Supporting Methods and Procedures for Innovation

Publication Date: 27 June 2023

Abstract

TechVision believes that large organizations should pay as much attention to innovation as typically spent in core traditional business areas. Many businesses and industries that haven’t innovated and adapted to new technical and business models are no longer viable. To that end, TechVision continues to cover the topic of innovation with the third of our series of reports designed to help enterprises develop successful and sustainable innovation programs.

Our first report was an innovation level set that applied our traditional reference architecture model to innovation. Our second report provided guidelines focused on project level execution for key innovation initiatives and this report describes an overall program approach that enables innovation to be repeatable and predictable.

The Supporting Methods and Procedures layer of the Innovation Reference Architecture ensures consistency across the entire innovation system and measures the efficiency of both the entire innovation system and the individual capabilities. It is focused on increasing decision velocity and speed to value. This layer includes the support structure for the key aspects of innovation, collaboration, ideation, learning, implementation, and value realization.

This report explains each of these key aspects in detail and gives practical advice and guidance on improving your innovation system.

Authors:

Gary Zimmerman

Principal Consulting Analyst

[email protected]

Executive Summary

Innovation is a collaborative process that involves a series of conversations. The key question to consider is whether the right individuals can engage in the right conversations and work together effectively to bring about innovation.

Innovation = Conversation + Doing

Innovation is a combination of talking and doing, where the conversations up front involve strategic thinking and design, and the conversations during execution are geared towards reflection and response. By engaging in this dynamic process, value is realized through breakthroughs and improvements. It is essential to have ongoing dialogue and collaboration between individuals with diverse perspectives and skills to successfully innovate and bring new ideas to fruition. Therefore, innovation is a result of effective communication, teamwork, and a willingness to experiment, learn, and adapt.

Innovation is a complex and dynamic process that is not linear in nature. To understand innovation better, it is more useful to view it as a continuous conversation about three critical facets of a successful business.

A market/customer need – an end user trying to solve a specific problem.
A product/service – that uses specific technologies/capabilities to meet that need.
The business capabilities – that enable the delivery of the product/service.

By having a continuous conversation about these three facets, businesses can better understand and address their customers’ needs, enhance their products and services, and improve their business capabilities.

To scale innovation, it is essential to view innovation as a system that makes innovation efforts repeatable and predictable. Our report, “The Innovation Reference Architecture” provides guidance on how to achieve this critical objective and highlights the importance of innovation to the digital enterprise. The Innovation Reference Architecture discusses several aspects of innovation including governance, execution, and the subject of this report, supporting methods and procedures.

Collaboration

Teamwork is essential to getting things done. In today’s global and digital 24/7 world, challenges are more complex; it’s becoming increasingly important to bring more, diverse minds to the table and to break down silos.

The pandemic supercharged the adoption of collaboration platforms, and we at TechVision have written several reports covering the evolution and adoption of Communication, Collaboration, Content, and Activities (3CA) platforms from Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, and many others. We know that choosing the right collaboration platform helps streamline, automate, and accelerate the common activities that you do every day. Tasks such as sharing information, coming together around an issue, building consensus, progressing workflows, communicating, updating, alerting, reporting, searching and more. But the collaboration platform can’t just be another application that your teams use to get their jobs done.

Think of the collaboration platform as the engagement layer that floats above your existing applications. Instead of trying to code one-to-one integrations between apps, they all just need to integrate with the collaboration platform, where the users are – reducing all that wasteful context switching. Done right, this engagement layer answers this question, “Are the right people able to have the right conversations with each other and enabled to work with each other in the right way?”

Ideation

Fresh, new ideas help your organization stand out. With intense competition for resources, organizations must differentiate to survive. In this report we look at ideation as a combination of workflow management and a social platform.

By thinking of ideation as a workflow management system, organizations can identify areas where they can improve the process of generating and developing new ideas. This may involve streamlining the workflow to reduce inefficiencies, improving communication and collaboration between stakeholders, or investing in new tools and technologies to facilitate the process. Ultimately, optimizing the ideation workflow can lead to greater innovation and success for the organization.

Ultimately, ideation is a voluntary exercise that requires individuals to be motivated and engaged in the process. It is at a fundamental level a social exercise. In other words, Innovation is a social activity where engagement and interaction are vital; and the Idea Management platform needs to reflect the characteristics of today’s social media platforms to drive engagement and interaction.

Learning

Continuous learning is essential to innovation because it enables individuals and organizations to acquire and apply new knowledge and skills that can lead to breakthrough ideas, processes, products, and services. Continuous learning enables individuals and organizations to stay current with changing trends and technologies, foster creativity and idea generation, develop new skills and competencies, improve problem-solving abilities, and encourage experimentation and risk-taking.

Knowledge-sharing systems are a crucial tool in continuous learning. When people share what they know, your organization will learn all kinds of useful information. This knowledge-sharing system will soon be populated with everything from FAQs and product troubleshooting tips to high-level documents about the company’s goals and mission. Knowledge sharing may be accelerated with technical advances such as Generative AI—a topic TechVision recently covered in an executive level set report.

Integrating competitive intelligence (external knowledge), business intelligence (internal knowledge), and collaborative intelligence (knowledge for mutual benefit) can be a powerful tool for corporate learning. By combining these types of intelligence, organizations can gain a comprehensive understanding of their market, customers, competitors, and internal operations, which can inform strategic decision-making and help prioritize innovation initiatives.

Implementation

What good are new ideas if they are not put to use? Organizations must engage the best people to champion their ideas and keep those great ideas moving forward. This report explores IT value chain management and innovation project management as approaches to implementing ideas.

IT Value Chain Management, also known as IT4IT, is a framework that reflects the operating model of IT as a service value chain for businesses. The framework is organized around value streams that align IT capabilities to the needs of the business. The IT4IT framework addresses the issue of “Cobbler’s children,” where IT has traditionally solved internal IT problems with point solutions over time. To address this problem, the framework applies Enterprise Architecture (EA) principles to the IT value chain. The framework also has a tool chain that supports capabilities and is organized around a data model, allowing for the integration of different tools and systems. The approach to implementation involves breaking down silos and implementing a standard way of working across the IT capabilities of the enterprise. In summary, IT4IT is an innovative framework that helps organizations to better manage their IT value chain, enabling IT to deliver value to the business more efficiently and effectively.

Innovation project management is critical to value delivery. Innovation project management is a more fluid and flexible approach that focuses on creating new and innovative products, services, or processes. Innovation project management places a higher emphasis on problem-solving, experimentation, and the ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. Unlike traditional project management which is focused on delivering specific outcomes within predefined constraints, innovation project management does not always follow a set process or structure, and the primary goal is to remove risks around customer solution fit, product market fit, and business building.

Value realization

You don’t have innovation if your new ideas aren’t creating value. Organizations must implement ideas and programs identified as most effective in delivering value to stakeholders. You must innovate to help your customer easily get the value they expect. And you must be able to prove you have delivered the value you promised. Digital Experience Management and Customer Value Management are the capabilities that your enterprise needs to create, communicate, deliver, document, and capture value.

Figure 1: Realizing Customer Value

Digital Experience Management refers to the practice of managing the entire digital experience of customers or users across various digital channels, devices, and touchpoints. The goal of digital experience management is to create and deliver value through an engaging, personalized, and consistent digital experience to users, regardless of the device or channel they use to interact with your organization. Digital experience management is becoming increasingly important in today’s digital landscape, where customers expect seamless and personalized experiences across all digital touchpoints. With the rise of digital technologies and the growing importance of customer experience, digital experience management is set to become an essential component of any successful digital strategy.

Customer Value Management is a data-driven capability that helps every member of the revenue team have more consistent and impactful value conversations with prospects and customers. Customer Value Management helps product and solution teams engineer value into their offerings. It helps marketers communicate value using value benchmarks. It helps sellers to collaboratively discover value with customers in value assessments. And it helps Customer Success Managers to help clients to realize and reinforce the value they are getting.

Conclusion

Organizing and optimizing innovation across an enterprise is hard work. Most enterprises are not starting from scratch, they have built up knowledge, expertise, and capabilities in isolated pockets throughout the organization. Marketing has worked to be responsive and applied automation to that end. So has Sales. So has Product. So has IT. So has Customer Success. All optimized to address the existing business from their own perspectives. When you look to systematize innovation as a recognized business capability, you’ll have to discover and understand these assets that have been built up over time. Focus on customer value and integrate the existing capabilities that support realizing that value – over time. You cannot boil the ocean so use the idea of Minimal Viable Innovation System, something we describe in detail in this report, to establish what works now and what to prioritize for inclusion as it evolves though subsequent iterations of ideas.

Introduction

Innovation is not linear. It does not follow a predefined sequence of steps from idea to implementation. Rather, innovation is a continuous conversation between three facets of a successful business: a market/customer need, a product/service that meets that need, and the business capabilities that enable the delivery of the product/service. These three facets are constantly evolving and interacting with each other, requiring ongoing dialogue and feedback.

In our report “Innovation Execution”, we described how an individual idea is turned into realized value. The objective of that report was to describe how a toolset, associated training, and support can make sure each team has the capabilities necessary to transform an idea into value. But how do you coordinate and combine these individual efforts into an innovation capability at enterprise scale?

Innovation is critical to the digital enterprise and cannot be left to serendipity. It needs supporting platforms and processes that make the innovation efforts repeatable and predictable. This report is about providing the underlying structure that consistently supports innovation teams across the enterprise as they execute their efforts. It’s about outlining the capabilities necessary to answer these questions:

How do teams collaborate consistently across the product lifecycle and across innovation efforts?
How do they learn from internal efforts and from outside sources?
How can they let others share in what they learn?
How do they not waste time “rediscovering the wheel”?
How do they find and learn from experts?
How do they find the insights they need to understand the environment?
How do they collect the right resources?
How do they manage the flow of ideas?
How do they capture and communicate results?
And finally, how do they navigate within the complex environment of enterprise innovation?

The Supporting Methods and Procedures layer of the reference architecture ensures consistency across the entire innovation system and measures the efficiency of both the entirety and the individual capabilities. It is focused on increasing decision velocity and speed to value. This layer includes the support structure for the key aspects of innovation, collaboration, ideation, implementation, and value realization.

Collaboration is about teamwork. It is essential to getting things done in today’s complex and global environment. Collaboration involves breaking down silos and bringing diverse minds to the table. Some of the methods and procedures that support collaboration are:

3CA: a framework for creating cross-functional teams that are aligned, autonomous, accountable, and adaptable.
Knowledge Management: capabilities for capturing, sharing, and using knowledge across the organization.

