Fear of disruption and harnessing the digital revolution are two topics that keep CEO’s and managers in constant turmoil as far as what to do and when.
Priorities can shift and become less about “real innovation” and tend to map to status quo or problem areas. In fact 70% of innovation efforts map to simple but incremental value creation. Think of adding a feature to your existing product to react to SWOT inputs. 20% of innovation efforts map to saving the status quo with waterfall development efforts to support traditional product release cycles and only 10% of innovation efforts are categorized as true “creative” efforts to drive new business models, create new categories or disrupt their industry.
Knowing where you are in this process and why are of paramount importance. Managing innovation successfully is key to positive outcomes.
From a related article, these benchmark considerations raise some strategic questions:
Once the top level innovation strategy is agreed then progress should be regularly monitored at future meetings. Topics might include:
- How are we doing against our innovation metrics and KPIs?
- Are all our functions aligned on this?
- What impediments are we finding in terms of attitudes, mindsets, skills etc?
- Are we getting enough good ideas? Are we building enough prototypes? Are our innovation processes working?
- Do we have some success stories to share?
The elephant in the room is “do we have a culture, experience and resources internally to drive innovation strategy?”
As much as we like to think there are employees who can volunteer for a new committee based project like wellness programs, green initiatives or HR initiatives like up skilling the workforce, Innovation Strategy does benefit from inputs from outside the organization.
3Open Labs is offering Halton Region based companies new program initiatives to help bring new innovations to fruition. The two main focus areas of huge benefits are Internet of Things (IoT)and (Industrial Internet of Things) plus Artificial Intelligence (AI) as well as subsets of related tools and technologies.
Driving change requires a hands on process and the Open Lab model can provide for 3 strategic areas of assistance;
- Discovery Days to understand your situation and priorities, where we can use an open forum with similar companies (by industry for example) to share common (non-proprietary) business problems.
- Collision Days to provide higher level optioning for “what is possible” by industry and sector with our local network of expert mentors and vendor partners. We review case studies and impacts of new technologies and for those companies interested, create a custom workshop to assist in blueprinting a strategic road map and resultant architectural design.
- Startup IP working with new R+D from our partners, startups and academic labs (Canadian and US University Labs) we can utilize nacent IP to bring net new innovation outputs to companies and even work to help create new business models and strategic partnerships.
With this program, we will offer a co-location option in Milton or Burlington called the “Corporate Innovation Outpost” where you can have your team meet and work on site in close proximity to the 3Open Labs partner resources and vendor technologies.
Innovating in a vacuum can turn out to be a huge time and resource burn that leaves your company stuck in status quo mode vs. innovating at the speed of the market.
For more information, please fill out the form on the corporate innovation page.