is no innovation strategy.

Now, once strategic goals are established, a firm should begin to ask itself, "How can innovation accelerate our goals and help us achieve differentiation or discover new markets or needs?" If you want to think of an innovation strategy, think of it as deciding whether the firm desires incremental or disruptive innovation, or open or closed innovation, or how much disruption or change the firm expects or can bear. Too many firms start innovation efforts without defining these parameters (what we call the facets of innovation) and trying to work with the project teams in this lack of definition is like watching tap dancers in a mine field. They rest very comfortably on ground that appears to be safe, and are completely unwilling to risk another step unless pushed.

What do successful firms do in regards to innovation and strategy? They define very clearly what they will and won't do, and what they expect from innovation and from the firm in general, then they empower (I hate that word) the team to do its best. Note that Apple (top down innovators usually in skunkworks) and Gore (bottom up innovators based on core capabilities) both follow this model and have radically different organizations, but expect people within the firm to understand the strategy and to innovate to achieve the strategic goals.

Closing doors by clearly defining your strategic goals is even more important than opening them. Too many firms are afraid to place clear limits and expectations on an innovation team, and so the team flounders from one seemingly valuable opportunity to another. Most firms fail to enunciate their strategies clearly and that hampers everyday operations, and it creates difficult distractions where innovation is concerned. Clarity is called for when the team is doing new, or difficult, or risky things. Leaving the team without an understanding of its mission and how the innovation efforts supports core business strategies or needs is almost criminal, and will usually result in failure.

So, the takeaway is this: innovation is an ENABLER to corporate strategy, and what innovation needs to succeed is clarity about what is important to the business and what risks and scope are offered by the management team for any innovation to succeed.


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on The Importance of Innovation Strategy by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Jeffrey Phillips is a senior leader at OVO Innovation. OVO works with large distributed organizations to build innovation teams, processes and capabilities. Jeffrey is the author of "Make us more Innovative", and innovateonpurpose.blogspot.com.

Innovation Perspectives - Making Your Own Luck

by Hutch Carpenter

This a bonus eighth 'Innovation Perspectives' article to give one extra perspectives on The Importance of Innovation Strategy:

Describe the importance of innovation strategy to the success of an organization's innovation efforts.

Braden Kelley of Blogging Innovation asked a number of people to contribute their perspectives on the question above. This is our response.

Popular culture associates innovation with one or both of these qualities:

• Out-of-the-blue "a-ha!" moments


• High individual creativity

When those characteristics guide your thinking, the notion that there can be an innovation "strategy" seems...quaint. Like saying Van Gogh needed a "painting strategy."

And if you subscribe to those notions, there must be a fait accompli aspect to your view on innovation inside companies. It will happen, or it won't. Throw your hands up, hope you've got the right creative people.

As Gary Hamel said recently, "There is this 'creative apartheid' ingrained in the world. Some people are really creative, some aren't. That's BS." A good contradiction to that poorly formed idea is the observation that people have different kinds of intelligences. Too much focus on outputs for one kind of intelligence means you're missing a lot of creativity.

So what is an innovation strategy inside organizations? There are four aspects to it:

1. Establishing the culture and expectations that everyone has valuable ideas to contribute


2. Providing direction for innovation efforts


3. Setting up a common basis for everyone to share and collaborate on ideas


4. Putting in place specific processes to turn good ideas into real initiatives

Culture and Expectations

When Google lets employees set aside 20% of their time for working on their own projects, what message does that convey? "We are a company built on and for innovation. We want you to contribute to that."

While Google's near monopoly in web search affords it the luxury of granting that much time, the point should not be lost that they are baking into their corporate culture the notion that everyone contributes to innovation.

It can be hard to break free of the purely "execution" culture. We get paid on our performance on assigned tasks over the course of a year. But it's important that employees look up from their desks sometimes. For instance, I imagine the employees of defunct retailer Circuit City were executing well on their tasks right up to the end. But what did they hear from their customers day-in, day-out in the years prior to the retailer's bankruptcy?

Creation of a rich culture that seeks and celebrates ideas is a powerful strategy for companies. Celebrates the ideas that turn into real initiatives, and those that don't. Celebrate the efforts as much as the results. Make it "safe" from a career perspective to take some chances.