The 3CA approach (Communication, Collaboration, and Coordination) and Knowledge Management are crucial capabilities that foster the conversations and learning that fuel progress across the entire innovation system.

Ideation is about generating fresh and new ideas that help the organization stand out. It involves differentiating from the competition and finding solutions to customer problems. Some of the methods and procedures that support ideation are:

Idea Management: a system for collecting, evaluating, and selecting ideas from various sources.
Strategic Intelligence Management: a process for gathering, analyzing, and disseminating information about the external environment and trends.

Ideation transforms ideas into concepts, products, epics, and stories that can be prioritized and implemented to deliver value.

Good ideas are useless if they are not put into action. Implementation is about putting ideas into action. It involves engaging the best people to champion the ideas and moving them forward through the innovation pipeline. Some of the methods and procedures that support implementation are:

IT value chain management (IT4IT): a standard reference architecture that reflects the operating model of IT as a service value chain. It organizes IT around value streams, supported by a tool chain and a data model.
Innovation Project Management: a discipline that applies agile principles and practices to innovation efforts.

You don’t have innovation if your ideas aren’t creating value. Value realization is about creating value from innovation. It involves implementing the ideas and programs that are most effective in delivering and demonstrating value to stakeholders. Some of the methods and procedures that support value realization are:

Digital experience management: makes it easier to orchestrate all your digital experiences – for every audience. By uncovering how your audiences feel about the experiences you deliver, you’re better able to optimize and improve them.
Customer value management: involves various activities across the customer journey, from understanding customer needs to capturing business value from satisfied customers.

We know from our research and experience that managing innovation activities can be very challenging in established companies and organizations. This is especially true when it comes to radical or disruptive innovations that are challenging the current ways of working, business models or organizational culture. Transformation and change are often an uphill battle; a battle that needs to be fought.

As Amy Banse, Former Head of Funds at Comcast Ventures, said in a recent interview, “A growing company has to reinvent itself on a regular basis.” That’s how Comcast grew from a local cable company into a leading content creation and delivery behemoth. And that’s how Amazon grew from an online bookstore to the world’s largest online marketplace, logistics company, AI assistant provider, live-streaming platform and, of course, a leading cloud computing platform.

Even if your enterprise’s innovation focus has been temporarily altered due to COVID, the way forward is clear. Evolving your business is facilitated by viewing innovation as a value chain of capabilities that can be organized and optimized to realize value for customers, employees, and the business itself.

A Systems Approach is Necessary.

Organizations are generally underestimating what it takes to make their innovation efforts successful, especially when they are seeking more radical, disruptive, or transformative innovations. Innovation attempts tend to be fragmented, ad hoc and episodic. That creates a need to find approaches that are more holistic, systematic, and sustainable over time. That changes the focus of innovation from singular events and projects to building longer-term innovation capabilities.

We also know that innovation activities can be managed to a large extent by creating the right conditions, removing barriers, and engaging people in the organization. The ability for an organization to innovate is dependent on several interconnected factors such as leadership, resources, culture, structures, processes and so on. This is why a systems approach is necessary for managing innovation activities.

Innovation System Management

An innovation management system provides a systemic and systematic approach for any organization to address their innovation challenges.

Figure 2: Three layers of innovation

In our report, “Innovation Governance” we described a holistic approach to guiding and sustaining innovation and is a vital part of business management. Innovation governance is about achieving this consistent approach supporting continuous learning, discovery, and improvement.

In, “Innovation Execution” we laid out our view of the best ways to utilize generally available tools and techniques to manage your individual innovation investments and efforts in support of the business strategy.

This report describes the structure (capabilities, workflows, platforms, and data) which need to evolve over time to support, at scale, the value streams inherent in enterprise innovation. As figure 3 shows, the value streams from idea to value interact with each other and exchange information and knowledge through the collaboration and communications, and intelligence and reporting layers.

Figure 3: The Innovation Support Structure

Organizing and integrating the value streams in this manner supports efficiency and consistency at scale as ideas move from imagination to business reality. Since innovation is a “contact” sport, we’re experimenting in this report by describing innovation as verbs rather than nouns. The report describes how different parts of the support structure enables that activity. So, to begin, innovating is collaborating.

Innovating is Collaborating

Most of us have been or still are (at least part time) working from home. It can be a stifling environment because there is no one around to turn to for a second opinion or advice, and there were few resources available to expand our knowledge base. This experience has made us realize how vital human interaction is to innovation.

Collaboration is one of the basic principles for sustainability and evolution of any organization of natural or artificial entities. Practically, collaboration is enabled through sharing information, resources, and responsibilities by distributed agents to jointly plan, implement, and analyze the activities required to achieve individual and common goals. Tangible benefits of collaboration are enhanced intelligence resulting in achieving something which is otherwise not possible for individuals, and/or with lesser efforts, and/or with lesser time, and/or with lesser cost, etc.

Collaboration plays a critical role in innovation by enabling the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and expertise between individuals and teams. Innovation often requires cross-functional collaboration, bringing together people with different skills, perspectives, and backgrounds to solve complex problems and develop new solutions. Here are some ways in which collaboration is essential to innovation:

Collaborative feedback speeds up the necessary iterations. An innovative solution is often a combination of ideas, from conception to delivery. Robert Weisberg, Creativity expert and author of “Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts” studied famous creators and suggested that creative production results from “chains” of connected ideas that flesh out the original thinking. Collaboration with others can speed up the chains of connected ideas that result in something innovative. Speed is the last great competitive advantage, so if you want to deliver something fresh, speed is crucial to delivering innovation before others do. Having open-minded people around you can quickly validate whether the idea will have merit and help build upon that idea…and alternatively, they can help you save time by quickly burning through bad ideas.
Collaboration results in more connections to people that can help push a good idea forward. Successful innovation involves more than a great idea. Even if it’s ground-breaking, you need to promote the idea so that others adopt or buy into it. You might need resources. You might need partners. You need great people to help execute the idea. Collaboration with others expands your social circle of connections to make things happen.
Collaborative teams provide energy and help overcome the expected resistance. New ideas are often born into a hostile environment and a team of people can provide the support to push through the inertia. Often, ideas not invented by management can be seen as a threat, so having a group helps push through the expected resistance and doubt. Team feedback can also provide energy to keep going through periods of uncertainty.
Collaboration helps ideas reach implementation. Innovation results from implementation of a complete solution or idea. There are a million good ideas floating around in the creative genius of the world that will never get implemented. That’s because innovation, at its very core, requires people to change deeply ingrained behaviors: for example, to communicate over a new kind of device, to drive a car with a novel engine, or to trust a new business process.

So, successful innovators are less in the business of invention, than they are in the business of changing people’s behavior. Applied social psychology if you will. Collaboration builds support and adoption though trust, communication, leadership, and connections.

In summary, collaboration is critical to innovation as it enables individuals and teams to combine diverse perspectives, foster creativity, share knowledge, provide feedback, and improve problem-solving. By working together, individuals can develop truly innovative solutions that drive progress and success. But how do you work together when you’re not in the same room, or even the same time zone? That’s where a collaboration platform comes in.

Think of the collaboration platform as the engagement layer that floats above your existing applications. Instead of trying to code one-to-one integrations between apps, they all just need to integrate with the collaboration platform, where the users are – reducing all that wasteful context switching. To maximize engagement, look for answers to the following questions.

What are people using right now?

Collaboration tools are one of the most common places to find ‘shadow IT’. Teams find their own solutions because existing ones (email, meetings, simple chat) aren’t doing the job. It’s important to find out just how many different collaboration tools, apps, and cloud services your employees are using (chances are the answer is dozens). Include everything from email, chat, messaging and conferencing apps to project management tools, shared drives, cloud file stores, wikis, intranets, and knowledge bases.

More importantly, look at what users are trying to do when they source their own tools. Is it about improving visibility and alignment? Is agility the issue? Speed of response? Including remote team members?

Even before you divide these into meaningful buckets according to their function, the sheer number of different tools tells you a lot and helps you to size and scope your opportunity. The big win comes from rationalizing your company’s collaboration tools – not just to save money, but to increase impact.

How well does your collaboration platform work with your existing software?

Consider the depth of integration: simply sending an alert from a software tool into the right collaboration channel is good. But can people also act on that new information, right from within the channel?

Think about custom integrations: how easy will it be for your people to create custom apps that integrate your existing software into your collaboration platform?

How well do you secure all your collaboration platform activities?

Committing to business agility means coming to grips with some traditionally risky activities, such as sharing sensitive data, bringing in external partners and taking devices outside the office. To any security professional, moves like this can be highly concerning. Your teams need to be able to share sensitive information with authorized colleagues, but the business needs control, compliance, and auditability. It shouldn’t be a trade-off.

Do you want to bring in collaborators from outside the enterprise?

Work used to happen almost entirely in-house. Today, it’s increasingly distributed across remote workers, suppliers, contractors, consultants, and outsourcers. If your teams can’t include all these outside contributors in your collaborative work, they’ll always be context shifting in and out of emails, phone calls and other messaging tools. That increases friction and slows work down. As no company is an island, you need a collaboration platform that can include outside participants without compromising security.

Fully leveraging the capabilities of a centralized collaboration platform can make a big impact on the things that matter most – things such as agility, alignment, responsiveness, customer-centricity, and speed of innovation.

Innovating is Ideating

Increasingly, companies will compete based on the speed at which they can discover, develop, and implement ideas for new products and services. To compete at this level, organizations must efficiently tap into the creativity of all their employees. Not only that, but they must also be adept at focusing employees’ creative energies around key business issues — gathering and evaluating ideas efficiently, and quickly identifying those with the greatest bottom-line potential for implementation.

Idea management, by definition, means creating a systematic process for the development of ideas. For any organization that values innovation, having an effective method for realizing idea management is a necessity due to the fleeting nature of ideas.

Idea management software tools are designed to help organizations focus their employees on specific business issues. This tends to result in a larger quantity of high-quality ideas. Also, because today’s idea management systems are powered by databases, setting up and managing a closed-loop evaluation process – which automatically reminds evaluators of upcoming deadlines and unevaluated ideas – is much easier to set up and administer.

Idea management systems also share some common roots with knowledge management systems and collaboration systems – Web-based technologies that help organizations to capture, share and leverage their collective knowledge, expertise, and wisdom. Because they track ideas from inception to implementation, idea management systems make it much easier to track key metrics, including the percentage of ideas submitted vs. those that have been implemented, and the value generated by ideas that the company has implemented.

Idea management technology helps organizations to gather ideas from all employees, evaluate them and bring them to market faster.

