How To Lead Breakthrough Innovation In Your Established Corporation
Innovation Matrix
For an established corporation, there’s a substantial amount that needs to happen in order to manage an effective innovation portfolio regardless of where companies or projects are in development. If you’re scaling disruptive innovations with new business models then you are targeting non-consumers of a category. This increases the level of difficulty and rate of failure. But sometimes the problems are well defined and can be solved through cross-industry partnerships.
To be successful in managing innovation, your corporation must identify a primary area of focus and build collaborative interactions between different approaches in one or more of the following quadrants:
By setting the X/Y axis as problem definition and domain definition, you can form a matrix that four basic types of innovation fit into. This gives you a good framework for determining what type of innovation you might want to lead.
For an enterprise to successfully evaluate and accomplish its innovation strategy, it needs to have a mechanism for navigating through each of these quadrants. Below are four options influenced by the innovation matrix to improve portfolio management, create value, identify partnership opportunities and test viable outcomes:
1.Test Marketing Program — Take the top 2–3 business innovation priorities and develop marketing experiments across digital and social channels with a call-to-action to test whether there is potential demand and if your message resonates best with a particular audience. Concept feasibility is better determined by putting minimum viable products (MVP) in front of consumers for feedback. By testing the unique value proposition (UVP) before a full-fledged launch, this allows you to market and test concepts under a time constraint that might normally take months to ideate and prototype in the real world. The Test Marketing Program works for new initiatives as well as existing initiatives that are being built or scaled. (Estimated time commitment: 1 week to 1 month)
2. Portfolio Value Creation Workshop — Work with your partner’s solutions team to build solutions by picking a project to unlock the path to value including monetization, revenue, and pilot development. This is even more optimal if you and/or your partner have existing innovation activities identify a wide variety of programs, partnerships, and investments. The growth potential of these successful results can sometimes sit unrealized because of deprioritization or lack of sales/marketing channels and support. I suggest a short activity in which you build a Lean Canvas of all successful initiatives and then evaluate the results of this portfolio by considering investment and growth opportunities through your portfolio management approach. (Estimated time commitment: 1 week to 1 month)
3. Innovation Incubator — As you mature in your piloting phase, how do you identify pilot candidates that are ready to scale and how do you support that growth effectively and efficiently? The Innovation Incubator would take any solution ideated through a thematic Challenge and evaluate business scale feasibility through virtual and in-person programming. You would work with solutions and business strategy stakeholders to help scale pilots over a 6–12-week cohort utilizing lean startup methodology and design thinking activities. At the conclusion of the cohort, you would have an internal Demo Day with recommendations for scale and growth. (Estimated time commitment: 6–12-week cycles)
4. Co-Lab — The Co-Lab is a partnership and innovation development program. The Co-Lab would allow you to bring in external partners who are interested in co-developing opportunities in order to go to launch market activations with ‘first of a kind’ solutions. Using mobility as an example, related concepts within the city context are being pondered by multiple organizations including government, corporations, non-profits, startups, and enterprises on a global level. Mobility solutions require multiple stakeholders to engage, and you would need to pursue partners from varied industries and markets. Relevant partners would participate in structured innovation and solution workshops on 6-month cycles to identify collaboration opportunities for co-developed solutions to mobility problems. These solutions would be pitched to cities as part of existing state and local innovation activity. (Estimated time commitment: 6-month cycles)
These are just four examples of how to lead breakthrough innovation in your established corporation. Most innovations die because there’s no formalized process to evaluate ideas. This is especially true when internal and external teams work together. Start by making small but impactful changes to your company culture and idea pipelines. Some times the key to success is your ability to engage and co-create with the right collaborators. If you’re interested in learning more or how you can partner with us then email start@humble.vc.
