Managing a portfolio of innovations Innovation Leaders have to manage multiple innovative initiatives across the corporation. How can a framework be put in place without overcomplicating the process? A case study: I decided to keep this framework as simple as possible and to organize innovations in 3 groups (and one additional group for those successful innovations that were being scaled to multiple countries or brands). The 3 groups were: Focused Ideation Criteria: an new idea that provided a potential solution for a priority business/customer problem End result: a “one-pager“, a short overview of the problem to be solved, the innovative solution and the potential value that would be created Example: the addition of a…

No! For Horizon 3 innovations, innovations far from the core business, I believe that a separate, dedicated innovation team is the most appropriate construction. “Separate” meaning operating independently from the current business teams. This team can be compiled with inside and/or outside employees to focus on disruptive innovations, without being distracted and held back by the short term priorities of typical business teams. I described an example of this in an earlier blog. For Horizon 1 and 2 innovations, it’s a bit of a different story: innovators should be as closely linked to the core business teams as possible. Here, I believe that every employee should be invited to come…

Attack on multiple fronts  As discussed in my earlier blog, strong silos don’t have to inhibit internal innovation. Innovation can be facilitated across them. Sometimes, a silo can play the role of a vendor (for free).  How can Innovation Leaders help innovators break through silos? How can they help innovators find collaborators in another silo? How can they help overcome barriers to collaboration across silos? Following are a few of my experiences in stimulating collaboration between the commercial and the manufacturing silos. I’m selecting manufacturing as many innovators in the “commercial silo” wanted to experiment with innovations that included packaging and supply chain elements. Networking. Asking several manufacturing colleagues if…

When to engage collaborators When should innovators engage with internal collaborators? Too early and the collaborators may hold the innovators back. The collaborators may also waste their time as many early stage innovations fail. Too late and the innovators may have wasted their own time because an expert could have provided critical insights, e.g. in a highly regulated industry, like healthcare, one must engage some functions timely, like Compliance. How can Innovation Leaders facilitate this collaboration and provide guidance to innovators and collaborators at the same time? The way I addressed the question of ideal timing for internal collaboration was twofold: define who may need to be involved in a…