As innovation grows in importance as a competitive advantage, idea management systems are poised to become the catalyst that can help companies to compete at levels never before possible.

Some are integrated with 3CA platforms to ensure seamless usage due to consistent user interface.

Figure 4 – The scope of Idea Management

Idea Management is a Workflow

Thinking of idea management as a workflow can help organizations to better understand and optimize the process of generating and developing new ideas. Here are some key steps in an idea management workflow:

Idea generation – The first step in an idea management workflow is generating ideas. This can be achieved through brainstorming sessions, ideation challenges, or by soliciting ideas from employees through an idea management platform.
Idea screening – Once ideas have been generated, the next step is to screen and evaluate them. This can be done through an initial assessment of the feasibility and potential impact of each idea.
Idea prioritization – After screening, ideas need to be prioritized based on their potential value and fit with the organization’s goals and objectives. This can involve evaluating the ideas against specific criteria or using a scoring system to rank the ideas.
Idea development – Once ideas have been prioritized, the next step is to develop them further. This may involve conducting additional research, prototyping, or testing the idea in a small-scale pilot project.
Idea implementation – The final step in an idea management workflow is implementing the ideas that have been developed. This may involve securing funding, identifying resources and stakeholders, and managing the project to ensure its successful implementation.

By thinking of idea management as a workflow, organizations can identify areas where they can improve the process of generating and developing new ideas. This may involve streamlining the workflow to reduce inefficiencies, improving communication and collaboration between stakeholders, or investing in new tools and technologies to facilitate the process. Ultimately, optimizing the idea management workflow can lead to greater innovation and success for the organization.

Managing ideas via a dedicated tool is only as effective as the underlying idea management process behind it. This is why your idea management software should be workflow or process-driven, meaning that as well as being a platform for gathering ideas, it facilitates a systematic process for developing the gathered ideas. Without an effective process that can be tuned to your specific needs, you will run into difficulties such as poor communication and transfer of knowledge, ineffectiveness, biases in decision-making, as well as losing visibility of great ideas. Some of the capabilities that are useful for the Idea Management System are:

Adaptable Workflow – An adaptable platform can be easily modified for different ideation purposes. Not only is it good to have a software that works for different use cases, it’s also natural that your idea management needs evolve with time. An adaptive idea management platform thus supports multiple different idea management processes and makes it easy for you to change those processes whenever you come up with ways to improve them.

Responsibilities – When it comes to ensuring that the organization is accountable for driving progress, assigning responsibilities is a crucial feature. There are many ways to solve this, but nonetheless, there should be a way to make sure every idea is someone’s responsibility.
Challenges / Category Support – Your business has specific challenges it faces and opportunities it wants to pursue; gathering ideas that specifically support or address these challenges ensure everyone is focusing on helping to move the business forward and are more likely to be resourced and implemented. Also, the ability to categorize ideas is crucial for makes it easier to organize your ideas of various types and for funneling them to the correct person, preferably automatically.

Flexible Idea Capture – Idea management software needs to have a customizable idea input forms related to specific campaign or category needs. This is because an idea related to strategic support, revenue generation, cost containment, or new product development may require different data and facts to support decisions along the journey to realized value.
Evaluation Criteria – The ability to systematically evaluate ideas makes it easier to distinguish potentially valuable ideas early on and is crucial for prioritizing them. When it comes to reviewing ideas “one size does not fit all!” An idea management system must be able to accommodate variable review teams (rounds of reviews), variable criteria (per round), and a variety of criterion types You need and want this type of flexibility.
Idea Archive with Strong Search – The nature of the innovation process is to converge on a small number of concepts that are the most likely to deliver the value you are looking for within the constraints and resources you are working with. This means that most of the ideas that you collect are not going to be implemented. This does not mean these notions do not have value, it may just not be their time. Having the ability to archive ideas and search through them is important. Before launching a new challenge or campaign, sponsors should look through existing ideas to see if there are some that might address their needs. These ideas might also be great topics within themselves or good seed ideas.
System Feedback Capture – User feedback, both positive and negative, is very helpful in shaping up the future of the platform. It provides insights into what is working well and what needs to be changed to make the experience better. It brings valuable information that will be used to make well informed and calculative decisions.
Actionable Analytics – Ensure your Idea Management platform offers an analytics tool that helps in gaining insights and making decisions. Configurable dashboards and flexible role-based ad-hoc reporting technology can empower you to recognize the best ideas and work upon them. You can also have a quick track and report on all the metrics and trends.
Ties to Implemented Value – The long-term survivability of any idea management system is based on its ability to report or make visible the actual value being generated from the tool to the business’ bottom line. Because it typically takes time to implement ideas, its crucial to capture projected values and project status information as the idea/concept moves through the innovation process.

Of course, the system needs to support collaboration features (commenting, voting, etc.) as these features support the social aspects of Idea Management.

Idea Management Is a Social Platform

Figure 5: Audience Engagement

Figure 5 shows how people interact with idea management as a social platform. Most people will read or follow a subject area or idea. Fewer will indicate support by liking or sharing an idea. Fewer yet will engage in a conversation on the idea, sharing thoughts and concerns in an active conversation. Fewer yet will create ideas and expose their thinking to others in the organization. Finally, there are folks that guide the conversations and interactions within a community. They help enforce the rules of the community, keep conversations moving forward, and nourish and grow the community. Think of a community as an area of interest such as a line of business, business process, product, or another category as appropriate.

Social Capabilities

Idea management can be a powerful tool for generating and developing new ideas within an organization. By leveraging social platform and gamification techniques, idea management can be made more engaging, accessible, and rewarding for employees.

Here are some key social features that can be included in an idea management platform:

Challenges – Challenges can be used to frame specific innovation problems and encourage employees to submit ideas that address those challenges. Challenges can be structured as competitions with prizes for the best ideas.
Voting and feedback – Allowing employees to vote and provide feedback on each other’s ideas can encourage collaboration and help identify the most promising ideas. Voting can be structured as a simple “like” button or a more sophisticated rating system.
Commenting – Commenting can be used to facilitate discussion and constructive feedback on ideas. Employees can provide suggestions for improvement, ask questions, or provide additional context.
Gamification – Gamification techniques can be used to make idea management more engaging and rewarding. For example, employees can earn badges or points for submitting ideas, voting, or providing feedback.
Engagement – Idea management should be designed to be engaging and fun, encouraging employees to participate and contribute their ideas. This can be achieved through clear and concise messaging, visually appealing design, and a user-friendly interface.
Accessibility – Idea management should be accessible to all employees, regardless of their role or location within the organization. This can be achieved through a web-based platform or a mobile app that can be accessed from anywhere.
Recognition – Recognizing and rewarding employees for their contributions to idea management can help build a culture of innovation and encourage continued participation. Rewards can include monetary incentives, public recognition, or opportunities for career advancement.

By incorporating these features into an idea management platform, organizations can create a dynamic and engaging environment for generating and developing new ideas, ultimately leading to greater innovation and success.

While the social aspects of an Idea Management solution are important, there are other aspects that should be considered when deploying.

You may need to wall off sensitive ideas from the general audience. Limiting access to conversations about strategic decisions such as investments, M&A, and other sensitive areas should be a requirement.
The social interactions around an idea can be part of the decision to offload an idea to another entity (supplier really likes and engages but customers do not care so much, perhaps this is part of a decision to let the supplier run with the idea)
Pseudo-anonymity for shy contributors – some folks will be reluctant to contribute due to a fear of ridicule or retribution. You’ll have to balance confidentiality and transparency as ideas move through the process. As the concepts become “more serious”, the identity of contributors, their expertise, and motivations becomes more important.

Innovating is Learning

We have established innovation is all about collaboration. But collaboration isn’t the only component necessary to ensure continuous innovation. The ability to create and apply knowledge are critical capabilities for any organization looking to make innovation a core competency.

Knowledge Management (capturing, sharing, and transferring) are crucial to sustained innovation because they help organizations to leverage their collective intelligence and tap into the expertise of their employees, partners, and customers. By capturing and sharing knowledge effectively, organizations can build a culture of learning, collaboration, and continuous improvement, which is essential for staying competitive in today’s fast-paced and rapidly changing business environment.

Capturing knowledge involves identifying and documenting tacit, implicit, and explicit knowledge that is critical to the organization’s success. This can include capturing information about processes, systems, customers, products, and services, as well as the expertise and insights of employees and external stakeholders. Capturing this knowledge can help organizations to avoid reinventing the wheel, reduce errors and redundancies, and build a foundation for future innovation.

Sharing knowledge involves making information and expertise available to others within the organization in a structured and accessible way. This can involve creating knowledge management systems, wikis, databases, and other tools that allow employees to search, access, and share information quickly and easily. Sharing knowledge can help to break down silos within the organization, foster collaboration, and cross-functional learning, and improve decision-making.

Transferring knowledge involves facilitating the movement of knowledge from one person or group to another. This can involve training and mentoring programs, job rotations, and other strategies that help to transfer expertise and best practices across the organization. Knowledge transfer can help to ensure that critical knowledge is not lost when employees leave the organization or retire and can also help to build a pipeline of talent with the skills and knowledge needed for future innovation.

In summary, effective knowledge management is key to sustained innovation because it enables organizations to tap into their collective intelligence, leverage their expertise, and build a culture of continuous learning and improvement. By investing in these activities, organizations can stay ahead of the competition and drive long-term growth and success.

Capturing and Sharing Learnings is Key to Sustained Innovation

Have you ever had a hunch about a new market opportunity or customer need, but you don’t have the information to back it up? Maybe there’s too much information to sort through, or you don’t have the context to interpret it. You may end up making an uninformed decision or no decision at all. That’s a big part of the reason why knowledge sharing is an essential function in any business.

Knowledge sharing is the exchange of information or understanding between people, teams, communities, or organizations. It’s a proactive and intentional act that expands the number of entities in the know while also creating or building upon an accessible collection of knowledge for others. Knowledge sharing:

Supports growth and innovation – If your organization doesn’t value knowledge sharing, it can create resistance to ideas and barriers to innovation within your enterprise. On the other hand, when your organization values and promotes a knowledge sharing culture, you tend to be more competitive and innovative.
Cuts costs and increases efficiency – If your employees spend hours looking for answers to their questions only to come up short, then your organization is bleeding time and efficiency costs. In other words, teams can’t find the answers they need, so they waste time and money duplicating efforts or worse, making bad decisions. On the other hand, in an organization where knowledge sharing is the norm, not only do teams save time with access to other teams’ knowledge, but they can also commission better research because they can quickly see knowledge gaps.
Enhances customer centricity – Knowledge sharing is important in the workplace because it enhances the collective ability of an organization’s workforce to understand customers’ situations, perceptions, and expectations, so the business can make customer-centric decisions. When your workforce shares their knowledge about the customer, they can get on the same page about who your customers are, and they can increase existing customer value, promote new value, and reduce churn, building a competitive advantage for growth in your organization.
Increases collaboration, so teams find solutions faster – Sharing knowledge in the workplace can be a catalyst for collaboration and busting through organizational silos – and that means employees can find solutions faster and increase performance. If a team’s stuck, they can rely on their knowledge sharing culture to learn what other teams have already experienced and find better solutions faster.
Helps organizations adjust to fast-changing markets – Research shows that sharing knowledge is significantly associated with organizational agility. When teams share their knowledge with other teams in their organization, they can more easily anticipate changes, make decisions, and pivot to keep in step with fast-changing markets and customer needs. Quick decision-making is key to an agile organization that stays competitive.

