Innovation is certainly one of those in need of concerted effort to bring up to date within organizations, to make it more inclusive and that can come through delivering it across the organization within the cloud. Highly visible, agile and core to the organizations future, seen by all and truly valued.

Let me outline my initial thoughts here, put the seat belt on for the ride please: making the business case.


The cloud solutions do seem to look promising for those adopting a strategy of increased use of the cloud as a future IT approach. They seems less emphasis on the cost savings but its potential to improve business flexibility and gain access to a wider array of technologies and solutions.

Also there is a growing view that the cloud supports critical aspects required today and in the future, that are more radical in organizational design.

Those that look to run IT processes in the cloud, such as development tools, test tools, development systems, test systems, service management and performance management as well as incorporating SaaS offerings (such as Salesforce) with their internal systems, and with this host of cloud hosted systems to make hybrid architectures that promise radical changes can be realized within our organizations.

If these changes can be delivered, then I think they will be welcome by all sides inside organizations, each grappling with all the changes swirling around the business today and forecasted to become even more volatile in the future.

Clearly organization design and its core processes and systems needs fresh, vastly different approaches, to tackling chronic organizational rigidity that is seen today. Business unit leaders are frustrated with a lack of new, more radical solutions to their needs of being responsive and agile.

Switching into the cloud can transform IT into a provider of on-demand service when the business needs it!

Switching to the cloud can also radically alter the position of IT as a real provider of the services you need to do the job, when it is needed, more on-demand. It can offer those in ITa future role of looking constantly towards being the ‘go to’ service provider, that is constantly adding the supporting structures for supporting new value and impact in flexible systems and processes that can constantly be adaptive to meet the business needs.

Critically the cloud can help significantly in the quest for speed, agility, scalability as well as being designed for the increasing need of having in place support structures for a more ambidextrous organization. These need different solutions than today’s systems and will become the big IT challenge to manager over the next few years.

There is a constant talk in IT circles of “everything is a service” and if this translates as the business expects this can have a real transforming ring to it. Business groups require faster execution, reduced time-to-value and higher levels of flexibility, and perhaps, IT might have a way to deliver these through the cloud. The promise is ‘hanging out’ there it seems.

Bringing innovation fully into the corporate fold

Thankfully, for many perhaps, innovation has been a little out, off on one side of enterprise resource planning. To some degree this has helped but also is rapidly becoming a real performance drag, innovation needs to be more central in core process thinking.

I believe the solution is to buy into ‘innovation in the cloud’ as the next practice idea. Today many innovation processes and systems have been fairly stand-alone, remote from the clutches of IT and not being ‘integrated’ into the Enterprise Resource platforms so far, would all have to go and that will have a few cries of “OMG no!”

On-premise IT solutions for innovation remain highly constrained.
I’m certainly against innovation continuing to stay in the on-premise platform at all. Of course, any migration plans will give the current systems sometime but the cloud just seems to be an alluring prospect that meets many of innovations needs.

Innovation can only really thrive and move considerably up a notch or two in performance and recognition, if it can obtain the integrated flexibility and achieve the more open access to all shades of business agility that can be found, if we have the opportunity.

Innovation runs counter to repeatable processes; it needs to leverage this ambidexterity of having access to all that makes it adaptable– nimble, agile, constant change, and experimentation, prototyping that is tailored to explore incremental innovation in faster, more flexible ways.

Alongside this to allow for more radical innovation that taps into greater needs for mobility, usability, elasticity and yet still be aligned to leverage, exploit and maximise opportunities needs to run in parallel.  It sounds a tall order doesn’t it, yet I’m not sure it actually is, when you stand back and think about this and try to begin to piece together all the pieces of the puzzle.

I think there are multiple ways forward exploit the cloud

There are many thoughts one could explore with a little bit of imagination, alongside a decent knowledge of what is possible today and what can be possible in the future, that is already in our ‘present line-of-sight by using something like the three horizon methodology.

