- Plan: Figure out what to do and how to do it -
- Staff with people who have innovation proclivities and listen to them
- Seek out suppliers, customers and community groups who have commensurate innovation proclivities and listen to them
- Set up goals based on searching and finding uniqueness within (and even outside of) Drucker's sources; do your best to set up financial goals but realize they are quite difficult to establish based on such uncertainly.
- Create an organizational-open-mind for changes and debate... but always decide on action to investigate and develop the uniqueness
- Seek support from private, as well as, government groups.
"The U.S. innovation system today is much more collaborative that it was several decades ago and the federal government is playing a much more supportive and important role in innovation.
Whereas the lion's share of the R&D 100 Award-winning U.S. innovations in the 1970s came from corporations acting on their own, most of the R&D 100 Award-winning U.S. innovations in the last two decades have come from partner-ships involving business and government, including federal labs and federally funded university research." 6
- Establish a process open to surprises, inconsistencies and debate
- Treat complacency and risk aversion as enemies
- Streamline sluggish, bureaucratic processes to reduce development times
- "Embrace the process, not the event"7
- Act: Just do it -
- Keep your eyes open, your mind open, and maintain ambition to do something to promote change.
- Search for uniqueness - Innovation can also be a change, concept or thing that is new to a culture. It doesn't even matter if the change, concept or thing has existed for centuries - it is unique if it is new to the people who encounter it.
- Find and analyze ways to exploit the uniqueness.
- Understand the recognized uniqueness within all environments
- Communicate - communicate - COMMUNICATE! See: Product Design Review, Say - What? Why? Who? When? How?
- KISS! (Keep It Simple S---); striving for perfection can reduce or even eliminate chances of success.
- Be aware that innovation may need to be repressed during certain critical times within the product development process - see Where Does Innovation Fit Within Product Development?
- Also be aware that business' current success and processes may not fit well with the new (potential) success of innovation. "...the management practices that allow companies to be leaders in mainstream markets are the same practices that cause them to miss the opportunities offered by disruptive technologies."8 Part of the supporting structure of a company running on the success of past innovation might need change in order to manage the disruption of a new innovation potential.
- Measure: How do you know when innovation succeeds? Basically, the market speaks - it likes what it sees. But many try to get a financial handle on innovation before there is actual success. This appears to be to most difficult part of the innovation effort, so can this be done? You decide.
- It's difficult to measure the success of the innovation process according to many innovation pundits:
- "Innovation happens long before the benefit is realized."9
- 'The wish was not father to the thought."10
- "Some of the largest R&D spenders live in a happy world where the number of patents goes up, whilst the returns slope downwards."11
- There seem to be no definitive metrics for innovation, as measures of success vary by company and industry. It appears that the most common metrics of innovation success are time to market, product sales, patent creation and R&D effort; but, as with any type of statistic, the numbers "must be looked at closely in order to withstand analysis".
- Patent creation - Some companies create many patents and boast of their innovative capabilities. But how many of the resulting products make it in, or even get to, the market place?
- R&D - This metric assumes that the amount of money spent on R&D directly correlates to the amount of innovative products, processes and services that get to the market place. Same results as for patents.
- Total shareholder return is gaining in popularity as a measure. But for the most part the field is still open to a metrics competition.
- For more information about measuring innovation see The Boston Consulting Group's interesting and useful report12.
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Richard Haney, 2009
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