For these and many other good reasons, knowledge-sharing systems are a crucial tool in keeping your entire organization in the loop. When people share what they know, your organization will collect all kinds of useful content. This knowledge-sharing system will soon be populated with everything from FAQs and product troubleshooting tips to high-level documents about the company’s goals and mission.

With total transparency, teams can find and communicate relevant information easily. Not only does it connect the right people with the right content, but it also cultivates a company culture that shares wins, losses, and lessons. By shining a light on mistakes or disappointments – product launches that didn’t take or reasons why your company’s customers are choosing the competition – all employees benefit.

Some knowledge on types of knowledge

Now that you see the significance of information capture and sharing, you’ll need to understand the different types of knowledge you’ll want to capture. By placing these insights into separate buckets, you’ll have a better sense of how to capture them.

Tacit knowledge. It’s one thing to be told that a stove is hot and quite another to get that lesson while running to the ER after placing your hand on it. Some things you just have to figure out by doing – that’s tacit knowledge. Think about how much we pick up just going about our day-to-day jobs. It’s the most valuable information for businesses and the toughest to pin down. You don’t know what you don’t know until you need to know.

Tacit knowledge is all about intuition. It’s knowledge that you don’t even know you have. You gain tacit knowledge through experience, storing it in your brain as an intuitive gut-reaction. It’s hard to push intuition out of an employee’s brain and into your knowledge management platform, so you must look for other ways. This intuition or tacit knowledge is where artificial intelligence (including generative AI) and machine learning is still weak.

One of the most effective ways to transfer tacit knowledge is hands-on experience. This can be accomplished through mentoring, which involves having the subject matter experts observe and guide others as they perform their tasks. Another technique is simulation where emerging technologies such as 3D animation and immersive virtual and augmented reality training experiences provide hands-on experience in a controlled environment.

When hands-on is not practical, an alternative is to conduct interviews with subject matter experts and ask open-ended questions to uncover their thought processes and decision-making strategies. These interviews should focus on the experiences and insights of the expert, rather than simply asking for information.

Storytelling and narrative techniques can also be used to capture tacit knowledge. Encouraging individuals to share their experiences and insights through stories and anecdotes can help to surface and document tacit knowledge.

Transferring tacit knowledge is challenging because the knowledge isn’t relevant until it’s needed. Warning someone not to touch the hot stove while they are in the swimming pool does no good. However, by using a combination of the above techniques and approaches, organizations can better understand and leverage the tacit knowledge of their employees when it’s needed.

Explicit knowledge. Also known as “codified knowledge,” this is information that has moved out of the brain and into written, audio or video form. It’s now available for mass access and consumption. It’s the stuff you likely record as you are innovating.

There are a variety of tools that can be used to digitally capture explicit knowledge during the different phases of innovation. Here are some examples of tools that can be used for knowledge capture during the different phases of an enterprise innovation capability:

Collaboration:
1. Slack: A messaging platform that allows team members to communicate and collaborate in real-time.
2. Microsoft Teams: A collaboration tool that includes chat, video conferencing, and file sharing features.
3. Trello: A project management tool that allows team members to collaborate on tasks and track progress.
Ideation:
1. Mural: A digital whiteboard platform that allows teams to brainstorm and organize ideas visually.
2. Ideanote: A collaborative ideation tool that helps teams capture and prioritize ideas.
3. Stormboard: A brainstorming and collaboration tool that allows teams to work together on a digital canvas.
Implementation:
1. Asana: A project management tool that allows teams to create and manage tasks, assign them to team members, and track progress.
2. Jira: A tool specifically designed for software development teams to manage projects and track bugs and issues.
3. GitHub: A web-based platform that allows software development teams to collaborate on code, manage projects, and track issues.
Value-creation:
1. SurveyMonkey: A tool that allows teams to create and send surveys to customers and stakeholders to gather feedback and insights.
2. Google Analytics: A web analytics tool that allows teams to track website traffic and user behavior to gain insights into customer needs and preferences.
3. Salesforce: A customer relationship management (CRM) tool that helps teams manage customer interactions, sales, and marketing campaigns.

These are just a few examples, and there are many other tools available for knowledge capture during the different phases of an enterprise innovation effort. The key is to find the tools that work best for your team and your specific innovation goals – and connect them together in an organized and searchable way.

Implicit knowledge. These are the unwritten how-to’s of the office that originate in the processes and routines of the everyday. These tidbits turbocharge you into getting things done smoothly and efficiently – and appropriately within your company’s culture.

Basically, implicit (tribal) knowledge refers to the collective understanding, skills, and experiences of a group of people within an organization. It includes the accumulated wisdom and information that is shared informally among members of the organization and is not necessarily documented or formally codified.

Implicit knowledge can include things like best practices, processes, procedures, and even unwritten rules and norms that are unique to the organization. It is often passed down from one generation of employees to the next through word of mouth or informal guidance and is a key component of the culture and identity of the organization.

Implicit knowledge is concerned with the “how.” It’s the way one employee writes better emails than everyone else, even though you trained everyone the same way. It’s your star salesperson’s ability to close 50% more often than everyone else. It’s the magic of “how someone does something”—how an employee acts on the experience gained over time.

Capturing implicit knowledge refers to the process of identifying and documenting knowledge that is not easily expressed or articulated by individuals. There are several techniques that can be used to capture implicit knowledge.

One approach is to conduct interviews with subject matter experts to extract and document their knowledge and experience. Another approach is through observation and shadowing. This involves observing subject matter experts as they perform their tasks and documenting the steps they take and the decisions they make. This can be done through video recording or written notes.

It’s worth noting that capturing implicit knowledge can be challenging, as it is often subjective and context dependent. However, by using a combination of these techniques and approaches, organizations can better understand and transfer the implicit knowledge of their employees, leading to improved organizational performance and innovation.

Knowledge, whether it’s tacit, explicit, or implicit, is a main ingredient in innovation. And new knowledge is being created through the recombination of existing knowledge. But that knowledge is wasted is if is not applied.

Knowledge creation and application are two basic aspects of innovation. Knowledge creation is associated with that part of the innovation process through which new knowledge is discovered and accumulated through collaboration and experimentation. Knowledge application is the process of putting that knowledge into practice to realize the commercial potential of created knowledge. Innovation can be viewed as a knowledge management process that extracts new value from a firm’s knowledge assets.

“If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times as profitable” – these words by former Hewlett Packard CEO Lew Platt are symptomatic of large companies that are aware of its huge knowledge resources, but at the same time far away from tapping into its full potential. While it’s tempting to focus on the mechanics of implementation and the anticipated value of innovation, ignoring knowledge management is risky.

Strategic Intelligence Management

As described above, Knowledge Management focuses on the creation and application of knowledge though innovation. Strategic intelligence identifies the trends and forces that focus innovation efforts. Strategic Intelligence Management are the capabilities needed to collect, analyze, and disseminate information relevant to an organization’s priorities and decision-making. In the digital enterprise, strategic intelligence management plays a crucial role in driving innovation in the following ways.

Market and industry analysis: Strategic intelligence management enables digital enterprises to keep a pulse on their markets and industries, identifying trends, shifts, and emerging opportunities. This information is essential for identifying gaps in the market, understanding customer needs, and staying ahead of the competition.

Technology scouting – In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, keeping up with emerging technologies can be a challenge. Strategic intelligence management helps digital enterprises to identify new technologies and evaluate their potential impact on the organization. This information is essential for making informed decisions about investments in new technologies and maintaining a competitive edge.
Risk assessment – Innovation often involves taking risks, but strategic intelligence management helps to minimize those risks by providing insights into potential threats and vulnerabilities. This information is essential for identifying and mitigating risks associated with innovation, such as intellectual property infringement, cybersecurity threats, and regulatory compliance.
Collaborative innovation – Strategic intelligence management can facilitate collaboration between different departments and teams within an organization, as well as with external partners. This collaboration can lead to cross-functional innovation, where ideas are shared and developed across departments, resulting in more robust and innovative solutions.

Overall, strategic intelligence management is critical for driving innovation within a digital enterprise. By collecting and analyzing information about markets, technologies, risks, and collaboration opportunities, organizations can make informed decisions and stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly changing digital landscape. Strategic intelligence management is made up of three related disciplines, competitive intelligence, business intelligence, and collaborative intelligence.

Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence refers to the process of gathering, analyzing, and using information about competitors, market trends, and technology trends to inform business decision-making. In the context of enterprise innovation, competitive intelligence can have a significant impact in terms of identifying new opportunities, anticipating market shifts, and staying ahead of the competition.

Market trends – Competitive intelligence can provide valuable insights into market trends, such as changes in customer behavior, emerging technologies, and regulatory developments. By analyzing this information, organizations can identify new opportunities for innovation and adapt their strategies to changing market conditions. For example, competitive intelligence might reveal that customers are increasingly interested in eco-friendly products, prompting an organization to invest in sustainable product development.
Technology trends – Competitive intelligence can also provide insights into emerging technology trends that could impact an organization’s business model. By keeping a pulse on technological developments, organizations can identify opportunities to incorporate new technologies into their products or services, or even develop new technologies themselves. For example, competitive intelligence might reveal that a new technology is emerging that could disrupt an organization’s core business, prompting the organization to invest in developing or acquiring similar technologies.
Competition – Competitive intelligence can also help organizations stay ahead of their competitors by providing insights into their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. By understanding the competitive landscape, organizations can anticipate moves by their competitors and develop strategies to outmaneuver them. For example, competitive intelligence might reveal that a competitor is investing heavily in a certain technology or product, prompting an organization to develop a similar offering to stay competitive.