I’ve also written about the need for a “innovation mashup” previously, as well as I can see the clear advantages that all these emerging platforms are providing that are delivering radically new innovative business models. Large organizations need to climb on board to thinking innovation differently.

Large organizations are lagging in the ‘responsive league’ clearly, they need to think beyond holding everything in house and look towards a more radical innovation agenda for change. Growth does not come from incremental dripping techniques; it comes from spotting emerging opportunities and turning those into commercial value as quickly as possible.

The current legacy within any innovation systems is creating such a drag on organizations current innovation performance and why are our organizations not recognizing this?

Putting innovation in the cloud is itself disruptive.

It offers a real chance to innovate existing business practices, it can give increased visibility. Innovation can be ‘seen’ throughout the organization, not tucked away in dark corners, scrabbling to gain attention. If you take the example of what salesforce.com did in cloud computing to transform the customer end, then why can’t getting innovation on multiple platforms in the cloud really show its potential as well?

Then innovation connects and suddenly the customer becomes a co-creator of value and collaboration really comes to the fore also, as something necessary and needed.

The speed of any innovation implementation process is determined by demand and acceptance though.

Any new design is determined by its adoption, diffusion and usage, all the way through to exploitation and uptake. I’ve written about the need to adopt improved practices for capturing and distributing knowledge through applying absorptive capacity that give greater structure and receptiveness to change that is increasingly needed to cope with growing inflows of information, knowledge and increased big data insights.

We need to find ways to ‘push’ organizational readiness for innovation to change and that comes from the top really pushing harder to achieve real growth from new opportunities but supporting the infrastructural changes this requires, a real place for IT and HR to become more involved in preparing change.

We also need to reflect on what is needed to help assimilate innovation as it will continue to have a complex, non-linear need in processes and this often in the past has simply kept it out of the ERP space, for example.

Equally due to this exclusion, sometimes the constant need to focus on innovation falls out of the corporate line-of-sight daily, as it is not part of this core, organizational supported process, it operates on one side for many to feel not involved. It comes back into the spotlight only when something has not happened, not as promised and that then ‘expends’ lots of negative energy chasing down answers, seeking explanations.

Resolving existing thorny issues need to be brought bring into the innovation cloud equation.

We need to tackle some problems within the innovation that will simply not ‘go away’ but will remain thorny issues until we tackle them ‘full on’.

The greater emphasis on the softer aspects of innovation in skills, attributes and collaborative techniques calls for different thinking on talent development, learning new topics, working in different, far more project related ways that are responsive and agile to ‘seize the opportunity’ by actively seeking the solutions that are available but most probably beyond the walls of the organization and this can be through the cloud.

The art of letting go and opening up to collaboration and co-creation is a growing challenge for all organizations. The pressure is on finding the ‘ways and means’ to enable that to happen.

Another strong argument for promoting the cloud where you have a constant array of collaborative tools and applications to help draft, design, brainstorm, make mock-ups live, share to-do lists in real-time, manage projects, offer concept board development on the fly, provide facilities for all aspects of audio, mind mapping and creative enhancing techniques and on and on.

I’d argue that innovation needs the very best ways to tease out understanding, not locked in selected mindsets of product developers. We need to offer interactive, real-time collaboration tools to make the design and execution of innovation a whole lot better.

Lastly, without droning on more, we need to find ways to orchestrate, monitor, allow for broader performance monitoring, add tools as needed on-demand, to build and deploy capacity management and modelling outcomes against performance within innovation all are needed. We need to change the ways we report on our total innovation activity,  not in the days and weeks these requests can take, but at the speed, the cloud can potentially provide and the business requires, fast.

So I am making my call of innovation and its need to head towards the cloud fast!

We have come a long way in understanding innovation, yet it still stays locked in legacy systems and structures. We need to make future choices on what we want out of our innovation activity, much of the same as today or the ability to move it into a new domain of performance?

