Two practical tools for translating science into innovation.

It has been one year since I left my corporate career and decided to go independent (www.andcat.eu) and it feels like a good moment to restate my aspirations and review their relevance. I'd like to start with one of the areas I am most passionate about: the translation of science into innovation.

I set myself the task of finding out what’s new on the topic and what are the new practical tools that I could propose to my prospective clients in the Food sector.

Not surprisingly, there is a lot of interesting and useful literature, coming from the scientific community and from practitioners and case studies: innovation frameworks, open innovation approaches, co-creation examples, etc.

Some of the reading may appear daunting, but there are a couple of common threads and concepts to retain.

Open Innovation.

The concepts and practices of open innovation have been widely promoted in books and publications since the name Open Innovation (OI) was introduced by Henry Chesbrough in 2003[1]. At its core is the idea that it is highly likely, if not certain, that the knowledge needed to solve your problem lies outside your organisation; OI practices allow you to come in contact with that knowledge and successfully innovate.

It sounds simple, but there are challenges: it is difficult to connect Academia and businesses, there are hurdles that hinder collaboration between companies, between multinationals and Small Medium Enterprises (SME), between customer and supplier.

One big help in navigating these challenges is the Want Find Get Manage (WFGM) framework proposed by Gene Slowinski in 2005[2], which I used a few years ago and is still valid and practical.

The first step of the process is the most important: WANT is the phase where internally you define what you need - It can be a problem to resolve, or a piece of new technology you want to acquire to achieve a product feature. It is incredibly important to clearly define the business need and the scientific and technical challenges to resolve, before rushing into action mode. This ensures an important ingredient of collaborations:

• Alignment of purpose

There needs to be internal alignment before engaging in discussions with prospective partners to guarantee a good start to the project. One very nice exercise of engagement between partners is to list what each partner wants/needs and what it can/will offer when entering a collaboration.

The way to organise the WANT stage in the first steps of an OI project needs to follow OI principles, e.g. the involvement of all stakeholders where the knowledge on a topic may reside, not just R&D folks.

The involvement of a wide range of business players is essential to leverage:

• The power of collective intelligence

Strategic Roadmapping

The second practical tool I would like to talk about is strategic roadmapping. It is a methodology used to support innovation based on a structured visual framework that guides the project team in the production of a research plan on any topic of interest. The Institute of Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge provides a great explanation of the process, that I shared in a previous post: link

The process consists of simply bringing together experts and stakeholders on a specific subject - that can be an innovation challenge or a technical issue to resolve - and answering 4 key crucial business relevant questions: why we need this activity, what exactly we need to do, how are we going to do it and by when.

I am a big advocate of roadmapping, as it can be used in many circumstances, it helps to frame innovation and research questions big and small, and, most importantly, delivers on the two ingredients that I mentioned above:

• The power of collective intelligence
• Alignment of purpose

And when it comes to “how are we going to do it?”, there is an obvious follow-up question: can we do it on our own or do we see an advantage in exploring external sources of knowledge?

Strategic Roadmapping leading to Open Innovation.

Do you want to try?

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[1] Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

[2] Gene Slowinski, Reinventing Corporate Growth. 2005