There are two main types of competitive intelligence, Strategic and Tactical Intelligence. The first, strategic intelligence, focuses on the horizon of what’s yet to come. When using competitive intelligence strategically, leadership is asking themselves questions like:

What do the next five years look like for our organization, product portfolio, risks?
What competitive changes will affect where we want to go?
How does what the market is doing today change the outcome of our future?

Tactical Intelligence is designed to answer more immediate and shorter-term questions. When leveraging tactical intelligence, leadership is asking themselves:

How do we increase our revenue?
What is our current market share and how do we increase that?
What changes can we make in the next year that will provide us with a more immediate return on our investment?

Overall, competitive intelligence is an essential component of enterprise innovation as it enables organizations to identify new opportunities, anticipate market shifts, and stay ahead of the competition. By gathering and analyzing information about market trends, technology trends, and competition, organizations can make more informed decisions about where to invest their resources, develop new products or services, and differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace.

Business Intelligence

If competitive intelligence looks outward, business intelligence looks inward, at the enterprise’s own sources of data to glean insights that should be influencing business decisions. A combination of both strategy and technology, Business intelligence is most often used by organizations to build predictive views of their business, using both historical and current data. This often involves collecting and analyzing internally generated information, such as sales data, customer feedback, and operational metrics, to gain insights into various aspects of the business.

By using internally generated information, organizations can gain insights into their own operations and identify areas for improvement. This can have a significant impact on corporate innovation, as it allows companies to better understand their customers’ needs and preferences and develop new products and services that address those needs more effectively.

One way that business intelligence can help drive innovation is by focusing on customers’ “jobs to be done.” This concept, popularized by Clayton Christensen, suggests that customers don’t simply buy products or services, but rather hire them to do a specific job in their lives. By understanding the jobs that customers are trying to do, companies can develop products and services that are more closely aligned with their needs and preferences.

Reducing process friction is another way that business intelligence can drive innovation. Process friction refers to any barriers or obstacles that prevent customers from getting what they want or need from a company. By identifying and addressing these points of friction, companies can create a better customer experience and build stronger customer loyalty.

Overall, the use of internally generated information in business intelligence can have a significant impact on corporate innovation. By leveraging data mining, analytics, and AI/ML to better understand their customers’ needs and preferences, and reduce process friction, companies can develop new products and services that are better aligned with customer needs and preferences, and ultimately drive growth and profitability.

Collaborative Intelligence

Collaborative intelligence is a concept that describes the process of combining the knowledge and skills of multiple individuals or organizations to achieve a common goal. This can involve sharing resources, expertise, and data to create innovative solutions or solve complex problems. Collaborative intelligence can take many forms, including open source, creative commons, and AI data utilities.

Open source refers to software that is freely available and can be modified and distributed by anyone. Open-source software is often developed collaboratively by a community of developers who share their knowledge and expertise to create better software focused on a specific problem (i.e., CRM) or to leverage a specific technology (i.e., Blockchain). This collaborative approach to software development allows for faster innovation, improved security, and lower costs for contributors.

Creative Commons is where creators to share their work with others while retaining some control over how it is used. Creators can choose to share their work under different types of licenses that specify how others can use, distribute, and modify their work. This collaborative approach to sharing creative works encourages innovation and allows for more widespread access to knowledge and culture.

AI data utilities are platforms that allow organizations to share data and collaborate on data analysis and modeling. AI data utilities can provide access to large, diverse datasets that can be used to train machine learning models and improve the accuracy of predictions. By sharing data and collaborating on analysis, organizations can develop more robust and accurate models that can be applied to a wide range of use cases.

Overall, collaborative intelligence is an important concept that is driving innovation in many industries. By sharing knowledge, resources, and data, individuals and organizations can achieve more than they could on their own, leading to faster innovation, improved decision-making, and better outcomes.

Pulling It All Together

Integrating competitive intelligence, business intelligence, and collaborative intelligence can be a powerful tool for corporate innovation. By combining these types of intelligence, organizations can gain a comprehensive understanding of their market, customers, competitors, and internal operations, which can inform strategic decision-making and help prioritize innovation initiatives.

Here are some steps that can be taken to integrate these intelligence sources:

Identify key stakeholders – Identify the stakeholders within the organization who will be responsible for gathering and analyzing intelligence. This may include members of the marketing, sales, product development, and strategy teams.
Define the objectives – Define the objectives of the intelligence gathering effort. What are the specific questions that need to be answered? What are the areas of the business that need to be explored? By defining clear objectives, you can ensure that the intelligence gathering effort is focused and efficient.
Gather competitive intelligence – Competitive intelligence involves gathering information about your competitors, including their products, services, pricing, marketing strategies, and market share. This information can be gathered through a variety of sources, including industry reports, competitor websites, social media, and customer reviews.
Gather business intelligence – Business intelligence involves gathering information about your own organization, including financial data, customer data, and operational data. This information can be gathered through internal systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and business analytics tools.
Gather collaborative intelligence – Collaborative intelligence involves sourcing insights and ideas from employees, customers, and partners as well as the common sources mentioned above.
Categorize and organize the data – Once the pertinent data has been gathered, it needs to be categorized and organized into human and machine-readable forms. The machine-readable forms can be fed into analytics platforms to identify patterns. Human readable materials are made searchable and discoverable within the collaboration platform.
Prioritize innovation initiatives – Finally, the insights and trends identified through the intelligence gathering effort can be used to inform strategic decision-making and prioritize innovation initiatives. This may involve identifying new product or service opportunities, improving internal processes, or exploring new market segments.

By integrating competitive intelligence, business intelligence, and collaborative intelligence under the umbrella of strategic intelligence management, organizations can gain a comprehensive understanding of their market, customers, competitors, and internal operations. This can inform strategic decision-making, develop innovation challenges, and help prioritize innovation initiatives to drive growth and success.

Innovating is Doing

Decision velocity and speed to value are the keys to maintaining competitive advantage in our connected world. Accordingly, the complexity and pace of change is mind boggling. Digital disruptions in the form of cloud, software defined everything, API economy and bi-modal IT have significantly transformed the very business model of IT. It has led to customer demand for continuous value creation through innovative digital products and services. This fact shows that the global trend in IT services industry is shifting from a back office / cost center mode to a catalyst for continuous value generation and growth both for the client and service provider ecosystem. The need to continuously deliver value through digital products is stressing the IT capabilities in most, if not all digital enterprises.

For example, consider a DevOps team working in a line of business. To continuously deliver software, the team uses a DevOps toolchain that has evolved over time made from multiple tools that were selected to address a specific aspect of the workflow.

Figure 6: Typical DevOps Tool Chain

They will often need to interoperate with other IT teams such as infrastructure, service management, help desk, enterprise architecture and more – each with their own workflows and toolchains. If you zoom out to the enterprise level, you’ll end up with a confusing tangle of data sources, dependencies, and services that have been cobbled together to deliver value.

Figure 7: Typical Enterprise IT Support Structure

The leaders of today’s digital enterprises are engaged in finding solutions to returns on IT investments, creating value differentiators for customers, transparency on costs, linkage to service usage, and satisfaction levels. There are strategic level decisions such as forecasting demand for services portfolios, establishment of Enterprise Architecture and Governance to ensure seamless benefits realization. Tactical and operational decisions that impact businesses comprised of optimization on sourcing and procurement cycles, contract management with vendors and suppliers, annual maintenance contracts on HW and SW licenses, and consolidation of tools and applications. Making and demonstrating progress in these areas are hard to do in this kind of environment shown in figure 7.

There’s an old Spanish proverb that translates roughly to the saying “the cobbler’s children have no shoes”. Meaning that someone with a specific skill is often so busy assisting others that their own affairs go unattended. A classic and frustrating conundrum. In most enterprises, this conundrum applies to IT.

When you look at the problems IT leaders are trying to solve, you notice they are business problems, not technical ones. How do we increase velocity? How do we forecast the resources we need to support our customers? How do we optimize the processes and tools we use to deliver value?

As the leaders in digital enterprises attempt to find solutions for many of the pain areas of IT mentioned above, they should look at the IT value chain in an integrated manner. An emerging standard, IT4IT, is designed to address pain points within IT by providing a framework for managing the entire IT value chain, from strategy and architecture to operations and service management. It prescribes a guideline when rigorously applied would enable the transformation of IT from a cost centric mode of operations to a viable unit of business.

Figure 7: The IT4IT Value Network

IT4IT Reference Architecture is a vendor and technology neutral IT management framework which looks at the IT activities in an integrated manner. It prescribes a framework that uses data, functional, service and integration models to create value through the service portfolio across its entire lifecycle. The IT4IT reference architecture is based on the value chain approach, which breaks down IT processes into four distinct value streams:

Strategy to Portfolio (S2P): This value stream is focused on defining and managing the IT strategy, including the identification of business needs and the development of IT portfolios to support those needs.
Requirement to Deploy (R2D): This value stream is focused on the design, development, and deployment of IT solutions to meet business needs.
Request to Fulfill (R2F): This value stream is focused on the delivery and management of IT services to meet business needs, including the management of service requests, incidents, and changes.
Detect to Correct (D2C): This value stream is focused on the detection, analysis, and resolution of issues with IT services, including the management of events, incidents, and problems.

By providing a structured approach to managing IT operations, including the identification and management of IT processes, IT4IT cuts overhead costs, reduces redundancies in process and tools as well as provides business insights for the management.

Innovation implementation efforts can leverage IT4IT to provide several benefits, including:

Alignment of innovation efforts with business goals – IT4IT helps organizations align their innovation efforts with their business goals by providing a framework for managing the entire IT value chain. This ensures that IT investments are targeted towards business priorities and that innovation efforts are focused on delivering tangible business value.
Improved collaboration – IT4IT promotes collaboration between different teams and stakeholders involved in innovation implementation efforts. By providing a common language and framework for managing IT operations, IT4IT helps to break down silos and improve communication and collaboration across different departments and teams.
Increased agility and flexibility – IT4IT supports the adoption of agile and DevOps practices, which can help organizations respond more quickly and effectively to changing business needs. This can be especially important in innovation implementation efforts, where speed and agility can be critical to success.
Enhanced visibility and control – IT4IT provides a comprehensive view of the entire IT value chain, from strategy to operations. This can help organizations gain better visibility into their innovation implementation efforts and improve control over the entire process.
Better use of technology – IT4IT provides guidance on the use of technology to support innovation implementation efforts. By leveraging IT4IT, organizations can better understand how different technologies can be used to support different stages of the innovation process, from ideation to deployment.

Overall, IT4IT can provide organizations with a structured approach to managing their IT value network, including their innovation implementation efforts. While this report provides an overview of IT4IT as a supporting method for innovation, details for this standard and its applicability in the digital enterprise can be found at https://www.opengroup.org/it4it. We have only touched upon this emerging standard and its impact will be explored in further research.

