Innovation Process: Ideas to Opportunity
Every corporation large or small needs to renew themselves or they are toast. Yes! even entrepreneurial new ventures need to continuously do this. Unfortunately, corporate innovation is more of an oxymoron than a reality.
Anyone who has spent any amount of their career in a larger corporation, or even in building entrepreneurial ventures , has seen many new ideas crash and burn.
Sometimes it is with a big bang and a long trail of smoke, but often in the relative obscurity with only a few people there to witness the demise. Most ideas will bite the dust. Only a handful will ever lift off and even fewer will soar.
That is the hard reality!
Every group in a company have plenty of ideas. But are there any among them that can fly? Probably, most of them need major repairs. Which ones? And, can we find out what repairs are needed before actually trying them out?
What you need is a state-of-the-art pre-flight check list to vet those ideas.
You are thinking, “All this sounds like the same old bureaucratic bull shit that we already have! Who has time for checklists and tools and process? We am tired of kicking the tires. What we need is something that can speed up the ability to implement those ideas!
This is precisely the kind of reasoning that can add to the dismal statistics of successfully flying with ideas. Un-vetted ideas are more likely to fail. The high failure rate, in turn, raises the bar for the organization to accept new ideas. Not doing anything may have opportunity cost but it is hidden. Taking a risk and failing is out in the open.
Bureaucracy and Efficiency are two progeny of the same parent -Process. It is the intention and rationale of the Process that separates the bureaucratic from the efficient.
Step-by-step process for innovation is what we learn from the successes in the Entrepreneurial community. We can adapt their process of launching ideas to fit in with the corporate Gating process.
In my decades of consulting and mentoring experience I have used a Opportunity Identification Process. It is an effective tool to steer numerous ideas from a broad range of perspectives before we consider them worthy of being an opportunity to be taken forward.
This process can be used by a Large company, A Division or a New Venture, that has been successful in planting its roots.
The process uses a series of self assessment questions, called screens or cuts to enrich a series of ideas to increasingly high-potential opportunities. If the idea “fails” to pass the screen it is set aside from further consideration. It is not discarded because, as we will see later, it may have a bearing on another idea that is moving forward.
There are 9 steps from Ideas to Potential Opportunity. In the next several posts I will attempt to detail these steps.
Opportunity Identification process enables groups or individuals to screen a large volume of ideas quickly and methodically.
The process identifies high-potential ideas to rise by allowing weak ideas to fail quickly and inexpensively, on paper instead of in the lab or the real world.
It also strengthens emerging concepts and provides a method to insert a flow of other ideas, that are triggered by the review, back into the process.
(Related posts: You Have a Brain, For Heaven’s Sake Use All of It , 9 Questions to Answer before Launching Your Boat and Ideas are Dime a Dozen, Opportunities are Priceless).
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Dr. Rajiv Tandon is an Entrepreneur, Educator and Mentor. He facilitates peer groups for CEOs of fast-growing companies in Minnesota. To learn more, sign up to get the email newsletter.
