What is your Innovation Process?

Innovation has become a buzzword and "cause". Yet it can be like a movie set that looks great from the front until you see it from the rear as a propped up fascade.

As Deming like to say 94% of the problems encountered are due to lack of good process, 6% involve the people. So much recently is centered around how to get our people energized to innovate. Encouragement, motivation, stimulus etc. All of these are incredibly important but let's take a closer look at process which you could argue is also heavily based on what the company culture is like. All talk and no process is indicative of the culture the leadership promotes.

So what is your innovation process? How physically are ideas generated, evaluated and put through the motions and prioritized for possible action that leads hopefully to revenue generation and profit. If you are small, start with a growth pipeline. Create an Excel sheet of ideas with a column for the probability of success and most importantly a column for the person who is responsible to investigate. Several other columns may involve scale ranking 1-10 for areas such as risk to development, investment required, time to develop, how strategic is it, profit potential etc.

The pipeline should be reviewed regularly. The simple rankings you come up with upon investigation may kill the idea from progressing to a formal product development cycle. Your pipeline realistically will have less than 5 ideas with activity if you are an organization under a few hundred people. The key is that there is activity on something and that you are meeting to discuss movement of ideas (kill it or develop some more).

The key is that when asked the question, "How do you innovate?", that you have an answer that goes back to some "process". Whatever that answer is, whether it's a simple Excel sheet or a more formalized approach is your process- good, bad or indifferent. If you can't answer the question, you know where to begin.