On the Innovation-to-Implementation pipeline

I remember participating in an innovation challenge a long time ago and presenting my “innovative idea”, and one of the judges’ feedback was along the lines of “That’s a pretty obvious solution”. My unspoken response at that time was: if it’s such an obvious solution, why hasn’t it been done yet? The judge was right: my solution wasn’t particularly novel. But looking back I understand the cause of confusion.

Innovation challenges are usually a quest for the novel, the unique, the unusual, the atypical. Which can get us on an endless hunt for “bright and shiny objects” which look alluring but can’t stand the rest of time. There’s a balanced approach to innovation that I believe we all can adopt, summarized as three key points below:

Innovation thinking is too often isolated from the environmental constraints: When we ask folks to be innovative or come up with innovative solutions, we must articulate the constraints they need to keep in mind in their solutioning. What resource deficits, deadlines, stakeholder interests, or inherent risks will they need to innovate around? As someone that has assessed on innovation challenge panels, I see the improvement opportunities here. Although we are blown away by many unique and inventive ideas, most leave us wondering “Will it survive the test of time? Will it scale? Will it be sustained?”

Innovation is not the same as improvisation: Building workarounds can temporarily alleviate the pain point that gave rise to the search for innovative ideas. Far too often, many are rewarded for improvisations which time shows up to be temporary duct tapes that fall off after a while, and leave the initial problem the same or worse. We must learn how to differentiate between improvisations – bandaids that don’t solve for the root cause of the problem that we are building innovative solutions for – and actual innovations.

Innovation Challenges are everywhere, but Implementation Challenges are barely a thing: We reward the creative sparks, the innovators, and ignore the executors that put in the grit and dedication to convert those ideas from concepts to tangible creations. Innovative ideas are really more common than we think they are – and innovation has been rendered a science in some parts through brainstorming techniques and design thinking. Curating the right environmental cocktail of immersion, curiosity, user empathy and creative problem solving will unearth enough innovative ideas than an organization or society can even process and execute on. But the missing link these days is the Idea-to-Product conversion pathway – the process or organizational workflow that:

• Takes the best of ideas;

• Sense-checks them for Feasibility-Viability-Desirability;

• Assesses them for their intended and unintended impact and plans mitigations for the identified risks;Analyses the cost-benefit;

• Articulates the case for change through persuasive messaging that converts the doubtful and resistant and builds loyal advocates for the idea; and

• Creates a roadmap for planning, designing, building, testing, training, launching, engaging, iterating and improving the idea turned product/outcome.

This Idea-to-Product workflow is known by different names in different institutions. It may be the Technology Transfer department, the Innovation Incubation Hub, the Product Management team. Whichever it is, this is the area that needs attention or focus.