How do you prioritize and select the most promising innovation opportunities and ideas?

Sometimes when we think of innovation we think of big, disruptive change, such as Uber, but it does not have to be the case. A really good example is British Cycling where lots of small, marginal improvements can lead to a large cumulative gain. Thinking of innovation this way means that every member of a team is better able to identify improvements and deliver innovation. My recommendation is that start with the small things as these are low hanging fruit. Following success tackle the bigger innovative ideas with confidence.

Innovation mostly ignites on the shop floor by folks who are involved in the day to day activities. This is when a brainwave fuels a solution to do it better or with a radicle new way of working.

Innovation takes many forms. However for every industry disruptor like Uber there are thousands of small ideas that move organisations forward. Firstly, create the culture where ideas are welcome, secondly ensure the whole business supports change management. It is often inertia that prevents innovation.

Having a framework to quantify and prioritize your area of work is always helpful as it will bring the sponsors and stakeholders not only close to the conversation, but involved in informing the final solution. I've been using the RICE framework pretty often, as it offers a good combination of parameters that can be represented into a simple 2-axis scatter with 4 quadrants. Learn more about it here: https://www.intercom.com/blog/rice-simple-prioritization-for-product-managers/

In my book 'Promote the General Welfare Political Economic System' I postulate that shifting from growing value-GDP to quality-GWF based decision making strategy is the only solution to fundamentally promote the general welfare of humanity and save the nature from catastrophe.

Colleagues know the organisation best and when invited to contribute come up with great ideas. It is also worthwhile talking with professional partners such as IT, Banking and Audit as they have a good steer on best practice and business trends. External specialists are a good source of ideas, especially in the newest technology and applications, AI being a good example. It is important that ideas are captured and compared by someone who is impartial as possible. Comparison can be really difficult as an innovation in operations may be easier to understand and value where an innovation in data flows for decision making may be much harder.

For me, I find the 'failed' cases equally interesting...After all, innovation is a process of discovery and sometimes you set out to solve the problem for one thing and end up solving something else entirely. An example of this would be the 'Post-its'?? Essentially some 3M engineers came up with the use for a glue that didn't 'quite' work in their downtime. What a fab product!

Read up on what makes innovative companies a success. How do they do it? Adopt or test the others with what strategy(ies) are best for our organization. Who do we need to collaborate with and work with in getting to the desired end point.

One thing I found helpful is looking at other companies and different industries for inspiration. For instance, when I worked with the web design team in an economic development organization, we look at Disney, Hilton, and Saphora websites for inspiration. Then took pictures to create a gallery wall to share with team members. After that do a 10x10 visualization brainstorming exercise where in ten minutes each team member proposes ten ideas (one per sticky note) and then prioritizes those ideas with a heat map voting.

If the challenge identification stage is “What” the ideas generation stage is “How”. No idea is a bad one. Be careful of the loudest voices and encourage those less vocal. Also, keep the ideas on record as they may be relevant in the future. See if ideas can be grouped either together or in a chain. Success in British cycling was not attributed to one big innovation but 1000 small ones.

Some organisations such as Cadbury / Kraft have developed excellent building strategic capability programmes that seek to evaluate ideas. Most organisations don’t have these resources so my suggestion is a simple cost(risk) / reward chart. Don’t discount the low risk / low reward as these may be classed as low hanging fruit and if there are enough of them have a larger cumulative effect.

Keep it simple. Test and evaluate but keep it lean. Todays digital technologies allow organisations to trial products / services cost effectively. The concept of fail fast and move onto the next might be appropriate.

Innovation is one of the pillars to grow and sustain business over time. It provides a sustainable competitive adv to market players and helps them expand their business, reach new customers and market, retain customers, increase market share, and grow revenue and margin. How do we do that? How do we know which innovation is better? The key is to understand that it is not a one-time exercise and investment but rather continual over time. Leadership, strategy, culture, and execution are the levers to make it happen. Organizations need to look for opportunities based on strategy and vision and evaluate the outcome of innovations, and prioritize them. Having a successful innovation requires resources, culture, leadership, and strategic intent.

From my experience, having to consider so many factors can be overwhelming and may lead to ambiguous outcomes. I'd suggest ranking identified factors using weighted average scoring model. This approach yields a more reliable outcome and helps to streamline decision making process when prioritizing innovation opportunities.

This step cannot be overemphasized. I have found time spent on scoring templates to prioritize ideas very useful. It also creates an objective record why certain ideas were collectively agreed upon or why they were shelved. It’s something you and the leadership can always go back to.

Fostering the conditions for innovation: curiosity, downtime, coffee chats with those across the functional departments, and having the time to read more broadly. In the past few years, I found science fiction to be a place of wonderment and really helpful starting points to think about AI and development of services and economy.

Some see innovation and invention are two separate objects. They are one. An innovation is an invention as it leads to doing something different to achieve something desired be it reduced costs. more efficient internal and/or external controls and systems that work together, ... a way of doing things better by changing it up. Invention is also innovation using similar logic.

I agree with @jessica Chen. Innovation does not happen in a staid environment. If you ask someone why they do something and the response is “I’ve always done it this way” the organisation is probably not ready for innovation and change.