Corporate Innovation Framework

A quantum leap in innovation. For the first time, innovation can be made a REPEATABLE & PREDICTABLE process.

Allow me to open the New Year, 2023, with another breakthrough in Innovation. In spring of last year, our VP-Products wanted to establish a list of all the supporting know-how to keep a better eye on our long-term product development. A few weeks later, I talked with the CEO of one of our customers. He told me that we know so many exciting things about Innovation and whether we have a knowledge base or library about our know-how and experiences.

Unfortunately, we didn't have one at the time. But we immediately began to collect all the strategic knowledge. We gathered over one hundred principles, strategic features, methods, organizational considerations, and execution aspects.

As of today, we have it: The Corporate Innovation Framework

A new tool that changes from the ground up how innovation is done, literally.

Now, this is not the first Innovation Framework. But this is the first, based on direct experiences, building or accompanying multi-billion dollar businesses that started from scratch. So far, there have been several attempts to build a framework. Some are more ideation-focused, others are more execution-focused, and yet others are more strategy frameworks. Still, corporations struggled to innovate because there was still no all-encompassing innovation model.

The Biggest Challenges - The most significant Value

The biggest challenge in the past has been that nobody could answer the most critical question about innovation: ”How is innovation done in a repeatable, manageable process with a predictable outcome.” If this remained unanswered, all bets would be off.

When to give answers, underlying questions surfaced, including: “Where are the ideas coming from? How good are the ideas? How disruptive are those ideas”. And right after that follow questions from those who believe they have good ideas: “How can we get them to market? How successful will they be?”

The most significant value of any innovation framework is to provide answers to each of those challenges: Understanding how to compose those massive innovative ideas in a repeatable way and how to make the go-to-market a manageable and predictable process,

Our development as BlueCallom started with the neuroscience-influenced discovery of how ideas are composed in our brains and how to stimulate those thoughts and what abilities should a team possess for the best outcome. After we understood how we could “produce” ideas, we realized that it was the key to making innovation a repeatable process. Moreover, we can create an innovation continuum within an organization which, even for the big tech companies in Silicon Valley, was mainly not possible.?

With the experience from our own past businesses and helping hundreds of startups on their way to becoming a unicorn, we know what it takes to successfully bring those disruptive innovations to market.?

Genuine Innovations are far too complex to appear randomly. For expecting innovation teams to deliver breakthroughs, it is essential that business leaders understand the basics of how the brain composes those ideas. This new understanding makes managing innovation a REPEATABLE & PREDICTABLE process. Corporate Innovation Management has changed from the ground up and can finally deliver breakthrough innovation.

Furthermore, we added more and more of the many counterintuitive aspects of innovation in a small booklet that contained “The twelve secrets of innovation”. We added another twelve later on but stopped because we knew it was even more than that. After almost one year of research, we finally could close this chapter and call it the Corporate Innovation Framework.?

Today we have “over a hundred things to know before you go.”

Key Aspects Of The Framework

In accordance with our customers, the most significant value we provide and reflect in this framework is the knowhow of

1) PRINCIPLES

There are ten general innovation principles with close to 50 specific features that are essential to innovation success. If only one of those principles is ignored, the whole innovation effort is in jeopardy. The principles include

Executive Commitment, Innovation Origin, Definitions, Budgeting, Neuroscience, Team, Culture, Execution, and Metrics.

2) STRATEGIES

There are three strategic components for corporate innovation success:

1. The Innovation Meta Strategy helps to put a stake in the ground and define the overall strategy to achieve innovation, independent of the individual innovation efforts.

2. The Executive Innovation Mandate shares the necessity of innovation for the company, the scope defined by the management, and the innovation magnitude relevant to the company. It defines the expectation of the innovation outcome. No more innovating in a vacuum.

3. Individual Innovation Strategy Templates as a guideline for individual innovation engagements.?

3) METHODS

There are twelve innovation process-specific methods helping teams to perform all aspects, from innovation opportunity discovery to global scaling and everything in between. Since innovation can’t be a step-by-step process, the method must support lateral (non-linear) steps and activities.

4) ORGANIZATION

With the new understanding of the innovation principles, the creation of an overarching innovation Meta Strategy, and a robust set of methodologies, it is essential to structure an adequate innovation organization that can carry out a billion €/$ Innovation project.???

5) EXECUTION

While an innovation team can create a breakthrough innovation within six months, it takes five or more years to achieve significant economic success. In other words, the business execution takes tenfold more time and financing than initial solution creation. That is the part where most companies fail to deliver. Almost any company that initially competed with a disruptive business tried to catch up and built a competitive solution, yet failed. They lacked the standing power to go through the growth process that is usually limited by the majority of conservative customers.

Be honest. Innovation is complex

Innovation is no magic, and it isn’t only for the elite - absolutely not.? But managing innovation is more complex than any other business practice, including engineering, marketing, sales, production, logistics, finance, HR marketing, IT, and others. This is because Innovation needs to consider all those practices to create, validate, produce, finance, market, and scale an innovative solution.

On top of everything, Innovation is the intellectually most demanding task our brain performs. Since all the thinking and idea development happens in our brains, this is where we have to start finding out: ‘how to innovate.’ As soon as you understand how the brain can be stimulated, we can create innovative solutions at will. Only a very few people mastered that process in the past.?

Moreover, innovation asks for different paths to developing a solution that elevates people or organizations in how they do things that were impossible before. It is equally unique in its effort to bring it successfully to market. For many businesses, the latter is even more challenging than the creation. This is because weaving an innovative solution back into the existing structure of sales, marketing production, etc., has consistently failed.?

It is free to copy and adapt?

Humanity needs to advance and innovate. The more problems we can solve, the better. The “BlueCallom Corporate Innovation Framework” is something we all should be able to use. Therefore, we made it free to copy. Credit must be given to the creator (BlueCallom), and adaptions must be shared under the same terms (credits, adaptable and free).

Resources

FRAMEWORK WEBSITE

Find most of the BlueCallom Corporate Innovation Framework documentation here. More details will be added soon and available as a white paper.

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WHITEPAPER

The BlueCallom Corporate Innovation Framework documentation covers all five innovation groups and their roughly 100 different features in a 50-page whitepaper. The paper will be available in March 2023.

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FRAMEWORK TRAINING

BlueCallom offers a two-day Innovation Framework Training covering all the critical aspects of the genuine innovation effort and explains why and how the Framework is the most profound help for creating genuine breakthrough innovation.

The next available training is on March 21-22, delivered as instructor-led online training.

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TRAINING MODEL WEBINAR

Get insights about how we conduct the training, meet the instructors, and get a feel for how we deliver the content. Join one of the Training Model webinars with ample time for Q+A or individual calls after the webinar.

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