Measuring Innovation in Inland
As a new team in our organisation we often need to describe what Inland does. Sometimes we say that Inland is ”the innovation lab inside the Finnish Immigration Service” (Migri). Whenever we speak this out loud we wonder what does this mean? What is the innovation we do in Inland? And how are we measuring the success?
A few months back we were also looking for a way of communicating the different types of projects we do in Inland: digitisation projects, redesigning processes, scaling solutions and building networks of stakeholders. We needed to define how Inland allocates time to different projects and initiatives.
This is when we came across the innovation matrix, a classic tool developed by mathematician Igor Ansoff. It serves companies to allocate funds among different innovation initiatives. What seems more appropriate in the case of Inland is to look at the allocation of time resources for different projects. We adjusted the innovation matrix from Nagij and Tuff (see further reading in the bottom of this article) to the Inland needs:
The “Where to play”-market axis we separated into
(1) serve existing Migri customers,
(2) serving currently underserved or not at all served Migri customers and
(3) serving customers of others.
The “How to win” or Product/Service axis we separated into
(1) use existing products/services,
(2) develop new products/services and
(3) develop new products/services usable by others.
The three core categories of innovation defined by Nagij and Tuff remained untouched in our model:
(1) core innovation refers to optimising existing products or services for existing customers,
(2) adjacent innovation refers to transferring from existing business into “new to the company” business. This is not about setting new trends but rather adjusting solutions existing in other contexts.
(3) transformational innovation refers to adding entirely new offers to the existing business and serving totally new customers.
After establishing this framework, we spend about 30min placing our currently 12 projects, ideas and initiatives onto the printed innovation matrix:
The process of discussion we had while placing the post its of our original version has brought up a few new realisations:
(1) We have only few projects inside core innovation. As Migri has a unit specialising in doing core innovation of digital channels, the IT department, we thought that this is as it should be. Inland should not concentrate on projects in this category.
(2) We currently have many projects on the edge of core and adjacent innovation. However, all these, especially those that deal with existing Migri customers do not take much of our time. These are initiatives we have taken up but they are taken forward by other players within the organisation (e.g., the HR department’s development team). We may mark those in a different colour in future.
(3) We have a few projects that fall inside the transformational innovation category. From placing them along the 2 axes they naturally ended up where we think they should be. The innovation matrix confirmed our gut-feeling that these projects are important to achieve Inland’s mission. We have set out to transform the way immigrants are served in Finland from being centred on organisations to centre around the immigrants themselves and the services they need during their immigration journey.
(4) Numbering the projects gives a screwed idea of our work: Some of these projects take only a few hours while some others imply years of work.
We are now starting to track how we spend our time onto the different projects. We think we use most of our time on adjacent and transformational initiatives but want to confirm this through numbers. These statistics will serve as one of Inland KPIs and help us communicate our role inside our organisation.
In future, we also want to measure what kind of ideas our co-workers in Migri bring to us. In the last few months these ideas have been mostly core innovation. However, we are aiming to change this over time to get more adjacent and transformational initiative requests from others.
While we know that measuring innovation is a holy grail, we think that our adaption of the innovation matrix can help us to make one step forward in measuring the work we do as well as communicating it to others.
Further reading on innovation matrix: https://hbr.org/2012/05/a-simple-tool-you-need-to-mana
Further reading on our projects: https://medium.com/inland/what-we-are-up-to-oct-2017-49f1821460b4
article author: Suse Miessner
article contributor & collaborator on the work described: Mariana Salgado
