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Three Lanes on the Road to Innovation
In our experience at The DeSai Group, we have discovered three critical lanes on the highway of innovation. If you maneuver correctly across all three lanes, managing your navigation, the car, and the environment, you will succeed in your journey.
If you decide to manage the journey in an informal way, without clear intent on your destination, health of the automobile, or taking the environmental factors for granted, the risks of failure will increase.
If you decide to manage the journey, as you go along, you will ge there, just not fast enough or in the most efficient way possible.
The three lanes on the journey are: Alignment, Insights, and Mobilization.
First is "Alignment". In this lane, the business must specify, clarify and commit to specific innovation vision and mission that will help achieve pre-defined business value – your target destination.
Alignment is about strategically sponsoring, aligning, monitoring, and supporting all innovation activities at every level of the business structure. If properly executed and adjusted as the organization matures, result will be climate and culture of innovation for long-term sustainable business growth.
Second lane is called "Insights". In this lane, the company builds collection of ideas and knowledge, connected or not to each other, for potential implementation. Insights is about analyzing and understanding your efforts to innovate, including the people involved, the processes used and the outcomes achieved. To gain insight into projects, market positioning and corporate performance, you can view Gantt charts, two-by-two matrices and balanced scorecards, respectively. Like these other forms of business insights, Innovation Insight depends on finding (sometimes through visualization and highly diverse breakdown exercises) new knowledge that leads to practical ideas for consideration. What arises from Insights are "Innovation Platforms" and "Fresh Ideas". This helps managers see the state of current initiatives and to tweak and tune those efforts, along with discovery new and novel.
Finally, the last lane on the journey is called "Mobilize". In this lane, it is all about strategic innovation execution. Mobilize is set of processes, methods, tools, and structures that will allow employees and managers (in informed way) to operationalize ideas for implementation/venturing.
It is critical to know that, all three lanes are always at work. The leaders must integrate all three lanes across the portfolio of innovation activities – we call this Strategy-Driven Innovation.
As your organization builds the innovation muscle and the innovation-engine continues to grow, you will need to adjust the integration points as part of the overall business planning conversations and activities at the top.
Would love to here your thoughts as well.