The Ten Commandments for Turning Innovation Ignorance into Intelligence

You’ve been incubating your innovation for a year now and are heading into the final approval meeting to put serious money into the opportunity.? As you enter the room, on your left sits the skeptical CFO, with her ever-present scowl firmly in place.? You hope you’ve gathered enough intelligence about the opportunity to convince her.? On your right is your business champion, who offers a nod and an unconvincing smile of encouragement. He supported this project even when you were ignorant about the opportunity and business case, and remains excited about the potential—but will he spend his political capital to get this approved? There were a few surprises along the way, so you may have to manage these leaders’ expectations a bit. Have you built enough momentum for your idea to get through the challenging questions you will be facing? Your champion’s weak smile suggests it may be your reputation on the line, not his.?

Sound familiar?

My colleague, David Matheson, and I recently put this question to 80+ innovation practitioners in a workshop:? How can you turn the ignorance surfaced in an early-stage project into the intelligence required to get the funding approval you will eventually seek??

The collective results from that workshop framed as commandments—“thou shalt” and “thou shalt not”—range from obvious practices to surprising insights. For example, perhaps you tend to resist engaging Finance for early projects because they corner you into committing to assumptions. It turns out it’s better to engage them early—see commandments IV and VI—but in a different way than you are probably used to.?

But first let’s focus more deeply on what problems need to be solved during incubation to create intelligence. It’s natural to seek a path of progression on your milestones and get the work on the project done. But often “doing the work” doesn’t resolve the underlying questions linked to successful innovation—it creates an appearance of progress, which is very different from procuring intelligence.

We’ve identified five root causes for why these approval meetings are often so difficult:??(Read more...)