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What metrics do you use you measure the results of your innovation team? Do you count the number of new ideas they have collected? How about the number of new ideas they have generated or the number of new product introductions they have been responsible for?

How do you deal with the situation where you’re supposed to innovate but have no budget?

How big should an innovation effort’s budget be to guarantee success?

One of the key questions one needs to resolve at the commencement of an innovation programme is what sort of innovator you should hire to lead everything.

Most organisations imagine innovation to constitute transformational initiatives that create brand new revenue or define new categories. These innovations, typically, are termed radical or breakthrough by most commentators. They’re typified as being extremely speculative, but with high returns. In other words, the chance of them working is pretty low, but when they do, you have a hit on your hands.

Disruptive innovation is about changing the goal posts for an existing market in some way. Disruption has the ability to make even a small organisation successful in the face of a much larger competitor. The way this happens is twofold:

Innovation Culture is another of those thorny innovation issues which will likely engender significant argument in any organisation. The question really boils down to this: is innovation part of everyone’s day job, or is it something which should be handled by a central team?

If you’ve made the decision to start an innovation programme, you’ll likely spend a significant amount of time hiring people who will be responsible for driving new things forward.

Organisations that can say – with their hands on their hearts – that they’ll make innovation the centrepiece of their competitive response to everything have adopted a Play-2-Win innovation Strategy. ING followed this strategy when it released it’s Direct product, disrupting the deposits market in the process.

There’s a new kind of economy emerging: the innovation economy. It replaces the knowledge economy that used to be the source of value for modern organisations, and the replacement is happening whether organisations are ready for it or not. In fact, it is becoming obvious that companies which have been successful in the recent past, such as Microsoft and General Motors, have weathered the global economic crisis little better than companies which are based on industrial age economics, such as agriculture and manufacturing.

Failure is a fact of life for innovation teams, and rates of 80% or more are not uncommon.

On average, an innovation programme will last 18 months before it gets cancelled. Most of the time, this happens because the people involved haven’t gotten results quickly enough.

Though it seems like common sense, many organisations don’t define what they mean by innovation before they start innovating. Then, they wonder why there are few decent innovation outcomes they can show to stakeholders.