Without a conscious effort, it's possible that employees will end up focusing only on executing assigned tasks.


Providing Innovation Direction

Think about some of your best creativity in your own career. I'll bet a lot of it came when you were under the gun, focusing on solving a real problem.

This is something we hear from Spigit customers. Focused campaigns are just as important as open innovation approaches. They're great for eliciting ideas on specific issues.

This makes sense. By one estimate, people have 15,000 thoughts per day. That's a lot of thinking, and you can be sure there are both fully formed ideas and idea fragments in there each day. With all those thoughts occurring every day, it is impossible to capture them all. Not enough time to enter them, and the ideas likely will lack context.

But what happens when a company puts out a call for ideas to solve a specific issue? There is an organizing structure to that amoebic soup of thoughts. People apply the fragments of ideas, pulling them together to provide possible solutions.

One best practice we heard from the recent Spigit Customer Summit is to tie ideation events to the big corporate objectives of a company. This provides a basis for running recurring campaigns around different themes. And drawing out those ideas we all have in our 15,000 thoughts a day.

This is the integration of corporate strategy to innovation strategy.


Common Basis for Sharing and Collaboration

Quick - tell me the top three ideas of your colleagues right now! It's hard to know, isn't it? Where do you go to look that up?

The usual options for sharing ideas inside companies are ad hoc and siloed:

• Email


• Presentations on a hard drive


• Customer service databases

It's hard to maintain a good innovation pace when these are your tools. Visibility into innovation efforts is nonexistent. This is particularly problematic in large enterprises.

Ideas exposed to a larger cross-section of the organization benefit from a diversity of perspectives. University of Chicago professor Ronald Burt conducted a study of a Supply Chain Group for a major American electronics company. His goal was to understand how employees generate the best ideas. One finding was this:

Thus, value accumulates as an idea moves through the social structure, each transmission from one group to another having the potential to add value. In this light, there is an incentive to define work situations such that people are forced to engage diverse ideas.

To gain the benefits of multiple perspectives, companies need a common place where all employees can post ideas, rate them and provide feedback.

Selecting, implementing, publicizing and using a cross-enterprise innovation platform falls right within the work of innovation strategy.


Specific Innovation Processes

Generally, companies that use Spigit have well-defined innovation processes when we talk with them. They understand their organizations, and what it will take for an idea to move forward. These processes often are provided to us in the form of Visio-like process flows.

Contrast this with the usual way ideas advance. They need to get traction at the departmental level. This is a powerful location for the development of a good idea. But then the trajectory of an idea becomes less clear. Ownership issues, attention limitations, and the need to coordinate multiple constituencies makes it hard to advance an idea.

In contrast, an innovation strategy includes taking on this issue, and establishing an open, consistent process for determining how ideas move forward. This includes identifying which managers have approval responsibility for ideas.

Of the four elements described here, this may be the biggest effort that goes into an innovation strategy. Innovations can touch a lot of employees and departments, and working through them can be tough. Paving a path ahead of time is incredibly valuable and necessary.


An Innovation Strategy Lets Companies Make Their Own Luck

Companies, all of them, have in their possession a deep reservoir of innovation talent. It's really incumbent on the companies to establish conditions to tap that talent. And make employees feel like innovation is anticipated and welcome.

This is the importance of a corporate innovation strategy.


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on The Importance of Innovation Strategy by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Hutch Carpenter is the Director of Marketing at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Innovation Perspectives - Strategy From Above?

This is the fifth of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on The Importance of Innovation Strategy. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Dan Keldsen

Arguably there is no important time than NOW to ensure that your organization has an innovation strategy.

After all, without a strategy, how are you going to making the changes to your business that you need to make, in order to survive the economic storm, and (if you move quickly and intelligently) to be well positioned to blow past your competition as the economy improves?


But strategy isn't enough...

Yes, companies need an innovation strategy - and ideally, that innovation strategy is no different from the business strategy at large.

As very smart, and quite wealthy friend of mine once said in doing the upkeep on his home - "if you aren't fixing it up, it's breaking down." And that most certainly applies to businesses and business models as well as it does to homes.

So, innovation strategy should either be your business strategy, or a sub-set of the overall organizational strategy, but strategy, even very deep, extremely well planned strategy will not do a SINGLE thing to move your company forward.


