Deciding Innovation Strategy
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.
What is the number one reason innovators fail to get timely results? Surely, it must be that they don’t have a firm idea of what they should be achieving up front.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve discovered a group of innovators who don’t have any idea what their organisation’s innovation strategy is. Usually, you can tell this is the case because the innovators are unable to answer the question “why do you have an innovation programme?”.
Deciding the overall objective of an innovation programme is the most fundamental, and most important, decision innovators will ever be asked to make.
It’s a decision, however, that can be quite easy to make, as there are really only three strategic options available.
The first is obvious: don’t do innovation at all. Rely on what worked in the past. Accept that a “back to basics” approach is possible, and that continuing practices appropriate two decades ago will, at least, let the business continue.
Making the choice not to innovate is perfectly reasonable, as long as everyone agrees up front.
Another innovation strategy is Play-2-Win. This is the strategy you’re adopting when you can say, without any doubt in your mind, that innovation will the centre of competitive advantage for your organisation in the future.
Making the strategic decision to do Play-2-Win innovation is not something undertaken lightly, since it will usually require relatively significant investments at the beginning. Of course, the payoff will probably be, given enough time, extremely significant.
The third kind of innovation strategy is Play-Not-2-Lose. Play-Not-2-Lose accepts that doing new things to maintain parity with competitors is the primary reason to have an innovation function. You may not get the market windfalls that accompany a big breakthrough, but you do get relatively good returns in the short term.
Choosing which of these strategies to follow is actually a matter of evaluating your organisation’s risk appetite.
Deciding which strategy to adopt up front is a critical thing to do, because everything that follows will be different depending on which choice you make.
If you’d like to find out more about Innovation for your organisation, then you might consider reviewing James A Gardner’s free online book which includes a chapter on Innovation Strategy.