Innovation Project Management

Remember a core theme in this report is how we develop a sustainable model and supporting processes to drive and develop innovation. Project Management is a framework that articulates a way of working to organize people and resources towards a one-time accomplishment of predefined task within the specified constraints of scope, cost, and time. Project managers do so by…

proactively managing risks
adapting to changes
exercising control commensurate to project goals
and managing stakeholder expectations throughout the project.

The aim of Project Management is to assure that projects are properly planned and controlled so that the risks are limited, opportunities seized, and project goals reached on time, quality and within budget. For decades, most project managers were trained in traditional project management practices and were ill-equipped to manage innovation projects. Today, attempts are being made to integrate all of this into a single profession, namely innovation project management.

Innovation and Project Management

For years, there has been a debate as to whether the words “innovation” and “project management” should be used in the same sentence. Some researchers argue that project management and innovation management should be treated as separate disciplines.

Innovation requires:

An acceptance of significant risk, more so than in traditional project management
A great deal of uncertainty
A focus on strategic goals and possibly no business case exists
Unknown constraints and assumptions that continuously change
Decision making in an unfamiliar landscape
A creative mindset
Collaboration across all enterprise organizational boundaries
Significant interfacing with customers in every market segment
A different leadership style than with traditional project management
A set of tools different than what is being taught in traditional project management courses

Some tools typically used when managing innovation include:

Design thinking
Storytelling
Decision-making flow charts
Value proposition
Business model thinking
Wall of ideas with post-it notes
Ideation
Prototyping, perhaps continuously

Innovation management, in its purest form, is a combination of the management of innovation processes and change management. It refers to products, services, business processes and models, and accompanying transformational needs, whereby the organization must change the way they conduct their business. The change can be incremental or radical.

On the other hand, project management practices generally follow the traditional processes and domain areas identified in the Project Management Institute (PMI)^® A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^® Guide). But the digital enterprise implements its innovation strategy through projects. Simply stated, a digital enterprise executes its business as a series of projects designed to deliver value. Project management has become the delivery system for innovation activities, but the integration is complex and varies with the type of innovation project.

Project Management is a Value Delivery System

Today’s project managers are seen more so as managing part of a business than managing just a project. Project managers are expected to be market problem-solvers and participate in business decisions as well as project decisions. In the past, project managers were actively involved mainly in just project execution with the responsibility of providing a deliverable or an outcome. Today, the project manager is actively involved in all phases of value delivery, from idea generation through product support. This full lifecycle view is changing how we view project managers and the skills they need.

The Innovation Project Manager

What are the differences between managing an ordinary business project and managing an innovation project?

Project management is the engine for implementing new or improved business capabilities and there are a host of tools and techniques that make this process more effective. In most organizations, there is a relatively high level of competence in project management … however, the understanding of how to manage an innovation project is not always as clear. It is important to understand the distinction between a regular project and an innovation project:

Innovation projects tend to start with loosely defined, sometimes even ambiguous objectives that become clearer as the project proceeds. The processes used are more experimental and exploratory and seldom follow strict linear guidelines.
Teams need to be more diverse and have a higher level of trust as they explore new territory where failure is a possibility.
With failure as a built-in possibility, innovation teams are more actively involved with risk management and need to learn to fail fast and fail smart to move on to more attractive options.
Also, innovation projects generally need to be sold to project sponsors and funding committees, a responsibility usually not required from normal project teams.

Since projects are implemented by people, the ability to collaborate and work effectively on a team is critical. Excellent project managers honor and manage requests, offers and promises. They focus on the most important issues and juggle priorities. They have what seems like an innate sense of timing, which comes from their continual scanning of the business climate and understanding of priorities and concerns of others. Projects often involve making hundreds of decisions, a process that can be fraught with hazard and conflict … unless a well-developed set of criteria for the project has been developed in advance. Projects can also drag on and on with endless tweaks and adjustments unless someone knows how to garner an agreement on what constitutes “done.” Once the end is recognized, the completion should be celebrated, regardless of whether the project was a success or failure.

The innovation project manager must have additional skills and responsibilities compared to a conventional project manager. Although roles and responsibilities will vary, some common differences are highlighted in the table below:

Project Manager	Innovation Project Manager
Develops detailed plans	Develops emergent high-level plans
Estimates and controls budget to deliver entire project	Estimates budget required on a stage-by-stage basis (based on traction and burn rate)
Controls time management of project resources	Coordinates value delivery of project products (often done in association with a Product Owner)
Breaks down deliverables into stages and tasks	Defines and coordinates project stages and releases so that sprints or sub-stages deliver value
Change often perceived as issues or risks	Change embraced as potentially positive
Monitor progress against plans	Monitor progress against value and continually justifies project
Document management, version control and delivery of progress/exception reports	Light-weight documentation and informal reporting where possible
Focused on project delivery and handover to BAU	Focused on risk removal and value delivery
Aligned to project team to achieve project delivery	Aligned to customer to achieve value delivery
Responsible for project delivery	May have additional responsibility for idea management process including projects, portfolio, and innovation capability management
Responsibility for solution ends when project ends and handover is complete	Remains actively consulted and informed on value after project is delivered
Uses tools such as risk registers, issue registers, Gantt charts, product breakdown structures, critical path and planning meetings	Uses tools such as collaborative planning, visual information boards, kanban boards, burn charts and standup meetings
Responsible for delivering one or two major projects	Often focused on delivering multiple innovation projects all at different stages

Table 1: PM Additional Skills and Responsibilities

We have learned from Agile and Scrum that flexible project management approaches are necessary for many projects. This same thinking will be required for innovation projects. We need different tools and different skill sets than traditionalproject managers are used to. Project manager training and incentives need to be tuned to value delivery and risk reduction rather than on time and on budget performance.

Innovating Is Realizing Value

At its heart, value realization is simple. When customers (internal and external) start looking for solutions to a problem, they have an inherent value expectation in mind. They then try different solutions until they find one that generates a level of value that has a positive impact on their business.

Value realization is much more than just an understanding that a product or service has worth, though. It is a specific revelation about the value your offering provides to a specific customer based on their needs. It is the moment when the customer feels validated in their purchase decision because they clearly understand the impact that their decision has had on themselves and their organization.

Value realization is every customer’s goal. It is satisfying for several reasons:

The problem they sought to resolve is solved, satisfying the need, and relieving their pain.
The customer feels validated for making the correct choice.
The customer receives positive feedback from members of their organization for having determined an effective solution.

Measuring how your customers realize value is vital to delivering value. Learning how your customers engage with your product and what generates customer satisfaction helps you win and more effectively maintains clients.

Why Is Value Realization Important?

When customers can realize the full value of their investment, they are more likely to be satisfied with the product or service, renew their contracts, and recommend the solution to others. This can lead to increased customer loyalty, reduced churn, and improved revenue and profitability.

On the other hand, when customers cannot realize the expected value, they may become dissatisfied, disengaged, or even switch to a competitor. This can lead to lost revenue, decreased market share, and a damaged company reputation.

By focusing on value realization, businesses can differentiate themselves from their competitors, build trust and loyalty with their customers, and achieve long-term growth and success. This process involves not only delivering the promised value proposition but also continuously monitoring and optimizing the customer experience to ensure ongoing value and satisfaction. This notion is at the heart of Customer Value Management.

Customer Value Management

Customer Value Management is a data-driven system that helps every member of the revenue team have more consistent and impactful value conversations with prospects and customers. Customer Value Management helps product and solution teams engineer value into their offerings. It helps marketers communicate value using value benchmarks. It helps sellers to collaboratively discover value with customers in value assessments. And it helps Customer Success Managers to help clients to realize and reinforce the value they are getting.

Figure 8: Customer Value Management

Modern, enterprise-class customer value management platforms support advanced capabilities that help companies capture insights into the value promised, delivered, and derived while also enabling them to accelerate, automate, and scale certain processes to quantify value and create assets that nurture the potential buyer on their customer value journey.

In other words, customer value management helps companies unlock differentiated value selling, enabling them to build and convey the right value message to the right buyer at the right time. Additionally, deploying a customer value management solution can also help companies:

Achieve a higher Net Retention Rate and shareholder returns by reducing discounts or increasing deal size and velocity.
Deliver value analysis that buyers rely on for price justification.
Automate traditionally manual request for proposal processes.
Create value-based assets such as case studies from a central repository that contains real, quantified proof points from customers.
Develop relevant and compelling content using value-based data.
Ensure customer success by monitoring and delivering value as promised during the sales cycle.

From executive management to marketing, customer success, and partner relationships, customer value management transforms the entire enterprise into a customer-centric entity that reinforces value-based messaging and execution throughout the sales cycle and the customer value journey.

Customer Value Management is a strategy that focuses on maximizing the value of each customer relationship to increase profitability and revenue. It involves understanding customer needs, preferences, and behaviors to create a personalized experience that meets their expectations and drives loyalty.

Customer Value Management includes analyzing customer data to identify trends and patterns that can be used to improve customer satisfaction and increase sales. By using this information, companies can make data-driven decisions about product development, pricing, and customer success. Its ties to innovation begins with understanding the customer’s value drivers.

A value driver describes the impact of a product or feature, on a customer’s business/operation. There are three flavors of value driver: economic, emotional and community.

Economic – The monetary value created by a product or a service for a particular customer versus their next best alternative. (Revenue growth, expense reduction, capital impact, risk reduction)
Emotional – The experience at touchpoints[1] (moments of truth) where your clients either fall in love with your product or turn away and leave. (Quality, service, consistency, personalization)
Community – Deeper interactions and connections with the company and fellow buyers of the product or service. (Purpose, authenticity, transparency, affinity)

Value drivers are critical to understanding the factors that influence customer behavior. Innovation involves creating new products, services, or processes that offer unique value to customers. Value drivers are the key factors that enable a company to create and deliver this value to customers.

