What are your organisation’s innovation goals for the year ahead?
It’s essential to set innovation goals
Innovation should be core to your strategy. Some simple things to remember:
- Be clear about your goals. Define them and the type of innovation outcomes you want. Are you seeking small improvements, a defensive play, or opening up new opportunities? Begin with the end in mind, one of Covey’s Seven Habits.
- Innovation is about doing things differently (or doing different things) to get better outcomes. That’s it. So: Keep-It-Simple-Stupid.
- Innovation outcomes are about productivity. Increasing the outputs you get from the inputs you provide. Productivity is measurable. Be clear about the business case, what progress proof points are, what timelines/horizons, governance, and how productivity payoffs can help fund innovation activity.
- There are two main types of innovation: incremental or disruptive. Each comes with different risks and payoffs, and each should be part of your strategy. You must know where you’re playing and how you’ll prioritise activities.
- Incremental innovation is about small changes and small incremental benefits to solve well-defined problems. It’s problem-led, starts with analysis and convergent thinking. It’s “if-this-then-that…” It’s existing logic.
- Disruptive innovation is about game-changing innovation and delivers value in new ways. It kills the old way of doing things and is idea-led. It’s about new possibilities and divergent thinking and new maps. It’s “if-this-then-what…?” It’s new logic.
- Fund your innovation activity. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly. If you don’t have budget for it, then it’s not part of your strategy. Failing to budget is failing to plan is planning to fail. It’s unacceptable to set people up to fail with targets but no budget. That’s responsibility without authority.
- Methods. Different approaches yield different outcomes (and timeframes). Start with the first 5 questions and then address this one. If you’re not clear on the why and what, the how doesn’t matter.