The Five I’s of Innovation

Talk of innovation is all the rage these day in certain circles, including the one I travel a lot in. To talk about it is one thing, to actively look for it is another, and to actually achieve it is still yet an altogether different thing. For innovation is one of those ineffable, “I’ll know it when I see it” kind of things, for it is in the minds of most first and foremost a noun describing a physical event and achievement similar to the Eureka or Aha! moment of mental insight. 

But innovation is also a process, a way of engineering for serendipity, or simply put, the search to find a way to increase the probability of a useful invention or creation occurring. To achieve the noun as event we must first seek to understand the process as verb.  It’s useful I think to note that there are two different kinds of innovation to pursue. The first is what I’ll call vertical innovation, which can be either incremental or step function in nature in terms of increased performance or cost to an existing thing. This is the kind of innovation that most corporate R&D is tasked to pursue. The second is horizontal in nature; it is the bundling of disparate tools, sometimes accompanied by a vertical innovation that dramatically lowers the barrier cost to integrating different things to create they synthetic whole. Because this type of innovation is imaginative and boundary crossing, it often takes a new business model to deliver it to market. More on these things later.

But innovation as a process to be pursued I observe can be described as five discrete steps, or what I call the Five I’s of Innovation. The first is Information. Note that this is not raw data, a large and random sampling of facts and elements, but facts and elements cogently collected into a relational framework that is information with the potential to be transformed into knowledge through testing and questioning. So having a framework which gathers, filters, and assembles data into a type of information that provides enough understanding of how something works, whether market or mechanism, is the first step in the innovation journey. While having to decide on how you will transform data into information on something of interest might be somewhat epistemological in exercise, it is nonetheless a required step if one is not to drown in non-coherent data, or spend a great deal of time analyzing data that in the end was just so much noise.

The second I is insight, the raison d’etre for bothering to create information. Insight is a new kind of understanding of a thing, whether it be market or invention, that holds within it the potential to do something different than what you and others have done before. Perhaps a path to invention of a new product, service, model, or attribute that fulfills a newly identified potential need. Suffice to say that the probability of finding any insight within a single first framework, or the hope of finding many insights within a single framework is fairly low. Therefore one needs to also build the facility to be able to turn information around through different, if not many types of informational frameworks. 

Assuming one has an insight that leads to a new level of understanding or point of view, the question then is, does the insight lend itself to an idea, the third I of Innovation. Ideation usually starts with “What if…?” A way to imagine things as other than they already are. This is much harder though essential to being able to systematically generate for it requires a bit of an entrepreneurial/creative/artistic mindset/framework, which of those of us who spend a lot of time in the engineering/science/left brain side of things find challenging to do systematically in a disciplined way. Nonetheless, ideation is a distinctly unique process of systematically taking insight, the fruit of disciplined information gathering and framing, and creating ideas that can be tested.

The difficulty of being able to systematically ideate has in my view given rise to the intense interest in Open Innovation, the idea of being able to take advantage of mass action and simply observe and as first mover, be able to access and utilize the implemented ideas of others. This is a complex subject in itself, not only because it is a thing and process unto itself, but it might comprise, as streaming data about what others are doing, part of our information component. This loop within a loop cybernetic is of sufficient interest that I’ll not spend much time on it here but leave it for another discussion.   

Once one has an idea, it is time to Investigate it, our fourth I. As we all know through activities of daily living, otherwise known as the school of hard knocks, not all ideas are equal or even good. How then to know whether an idea is good? Through investigation. This might be in the form of competitive landscaping, is it novel, are others pursuing it or something akin to it, and is the idea then competitive in at least concept? Can the idea be rapidly prototyped and tested? Can it be scaled? Those in corporate strategy will recognize these questions as part of building a business case. And because one cannot go all the way to build a business case for each and every idea coming down the pike [assuming you have them of course] then a kind of gedanken stage-gate process suggests itself here, which if successful usually results in the build of the business case argument for, and the business plan go to market roadmap.

If the idea survives this thought experiment, market research, gauntlet, then the fifth I, Implementation is then put into action. Starting with the investigated and now vetted idea for a prototype product/service/model, one systematically tests in development fashion the feasibility and scalability through traditional step-wise increased activity and investment until the initial minimally viable product is obtained. If successful as one hopes, this begins its own iterative loop of successive refinement and nextgen builds and a SKU is born. 

If one thinks of the Five I’s as the process of innovation then perhaps the process imagery is not so much the traversing-the-funnel picture so widely used so much as severely designed cone, as wide on the front end as the questions you are interested in asking about the desired soon-to-be invention, but less like a funnel which becomes column-like on the back end, but more like a persistent, designed-for narrowing until only the very best essence is distillated out the latter end. 

We often observe clients struggling to put in place a sequenced process for innovation, the engineering for serendipity as I call it. It is hard, it’s complex, and it’s competitive. But I often think it is because of unconscious intermingling of Open or Outside Innovation and Inside Innovation, the comingling of the horizontal, new, and potentially disruptive, and the vertical, designed to be incremental, improvement. Properly done, the two should fit hand-in-glove synergistically but conversely, can be chaotic and confusing. However, for those who take the time to do so, to design the cybernetic loop-within-loop, the innovation process and journey can be both the interesting and lucrative one we all hope it to be.