Execution is what counts - the rest is theory

There is an IBM commercial from the early 2000s that I frequently reference, that goes something like this:

A business managers has a room full of his team, and he's proudly showing off the 3-inch thick paper binder with the "strategy that took us 12 months and 3 million dollars to create. It's the most cutting-edge strategy we've ever had, and we're extremely excited by this. My question to all of you is... can we do it?"

(dead silence for 10 seconds)

No! Absolutely not! No way!

(the manager is stricken, deathly pale as the team lampoons the strategy)


Strategy needs to connect to reality


By connecting to reality, I mean that while the goal may be to "think out of the box" - you need to take into account how your business operates now, what skills, technical capabilities, existing technology investments, partnerships, clients, etc. exist RIGHT NOW.

Connecting the dots between the current-state of the business, with the future-state of the business, means that the hard work to actually walk that path from here to there, needs to happen, and THAT is all about execution.


Is your team ready? Is your business ready? All of it? A certain piece of it?

Humans are adaptable creatures by nature, but some are more adaptable than others - which is why recommend taking a more scientific approach to understanding which people are equipped to create the brilliant, disruptive ideas, who can run them to actually delivery as a new product or service, who SHOULD be paired up to solve problems, who absolutely should NOT be working on similar teams, and so on. Measure their problem-solving and decision-making strengths, and take the best of the best for each type of problem that comes up, and the odds of successfully solving and executing on the solutions are that much more likely.

While it's far easier to identify the weaknesses of teams or business models, leveraging the strengths is for many, quite difficult. And while some companies can "turn on a dime" or instigate rapid change throughout the organization, more often, there is a leading and a trailing edge to certain areas of the organization that are likely to make the jump to the future first.


Lead and Pull

Leverage the adapative leaders and pull-through to the rest of your organization, and you just might be able to make your innovation strategy turn into reality.


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on The Importance of Innovation Strategy by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Dan Keldsen is Co-founder and Principal at Information Architected in Boston, MA, providing analysis, consulting and training services to organizations worldwide on the application of technology to knowledge workers and managers.

Innovation Perspectives - What/Why/When/How/Where/Who

This is the fourth of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on The Importance of Innovation Strategy. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Drew Boyd


I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

- Rudyard Kipling (1902)


Here is a simple template to create your company's innovation strategy:

WHAT:

• Determine what business lines are to be innovated.


• Determine what products or services within those business lines need innovation.


• Establish a portfolio model that compares innovation output from one business line to another.


• Rank order business lines based on the strength of their innovation portfolio pipelines.

WHY:

• Determine how much innovation is needed. Use a tool like Map-the-Gap.


• Tie innovation to a strategy framework such as The Big Picture.


• Focus innovation exercises to link directly to the strategy framework.


• Use the framework to identify market adjacencies.

WHEN:

• Schedule innovation workshops at the front end of the business cycle to help determine what projects will get funding in the next budget cycle.


• Schedule innovation workshops after the planning cycle to jump-start new initiatives for the upcoming year.

HOW:

• Choose specific methods of innovation to be used based on efficacy and results.


• Combine different methods to leverage the strengths of each.


• Integrate the methods by using the output of one as inputs for the others.

WHERE:

• Set aside space with the specific purpose of conducting innovation workshops.

WHO:

• Form innovation "dream teams" to maximize the success of innovation efforts.


• Schedule training on how to use innovation methods.


• Examine the company's innovation culture to diagnose where it is weak.


• Establish an innovation competency model.


• Designate and empower commercial leaders to drive innovation efforts.

You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on The Importance of Innovation Strategy by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Drew Boyd is Director of Marketing Mastery for Johnson & Johnson (Ethicon Endo-Surgery division). He is also Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati and Executive Director of the MS-Marketing program. Follow him at www.innovationinpractice.com and at http://twitter.com/drewboyd

Innovation Perspectives - Yes, No, and Everything In Between

This is the third of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on The Importance of Innovation Strategy. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Mike Brown

Does an organization need an innovation strategy? Let me say, unequivocally, "It depends."

Depending on its business situation, there are multiple strategic innovation approaches. Here are three different business situations and a potential innovation path for each:

Situation 1 - It's All About Innovation

If innovation is fundamental to an organization's success and competitiveness, then innovation "matters" for that business. And when innovation passes the "does it matter" test, beyond an innovation strategy, it becomes more important that innovation be woven into overall business strategy.


