It only takes a cursory search of many of the leading management strategy journals and periodicals to figure out that Innovation is on the mind of many senior and influential leaders within the business world.

We are finding however that with a presumed lack of a comprehensive solution to motivating, capturing and managing innovation in the enterprise organisations often implement a “just capture the ideas, we’ll figure the rest out later” strategy to fostering innovation.

The thought goes like this:

Since we don’t have a structured program in place to capture, formulate, valuate, define and select ideas for investment, we’ll just focus on capturing them for now. That way when we finally do define our process for managing innovation we’ll have a bucket full of ideas to work from.”

Sounds reasonable, but we think that this can be inherently counter to the anticipated outcomes of this strategy.

Dangers of an “Ideation-Only” Strategy

Innovator Disenfranchisement

Our team has seen this in several cases in the past two years specifically where organisations have implemented a tool (typically software-driven) for capturing ideas for organisational, process, service, product or market improvement. Obviously the implication of this type of “21st Century Suggestion Box” is that the ideas actually get acted upon.

When there is a lack of follow-through on ideas the innovators become disenfranchised, lose trust or faith in the organisation’s ability to execute or just feel unvalued.

This disengagement can take substantially longer time to repair and can be a costly undertaking.

Unmanaged Execution

Because the process of cultivating an idea from conception to implementation is not structured, often it is left to the Herculean efforts of a few to bat a home run. Without a clear mandate, guidance, resources and motivation good ideas can often die from lack of support.

Emotional Investment

When there is no transparent and structured process of assessing the alignment and business value of an idea, innovation can fall into a subjective (and often politically-influenced) investment decision where the “popular guy” with the bad idea is awarded investment over the “less popular guy” with a great game-changing idea.

Benefits of Innovation Management (vs. Simple Ideation)

There are many benefits to a structure innovation management program, including transparency, objectivity, communications, team building, reduced cost, reduced risk, increased return, etc. Some of the following however are less known or discussed… all however can be measured and argue for formalisation (not bureaucratisation) of the innovation process within your organisation.

Developing Informal Networks

As ideas gain support, invariably informal networks will form around the idea. In some cases this will be in the form of communities of practice and in others it will be stakeholders that seek to gain a benefit from the idea in question. As an organisation you want to support and encourage these informal networks even if they reach across organisational boundaries. Why? Because networks-of-interest, communities-of-practice and other such informal networks inherently drive worker engagement, job satisfaction and even capacity and efficiency.

Strategic Alignment, Focusing on Challenges

When the Innovation Management Lifecycle includes strategy alignment up front whereby organisational challenges and priorities are well defined, then the creative efforts of the innovators are focused on defined issues and opportunities which serves as a pre-qualifier for the idea generating process (or at least the pre-condition for additional investment).

The flip side to this however is that innovation can occur outside of known challenges, for instance to address a new market or to resolve a problem that has not fully manifested itself.

Portfolio Management

With finite and even constrained resources, it is important to understand how to manage a portfolio of innovation and to understand funding requirements as they pertain to anticipated return and alignment to strategic objectives. Simply the ability to increase investment in innovation that contributes most directly to the bottom line or some other objective is argument enough for a structured methodology for managing your innovation portfolio, but even more so (and often less appreciated) is the ability to “kill” a concept early if it is not aligned with corporate priorities, doesn’t address a problem, is too risky or just doesn’t offer a return. This alone can reduce investment in failed innovation and ultimately increase the confidence of management and the workforce in the outcomes of investment in innovation.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that modern portfolio theory applies to your innovation portfolio. The concepts around risk and return directly correlate with the information that we need to be tracking in the early stages of the innovation process lifecycle.

Implementing an Innovation Management Program

Innovation management does not have to be over thought. In fact, implementing an innovation management program can be iterative and start with a simple ideation strategy, including a suggestion box (or even an electronic form of one).

Our team has worked successfully with a number of clients to get started quickly, easily and cheaply in order to start capturing value in your team’s inherent ability to generate business value-adding ideas.

For an interesting look into an Innovation Process Management solution, based on Microsoft software, take a look at this video: http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/us/details/eaec7255-fbfa-4329-8e72-17a1e22e8f16

If you have further questions or comments regarding Innovation Process Management, ideation or anything related to this area, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly (Jame.Healy@Avantage.com) or to leave a comment below.