Customer Value Management involves various activities across the customer journey, from understanding customer needs to capturing value from satisfied customers. Here is a breakdown of Customer Value Management in terms of the five value-related processes:

Value creation – Value creation is the process of identifying the needs of a specific target audience and developing products or services that address those needs. A key function of innovation is to discover, understand, and validate the value drivers of that audience.
Value communication – Customers don’t want your product or what it does; they want help making their lives better. Value communication is about aligning the customer’s inherent expectations with your promise of value. Does the customer want something that’s easy to use? Do they want cost savings? How about safety? Identifying and quantifying the customer’s specific value drivers, establishing value metrics, and setting mutual expectations sets up the next phase, value delivery.
Value delivery – You can create the promise for value with the product or service, and communicate that value, but when it comes to implementation and ongoing support is that value being delivered? That’s where you move beyond measuring ROI to emotional and community value drivers. Is the customer adopting the product as expected (reflected in the usage metrics)? Can they get the job done? Are there things along the journey that are stopping progress? Are they getting the support they need? Are the expectations being met?
Value documentation – You may be delivering expected value, but are you documenting it so that it can be communicated back to the business user (and buyer)? Most companies do not do a great job documenting the value they deliver and that makes it hard to explain to your customer, and even harder for your customer to explain it to others. They fear they made the wrong decision and will fail to deliver value to justify the investment after the fact. Capturing the right data and connecting it to the value drivers gives confidence through evidence that they made the right decision.
Value capture – This is where you capture your fair share of the value you create. Companies to effectively monetize the value that they provide to customers through pricing strategies, cross-selling and upselling, and retention and loyalty programs. By capturing value, companies can improve profitability and sustain long-term customer relationships.

A scalable customer management platform supports the value realization by helping to develop content relevant for marketing, sales, customer success, product, and of course, customers.

So, when looking to deploy a customer value management solution that is comprehensive and robust, make sure it meets the following key requirements:

Support for the complete customer engagement cycle, including value discovery, value delivery, and value documentation.
Business case customization features.
Single source of truth or master repository of value data.
Value model configuration and customization features.
Value realization measurement.
Seamless integration with your enterprise CRM and other tools.

Customer Value Management is Key

Implementing a customer value management program is the key to understanding how customers perceive value and using that understanding to continue creating value in an increasingly digital world.

Digital Experience Management

Digital Experience Management supports Customer Value Management and is the process of monitoring every interaction people have with a company’s digital properties (website, social, mobile apps, intranets, and more) in order to understand what’s working and make improvements as needed.

Experience management vs. customer experience

Experience management is often confused with customer experience, but they’re not the same. Customer experience encompasses every interaction a customer has with a brand – from seeing an ad on TV to submitting a customer service request. It’s the sum of every engagement, and the impact they have on the customer.

Experience management, on the other hand, is a method of collecting feedback, tracking engagement, and uncovering insights. It’s how companies learn what parts of their experience are working, and which parts aren’t. Customer experience is the experience you deliver. Experience management shows you how effective your experience is.

It’s also important to note that experience management isn’t just about the customer experience. Experience Management solutions also monitor employee experience, product experience, and brand experience. And Digital Experience Management zeros in on how those experiences fare online.

Why Digital Experience Management matters: The benefit of insight

People today are savvy and have high expectations of the brands they engage with. With the accelerated digitalization of business due to COVID, it’s more important than ever to get a handle on your digital experience.

Customers expect a seamless, omnichannel experience regardless of when and where they choose to engage with your brand.
Employees expect to be supported, listened to, and set up for success as they work to deliver value.
How your products show up online and how easy it is to purchase and use them across multiple channels are as important as the quality of the product itself.

Meeting all those expectations isn’t easy, but Digital Experience Management makes it easier to orchestrate your digital experiences – for every audience. By uncovering how your audiences feel about the experiences you deliver, you’re better able to optimize and improve them.

Digital Experience Management allows you to:

Mine your digital channels to learn how people are engaging.
Identify problem areas by tracking where people “jump ship.”
Collect real-time feedback from customers and employees about their experiences.
Identify tasks and processes that could be streamlined – or even automated – for a better overall experience.
Make strategic business decisions with confidence, not guesswork.
Deliver a consistent experience across all your digital channels.

By understanding your audiences, from prospects to customers to employees, you can create digital experiences that meet their needs and boost your bottom line.

Digital Experience Management: your eyes and ears for the future of business

At this point, if you’re not listening to your customers and employees and taking their feedback to heart, you’re already behind the curve. People are more in control of the experiences they choose to engage with. If you aren’t hearing them, someone else is. Companies aren’t competing based on whether they need to collect experience data. Today, they’re competing based on the quality of their data, and their ability (and willingness) to act on it.

With digital channels proliferating, it’s more important than ever to invest in solutions that give you the best data and make it easy to interpret. Digital Experience Platforms aim to do just that.

Digital Experience Platforms

Just like innovation itself, the customer journey is a series of conversations. The customer asks, you answer, and then you measure how good your answer was. Emerging digital experience platforms offer organizations a suite of tools to foster meaningful relationships by speaking, listening, and responding to their audiences.

A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is a collection of products that work together to help organizations deliver an exceptional digital experience to their customers. A DXP achieves this coordination by eliminating technology silos. It provides businesses with one central hub from which to create, manage, deliver, and optimize content-driven experiences across all digital properties.

Figure 9: The core capabilities of a DXP

A DXP gives organizations tools to gather comprehensive, cross-channel data to understand their customers, and then incorporate these lessons into the creation, management, and delivery of content. Whether a customer encounters your brand on a website, app, chatbot, social platform, customer portal, in-store kiosk, smart device, or wearable tech – a DXP connects these digital touchpoints into a focused, more informed ecosystem for product managers and marketers to manage.

An open DXP is a solution that integrates multiple products from different third-party vendors into one, centralized system. An open DXP provides organizations with the flexibility to integrate products of their choosing, such as the CRM they are already using or a new technology that meets their needs perfectly. Additionally, many open DXP vendors also offer pre-built integrations with third-party products that are vetted and available for customers to “turn on” in the system.

A closed DXP is a self-contained platform with all DXP components or products built into the system itself. So rather than tapping into existing third-party tools, all DXP components are developed and maintained by the DXP provider and sold as a suite. That’s not to say a closed DXP can’t integrate with outside products; it’s just designed to work best within its own ecosystem of products.

Choosing between an open and a closed DXP comes down to preference. That said, most buyers prefer an open model. A closed DXP is nice for organizations lacking tech resources to facilitate integrations or for those who want to work through a single vendor. Either way, look for a solution is composable. Composable DXP is a newer concept that provides integrated, consistent solutions, that are modular, yet connect the gaps of the digital experience.

While a digital experience platform is necessary for most large organizations’ digital ambitions, it isn’t as simple as just purchasing a new solution. Here’s how to get started.

Review your existing apps and tools – Before further extending your digital experience apps and toolset, evaluate exactly what you have now. Then map out which ones you are already using, the functionality within them and what you are currently using them for. This will help a lot going forward and tell you a lot about your pre-existing customer journey.
Determine which steps need optimization – Don’t try to do everything at once. Have a look at which steps or processes would be important to tackle first and start there, ensuring you remember that tackling one aspect at a time is all part of the composable journey.
Leverage and reuse existing digital experience apps, tools, and processes – After you have defined the most important aspects to tackle first and you have an overview of your current digital experience apps and toolset, think about how the existing apps or parts of them can be reused to optimize processes and the customer journey.
Think about what can be automated – As the number of digital experience apps, tools and processes grows, so does the time needed to invest in connecting them. By automating processes, you will free up time from development and digital teams to focus on strategic and innovative ways to improve the customer experience.
Choose the right digital experience apps and tools for the job – Having the right applications and tools for the job is key. Delivering personalized omnichannel experiences at scale requires a unified and seamless approach to eliminate siloed user experiences and one-size-fits-all solutions.

Digital Experience and Customer Value Management are two sides of the same coin. Digital Experience Management helps you engage the customer all along their journey with consistency in the ways they prefer. Customer Value Management promises, delivers, and documents the value they can expect when they engage with you.

Conclusions and recommendations

Moving Forward

Managing total innovation will require a significant shift for most companies, which are used to a less orderly approach. But the pathway to such discipline is clear. The first step is to develop a shared sense of the role innovation plays in driving the organization’s growth and competitiveness. Managers should agree on an appropriate ambition level for innovation and find common language to describe it. Reward systems should support this shift with employee incentives for innovation.

Next, it makes sense to survey the company’s current innovation landscape. A comprehensive audit will reveal how much time, effort, and money are allocated to core, adjacent, and transformational initiatives—and how that allocation differs from the ideal ratio for the company in question. With the difference exposed, managers can identify ways to achieve the desired balance, usually by paring core initiatives down to those focused on the highest-value customers, encouraging more initiatives in the adjacent space, and creating conditions more conducive to breakthroughs through transformation.

Throughout all this activity, leaders must communicate clearly and relentlessly about innovation goals and processes. There’s no getting around the fact that to improve the overall return on innovation investments, managers must take a hard look at projects—all of which are attached to people who feel a sense of ownership and pride in them. The imperative is to identify and accelerate the most promising ideas and kill off the rest (some of which may be perfectly viable but don’t represent the best use of resources). Open commitments and clear messaging will go a long way toward ensuring that the entire organization knows what is being decided by whom and why, and how those decisions will benefit the business over the short and long terms.

Because innovation is a system-level problem, a point solution – trying to drive widespread change by doing a single thing – is wholly ineffective. It is equivalent to attempting to turnaround a failing school plagued by disinterested students, overwhelmed teachers, and crumbling infrastructure by painting the walls blue. Soothing, perhaps, but unlikely to have any real impact. Instead, leaders hoping to boost their ability to drive growth through innovation need to simultaneously direct it strategically, pursue it rigorously, resource it intensively, monitor it methodically, and nurture it carefully.

What does good look like?

If you were asked this question today by someone regarding your management culture, your business, your clients, your products or customer experiences… how would you answer?

“What does good look like?” is quite a useful question. In fact, its simplicity is what strikes me most. Considering all the questions we ask when trying to perform our work, run our projects, manage our people, and strive for excellence; there are just some questions we forget to ask and take the time to ponder. This is one of those questions.

The value of this question is that it can applied to nearly every area of our work and professional development. We often hear about reverse engineering and how we need to understand what we are trying to get to and then backtrack into what it will take to get us there. While this is a very good way to engage on any given activity, it still doesn’t answer the question we are asking here; What does good look like?

Having a vision or perceived view of an outcome isn’t necessarily the same as knowing whether it is great or good enough. In other words, a finished project or product may not necessarily be exactly what the customer or company desired even though it may be good, it simply may not be good enough or even great. Putting the effort into answering the question forces a level of detail that sometimes gets missed in translation. Let’s take innovation as an example.

We suggest that good enterprise innovation involves the continuous creation and implementation of new ideas, processes, products, and services that lead to business growth, increased efficiency, and competitive advantage. It involves building a culture of innovation that encourages experimentation, risk-taking, and creativity, and actively seeks out new opportunities.