Situation 2 - Innovation Is Appreciated

For many (most?) companies, innovation is viewed as beneficial, but it doesn't matter in the same strategic sense as in the first group. If that's the case, having visible top-level support for innovation can take the place of an explicit innovation strategy.

Beyond that, it's vital to manage the environment's receptivity to innovation. This starts with assessing the degree to which critical success factors (CSFs) for innovation exist. If CSFs are largely in place, the primary task becomes integrating innovation into the company's strategic direction. If some or all aren't present, step one is making moves to put them in place to create a higher probability of innovation success. Among innovation CSFs are:

• Having an innovation-friendly environment - Even absent an innovation strategy, are processes in place that are conducive to exploration and development of new ideas? Organizational forces should motive and support work across disciplines and recognize individual and group contributions to innovation.


• A longer term sensibility - Some innovation starts yielding near-term returns. Often, it takes longer. There has to be some rope to play with (both in terms of time and resource investment) for a sustained innovation effort.


• Fact-based strategic perspectives are encouraged - Is innovative, strategic thinking considered to be the purview of senior leadership or is it cultivated broadly? Multiple, perspectives are vital to triggering, thoroughly vetting, and successfully implementing new ideas. The closer to customers those strategic perspectives originate, the better, and that's usually not exclusively from senior managers.


• A basic comfort level with disturbing the status quo - Moving into new areas is usually messy organizationally and in the marketplace. These disruptions need to be understood as innovation precursors. Is your organization ready to fail fast & learn quickly if it's a step to successful innovation?


• A willingness to bring diverse parties into innovation - There's now more recognition and acceptance of the incredible potential in ideas coming from outside an organization. Does yours have an externally-oriented view that introduces broad inputs into innovation?


• Metrics are used to motivate and refine innovation, not quash it - Innovation has to produce value for customers and the business to be worthwhile. Monitoring value requires solid metrics. Are they (or can they be put) in place to help steer innovation efforts and monitor their impacts without being used to prematurely shut-down exploration?

Situation 3 - Innovation Gets in the Way

When an organization's sentiment runs counter to innovation, underground innovation is an alternative. This implies working around the system to create and implement innovation efforts beneficial for the business. Going low-key can provide several advantages:

• It potentially lowers expectations and increases maneuverability. With few resources, there's potentially less scrutiny, leading to some freedom to experiment, make mistakes, learn, and still drive results.


• Parties who participate are likely to be more committed. With a certain amount of risk in joining forces with an underground effort, people won't typically get in half-way.


• It forces more ingenuity. Cut-off from some fundamental resources, you have to understand limitations upfront, spell out a plan for what you won't have, and innovate in areas you wouldn't have considered previously.


• You can focus on creating deliverables instead of justifying each innovation step. With a near-term results oriented management team, being able to introduce them to an innovation that's nearer completion can be beneficial.


• You can get an advantage relative to competitors. They may be taking a more traditional route to innovation or completely eliminating innovation programs while you're still trying to move ahead.

What Do You Do?

You know your business situation. Consider the range of possibilities and select the level of strategic innovation focus that makes sense for your business and the desired results.


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on The Importance of Innovation Strategy by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Mike Brown is an award-winning marketer and strategist with extensive experience in research, strategy, branding, and sponsorship marketing. He's a frequent keynote presenter on innovation and authors Brainzooming!

Innovation Perspectives - Leveraging Intrapreneurs

This is the second of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on The Importance of Innovation Strategy. On the heels of Braden Kelley's kickoff, here is another perspective:

by Steve Todd

If a corporation lacks a cohesive and well understood innovation strategy, can it still be productive and creative? I believe the answer is yes. Individual pockets of innovation can result in new products and services that significantly add to the corporate bottom line.

The downside of this approach is the amount of potential corporate energy that gets left on the table. Corporate intrapreneurs should be aware of and rallying around a well-defined innovation strategy. If they are not, then the company is missing out on a great opportunity to generate (and deliver!) breakthrough innovation.


