• Build an Innovation Engine in 90 Days

  “there’s an important intermediate option between ad hoc innovation and building an elaborate, large-scale innovation factory: setting up a minimum viable innovation system (MVIS).”

  tags: innovation HBR #MustRead

  • strategically speaking, all innovations fall into one of two buckets. In one are innovations that extend today’s business, either by enhancing existing offerings or by improving internal operations. In the other are innovations that generate new growth by reaching new customer segments or new markets, often through new business models.
  • first one “core innovations” and the second “new-growth innovations.”
  • Innovation projects meant to strengthen the core should be tied to the current strategy and managed mostly within the main business’s organizational structure.
  • New-growth initiatives push the frontier of your strategy by offering new or complementary products to existing customers, moving into adjacent product or geographic markets, or developing something utterly original, perhaps delivered in a completely novel way.
  • Even a minimum viable innovation system requires that at least one person (and typically more) get up every morning and go to sleep every night thinking about nothing but innovation.
  • The IWG helps innovators understand the needs of users, test prototypes, make adjustments, and then build scale. It also works to identify latent organizational innovation talent by running workshops that gather ideas from staff, patients, families, and the public and gives employees with promising proposals the opportunity to step out of their day jobs for a while to push their ideas forward. Equally important, the IWG runs an annual Innovation Expo, which celebrates innovators who experiment with new ideas, regardless of whether they succeed or fail.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.