Here are some characteristics to look for:

Purpose-driven: Innovation is driven by a clear sense of purpose and aligned with the company’s mission and goals.
Customer-focused: Innovation anticipates customer needs and delivers customer value is more likely to succeed in the marketplace.
Agile and adaptable: Innovation is agile and adaptable to changing market conditions, technology advancements, and customer preferences.
Collaborative: Conversations are encouraged, across teams and across boundaries. Customers, employees, and partners and aligned and engaged in creating value.

Inquisitive: Demonstrates a culture that allows and encourages experimentation, rewards taking chances, accepts failure and encourages people to change how they work.

Data-driven: Data and analytics play a critical role in identifying new opportunities. Innovation effectiveness is supported by evidence.
Scalable: Innovation delivers solutions that can be easily replicated or expanded to meet growing demand. They can be quickly and efficiently deployed to match the scale of the problem.
Evolving: Innovation is not viewed as a one-time event but a continuous process of learning, experimentation, and improvement.

Overall, good enterprise innovation requires a combination of strategic thinking, creativity, collaboration, and a willingness to take risks and learn from failure.

I’ll know it when I see it.

It is understandable that you try to categorize innovation excellence as an observable set of facts or events even if it is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters. However, recognizing innovation excellence requires a bit more than just relying on gut instinct. There are several specific indicators that can help you recognize innovation excellence, including:

Consistent track record of successful innovations: You have consistently created successful innovations, such as new products or services that have had a positive impact on your business and customers. This can be measured by the enterprise’s past projects, industry recognition, customer satisfaction, financial performance, and employee engagement.
Investment in research and development: Companies that are serious about innovation often invest appropriately in research and development. You can see this in funding allocation, patents and publications, dedicated resources, product development pipeline, and industry recognition.
Culture of experimentation: Companies that are good at innovation often have a culture that encourages experimentation and risk-taking. They may encourage employees and reward them when they come up with new ideas, try new things, and embrace failure as part of the learning process.
Collaboration and partnerships: Companies that are good at innovation often collaborate with other organizations, such as startups or research institutions. You’ll see this in joint projects or initiatives, cross-functional teams, external advisory boards, competitions or challenges, and participation in consortia and standards bodies.
Measurable outcomes: Finally, innovation excellence is not just about ideation and creativity, but also about delivering measurable outcomes. See if you have defined clear goals and metrics for innovation and track their progress in achieving them; chief among them are customer focus, decision velocity, and speed to value.

Where Do I Start?

You can begin the journey by leveraging the information contained in our innovation research portfolio, including this report, to understand and map your organization’s innovation strategy (why you innovate), the types of innovation you do (what you innovate), and measure your innovation capabilities (how you innovate). In doing so, you’ll establish a rough baseline that can be tested and refined using the Minimum Viable Innovation System approach.

Minimum Viable Innovation System

Scott Anthony, David Duncan, and Pontus Siren’s article in the December 2014 edition of the Harvard Business Review, “Build an Innovation Engine in 90 Days,” is a compelling read. The article introduces the concept of a minimum viable innovation system (MVIS), an approach to innovation performance improvement that suggests companies quickly put in place some basic process building blocks rather than undertake a long, drawn-out effort requiring major organizational changes. In other words, get started and get better.

While you may be uncomfortable with the catchy 90-day promise in the article’s title (it does make you want read it), There are some important points worth highlighting.

Figure 10: HBR’s MVIS Timeline

The article’s authors suggest that you start by assessing what you have in your development pipeline. You can do this by categorizing your development portfolio according to a simplified version of the horizons framework we described in our report, “The Innovation Reference Architecture”. In doing so, you can find out if your project mix supports your organic growth goals. This starting point puts a key component of innovation strategy – your development portfolio mix – ahead of execution.

Next, choose two to three strategic opportunity areas that each combine the following:

A job that many potential customers need to do that no one is addressing very well.
Either a technology that will enable customers to do that job much more easily, cheaply, or conveniently, or a change in the economic, regulatory, or social landscape that is increasing the need for that job.
Some special capability of your company that competitors can’t easily copy that will give you an advantage in seizing this opportunity.

These become the ideas that are the first to run through the MVIS experiment.

Learn by Doing

Sticking with the get started and get better theme, the authors recommend kicking off these projects with dedicated teams using a “learn by doing” approach. We support experimenting but recommend going beyond the process checklist method suggested in the article.

Instead, establish a capability framework consisting of 1) an innovation governance team, 2) a high-performance project team structure, and 3) a process workflow structure, as part of your MVIS. These three elements, described below, are fundamental to an innovation system and can be framed up in a few weeks. Once these building blocks are in place, you can use learnings from your pilot projects to identify gaps and build out the details of each element, setting the stage for your longer-term innovation engine.

Innovation Governance Team

This is a cross-functional leadership team responsible for making go, no-go, and redirect decisions at key investment milestones for innovation projects with operating practices like a venture capital firm. This team must have the discipline to make investment decisions that balance the need for both short-term core innovations and longer-term new growth innovations. If that balance becomes difficult, separate new growth governance from core development governance, as the article’s authors point out, and create evaluation criteria suitable for breakthrough innovation (i.e., light on precise financials and heavy on validating early-stage assumptions and rapid learning). Work out a decision-making pattern as we described in our report “The Digital Operating System” to align authority and responsibility.

High Performance Project Teams

These are small, cross-functional core teams with members jointly accountable for in-market success. Freeing up resources, especially dedicated resources, is not an easy task for any organization. The article offers up a few helpful tips for freeing up key individuals by seeking out and killing what it calls “zombie projects” (go nowhere pet projects or redundant projects that refuse to die). Advanced organizations carry out this type of purposeful pipeline pruning as an ongoing activity versus a one-time event, but the MVIS effort can be a forcing function.

In the beginning, consider staffing with experienced specialists and your most progressive leaders. These teams will need to break free of ingrained methods more suitable to core innovation, especially in the early stages where rapid test and learn cycles are the norm.

Process Workflow

It’s tempting to pick a promising idea, turn it into a 9–18 month project and start executing. This is a common mistake and a very costly one — spending quarters, or even years on a yet unproven idea is likely throwing good money after bad because most ideas just aren’t worth the investment.

Instead break the bigger project behind the idea into small step-projects, each no more than 10 weeks long, and execute them one at a time. For example: mockup → prototype → MVP → dogfood[2] → beta → launch

In accordance with Lean-Startup’s Build-Measure-Learn principle, each step-project is an experiment that tests the idea in terms of:

Value – The product idea addresses real needs in the market; there is a demand for it.
Usability – Users will be able to start using the product quickly and without much friction.
Feasibility – We’re able to build the product idea within reasonable time and cost.
Viability – The idea makes business-sense and thus not create risks for current business.

In a successful progression we will put in each step-project a somewhat more complete version of the idea in front of more users for a longer duration of time.

Benefits of this process flow approach include:

Enables innovation teams to focus on content without having to re-invent the process each time.
Focuses on driving to outcomes, not crossing tasks off a checklist.
Makes visible key cross-functional dependencies.
Over time, incorporates lessons-learned and best practices.

Remove Innovation Barriers

Toward the end of the article, the authors point out that “work on the MVIS should highlight some of the large barriers to innovation inside an organization” and goes on to mention a few. It’s up to you to rewire them as you roll out and scale the system. Here are some thoughts to get you started:

Corporate Budgeting – Don’t confuse annual corporate budgeting with project selection or development portfolio management. Markets, technologies, and customer buying behavior changes too fast in today’s world. You need a process that runs on a tight frequency, allows priorities to shift, enables real time reallocation of resources, and has tolerance for the uncertainty that comes with game changers. Corporate budgeting can define the scope of your company’s investment, but in most industries, innovation leadership should make investment allocation decisions on a more dynamic basis.
Incentive Systems – Measure performance of project team members based on project team performance and in-market results. In leading organizations, team-based metrics represent more than 50 percent of an individual’s performance review. When it comes to new growth initiatives, be sure to reward learning, risk resolution, and fast failure.
Strategic Planning Systems – Set aside time to look for white space opportunities and identify threats that may disrupt your core business. Think longer-term about the potential for competitors to fundamentally undermine your business model. What could someone possibly develop that would completely obviate the need for your product?

Anthony, Duncan, and Siren have come up with an excellent approach to guide you in building your innovation engine. Start by assessing alignment between strategy and the projects in your development pipeline, establish the fundamental elements of your long-term innovation system, get started with a few pilot projects, and remove barriers. Whether it takes you 90 days or 190, the point is to get started and get better.

Iterate

After your “90-day” iteration, remember to learn from your process. Do a retrospective, evaluating what went well the first time, making sure you find ways of repeating that success, and what to do differently to improve your next iteration. Eventually integrate the technologies and platforms highlighted in this report into a formal support structure for your innovation system.

Closing Thoughts

Organizing and optimizing innovation across an enterprise is hard work. Most enterprises are not starting from scratch; they have built up knowledge, expertise, and capabilities in isolated pockets throughout the organization. Marketing has worked to be responsive and applied automation to that end. So has Sales. So has Product. So has IT. So has Customer Success.

All optimized to address the existing business. When you look to systematize innovation as a recognized business capability, you’ll have to discover and understand these assets that have been built up over time. Focus on customer value and integrate the existing capabilities that support realizing that value – over time. You cannot boil the ocean so use the idea of Minimal Viable Innovation System to establish what works now and what to prioritize for inclusion as it evolves though subsequent iterations of ideas.

If you want to dig deeper into any of the topics associated with establishing innovation within your enterprise, TechVision is here to help you. We can conduct workshops, work with internal teams and help your organization architect and implement a sustainable innovation program. We can also help you apply these concepts to key technology areas we regularly cover such as Identity Management, Security/Risk, Governance, AI…Good luck in your innovation journey.

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TechVision will provide regular updates on the latest developments with respect to the issues addressed in this report.

About the Author

Gary Zimmerman is an experienced executive known for helping companies deliver new offers and expand markets. Accomplishments include launching four companies, 20+ products, building high-performance organizations, and generating millions in sales.

His experience at Neustar, Respect Network, and Sovrin allows him to provide a broad perspective on a variety of subjects including self-sovereign identity, blockchain, enterprise data management, and the data brokerage industry. His experience in both enterprise and startup product development gives him a unique perspective on innovation.

[1] A touchpoint is a moment in time when an interaction happens between a customer and your product, service, or business in general.

[2] Before you subject your users and customers to a new product idea, it’s best to test it on yourself and on your colleagues. Your coworkers will be more tolerant of bugs and missing functionality and can give you very early feedback on value, usability, and critical bugs. This process, often called dogfooding (short for “eat your own dogfood”),

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