Innovation is the lifeblood of any organization that wants to stay ahead of the competition and create value for its customers. But how do you manage your innovation pipeline, the process of generating, evaluating, and implementing new ideas? Here are some tips to help you optimize your innovation pipeline and foster a culture of creativity and experimentation.
Before you start generating ideas, you need to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve with your innovation efforts. What are the problems you want to solve, the opportunities you want to seize, and the impact you want to make? How do you align your innovation goals with your overall business strategy and objectives? How do you measure your innovation performance and outcomes? Having a well-defined innovation framework will help you focus your resources and efforts on the most relevant and valuable areas.
A mechanism is required to classify innovations and basket them into, for ex.: 1. Highly creative, happens when prior experience does not bias and throttle the originality of the minds. 2. Should be nurtured ASAP. Usually results immediately in scalable results like ROI, Cost reduction etc. 3. Ideas you cannot ignore but require further swarming. Eventually pushed to 2nd basket. We do not know which innovation can turn into a revolutionary, game-changing, disruptive, or transformative idea. So, its essential it does not slip from any basket. Serious efforts are required from corporate and government to nurture and direct any and all innovations!!! Worth maintaining a register like Patents.
Ideas can come from anywhere and anyone, not just from your R&D team or your top executives. You need to tap into the collective intelligence and creativity of your entire organization, as well as your customers, partners, suppliers, and other external stakeholders. You can use various methods and tools to collect and solicit ideas, such as brainstorming sessions, surveys, feedback platforms, hackathons, innovation challenges, and crowdsourcing platforms. The more diverse and inclusive your sources of ideas are, the more likely you are to find novel and useful solutions.
Not all ideas are created equal, and you cannot pursue every idea that comes your way. You need to have a systematic and transparent way of screening and selecting the most promising and feasible ideas for further development. You can use various criteria and metrics to evaluate and prioritize your ideas, such as customer value, market potential, strategic fit, technical feasibility, financial viability, and risk level. You can also use tools such as scoring models, decision matrices, or portfolio maps to visualize and compare your ideas.
To make evaluation more effective, I propose a three-fold strategy: 1) Identify mindset barriers that hinder innovation; 2) Align with the right ecosystem to guide your innovation roadmap; 3) Implement a visionary approach that resonates with your company culture. The challenge isn't just technological; it's about fitting an idea within your internal and external landscapes. Many firms get stuck in an 'innovation bottleneck,' assessing technologies that are misaligned with their goals. Consider alternative KPIs like learning experiments conducted or duration of tech transfer processes to break free from this bottleneck. After all, innovation is not a one-size-fits-all approach.
Once you have a shortlist of ideas, you need to test and validate them before you invest too much time and money in developing them. You need to adopt a lean and agile approach to innovation, where you build prototypes, run experiments, gather feedback, and iterate based on the results. You need to validate your assumptions and hypotheses about your customers, their needs, your value proposition, your business model, and your competitive advantage. You need to be willing to learn from your failures and pivot or kill your ideas if they do not meet your expectations.
The final stage of your innovation pipeline is to turn your validated ideas into market-ready products or services. You need to have a clear plan and process for launching, marketing, and delivering your innovation to your target customers. You also need to have a strategy and resources for scaling your innovation and capturing its value. You need to monitor and measure your innovation performance and impact, and look for ways to improve and optimize your innovation over time.