The Role of an Innovation Strategy

I like this simple definition of a corporate intrapreneur: an innovator that conceives and delivers an idea at a large corporation. Every business unit has these types of individuals. They are uniquely creative, they are extraordinarily productive, and they collaborate well. They have successfully guided their idea through the hands of marketers, designers, testers, documenters, and salespeople. They are influential.

And their business units want to keep them right where they are.

Without a corporate innovation strategy, that's right where they'll stay. They will continue to innovate within their stovepipe and grow their core business.

A corporate innovation strategy must unite intrapreneurs by encouraging collaboration among them, without undue disruption to their respective business units!


Best Practices in Creating the Innovation Strategy

A corporate innovation strategy that effectively leverages intrapreneurs has the following characteristics. If implemented properly, it:

• searches for, identifies, and engages corporate intrapreneurs


• enables corporate (and global) relationships via social media tools


• provides a career growth track that rewards intrapreneurial collaboration


• gathers intrapreneurs for idea submissions and innovation summits


• provides opportunity for external collaboration with industry and university experts


• sends them to customers for bi-directional conversations

This strategy should be "loosely centralized" within a corporation, and is often funded as part of the office of the CTO.


Integrating Innovation and Corporate Strategies

This type of innovation strategy establishes a strong intrapreneurial community. When critical changes in corporate strategy occur, new directions and edicts can be directly presented to the most influential innovators in the corporation. They can collaborate amongst themselves and brainstorm new ways to combine technologies and meet market needs. They can recommend the creation of new business units with new processes. They know how to get "new things" done and can influence their co-workers to implement the strategy.

Intrapreneurs become stifled when they remain in their stovepipes. Get them to collaborate across boundaries and expose them to corporate direction.

And most importantly, get them in front of their customers.


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on The Importance of Innovation Strategy by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Steve Todd is a high-tech inventor and author of the book Innovate With Influence. An EMC Intrapreneur with over 140 patent applications and billions in product revenue, he writes about innovation on his personal blog, the Information Playground.

Innovation Perspectives - Directed Innovation for Strategic Success

This is the first of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on The Importance of Innovation Strategy. To kick it off, here is my perspective:


It seems like every organization has a vision and a mission statement, and some even have mantra's. Blogging Innovation's mantra is to make innovation and marketing insights accessible.

At the same time organizations are creating their mission statement, many take the time to create an organizational strategy, only to then neglect the creation of an innovation strategy.

I believe that every organization should create an innovation strategy with the same diligence and precision that they attempt to create their organizational strategy with. Has your organization created an innovation strategy?

An innovation strategy, what's that?

An innovation strategy sets the innovation direction for an organization. It gives members of the organization an idea of what new achievements and directions will best benefit the organization when it comes to innovation. As with organizational strategy, innovation strategy must determine WHAT the organization should focus on (and WHAT NOT to) so that tactics can be developed for HOW to get there.

There are two main kinds of innovation - directed innovation (or intellectual innovation) and emergent innovation (or instinctual innovation). An innovation strategy benefits both types. An innovation strategy provides the contraints that the organization's directed innovation needs, while also providing the focus that helps emergent innovation, well, emerge over time as members refer back to the innovation strategy.

Best practices indicate that innovation succeeds best when it is constrained. But for some people, it doesn't make sense that innovation needs to be constrained. - "Don't great ideas come from giving people free reign?"

The short answer is no. By giving people constraints, it actually sets their creativity free, but in a directed fashion.

A well-defined innovation strategy helps the organization define which innovation challenges to focus on and what tactics will best help the organization overcome those challenges. An innovation strategy provides a map to refer back to as projects and ideas are being evaluated.

An innovation strategy should communicate to the organization the kinds of innovation that will be most valuable to the organization in helping it achieve its corporate strategy. It is best practice for an innovation strategy to support the organizational strategy.

Without an innovation strategy, an organization can find itself pulled in many different directions, dissipating its innovation energy and preventing it from accelerating its innovation pace by combining the outcomes of strategically-related innovation efforts.

Finally, even those organizations that have successfully created an innovation strategy, often miss the most important part - to communicate it out very clearly to all members of the organization, so that members know exactly what the innovation strategy is and precisely how to contribute. If you've done a good job of this, you won't be afraid to ask your members the following question - What is our innovation strategy?

Are you afraid?


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on The Importance of Innovation Strategy by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.