To do this we have to navigate through all the hype and mystic surrounding innovation, we have to be bolder in testing out capabilities to experiment and explore the options we have available today in new software, tools, thinking and applications.

We have to take clearer positions on the best applications to do the job and not settle for today’s poor compromises of having one stage-gate system for example, we need to feel comfortable leveraging and extend our resources and capacities to innovate and learn on a continuous basis how to exploit the opportunities in agile, flexible and real-time ways.

Making the business case

For me, to achieve this we must go cloud-based, agile, and moving towards having a more ambidextrous organization design for innovation. This will help innovation to break out of the existing constraints and linear approach we have given it as its straight jacket.

It will not come overnight, a cloud-based innovation capability but I see no reason why it can’t be delivered in less than five years.

I’m sure there are some out there wanting to bring this hugely disruptive potential into realization quicker than that, it has a real business case potential in my opinion. Does it for you?

The post The growing need is to move innovation into the cloud. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Today, when markets are especially tough, looking long and hard at what you have and jettisoning what you don’t need becomes essential to reposition yourself as leaner and more flexible, far more agile.

Looking to be capable in incremental innovation is simply not enough, we need to be at the same time achieving more distinctive and breakthrough innovation.

This is the higher demand point that is expected from the innovation system within organizations,  and regretfully this is not happening as much as it should.

There are many pressing needs why organizations have to ‘shape up’ and make some adjustments to their innovation activities.

One of these is simply don’t ignore the need for looking to explore a re-engineering of the innovation process. It can really make a lasting difference to the fortunes of the organization.

Herein this second part of the case for re-engineering are some thoughts to offer and support this call for a more in-depth look at redesigning your innovation process.
What is valuable, what is not?

What does give you real value within the existing process? What are really non-added value activities that have been implemented over time to defend, to protect, to layer on the existing?

Perhaps having a fresh perspective, driven by changing market conditions, you can challenge many present activities as work that might be unnecessary, as you make a greater focus on optimization and speeding up, consolidating activities, as part of your needs to adjust and meet this market change that is happening at present.

The need for focusing on new responsive outcomes not just task or unit inputs and process outputs does need radical rethinking.

To be more responsive you might need to place into the innovation system a higher sense of urgency, of reducing time to market, of delaying certain decision points closer to the end.

You need to be more adaptive to these changing market conditions and this might need some radical rethinking by challenging existing practices and norms.

Firstly what is achievable within the existing system?

What is possible with leveraging different technologies, collaborative platforms, more flexible structures and exploring synergies across the whole innovation system?

If you were able to cut across existing boundaries, changing existing controls and constraints presently imposed and challenge the existing structures, what would that achieve?

Of course you begin to challenges sensitivities, threaten personal silo’s and comfortable routines built up and nicely established, you challenge existing attitudes.  All of this has increasing ramifications on existing structures so you have to move cautiously and in thoughtful ways.

Focus on those that might be effected most, that can block and challenge, then set about to offer them a clear alternative. One that they can see a different potential and ‘richer’ promise than often just the protect and defend of the daily grind.

You need to paint an inspiring vision and some details of the journey and outcomes expected. Get them involved, excited and wanting to change, those that don’t, well it just simply will get harder for them to block real progress if you can gain real momentum and early success is quickly seen and felt.

A more radical rethink needs a reason

When we are evaluating the existing business processes, there will always have a certain structure and measured set of activities within it. These are designed to produce existing acceptable results from a set of particular outcomes that might have worked, but I expect, really expect, you were not really happy with the results, it seemed to give a certain disappointment.

If you are truly dissatisfied with your innovation outcomes then you need to see these existing systems and structures as an obstacle and barrier to a different innovation path.

It is when the dynamics change, then you need to be alert and ready.

What if you needed from your innovation process, the shift to a real need for building in agility and higher market responsiveness for example?

Changing the existing process is unlikely to work it needs re-engineering.

You certainly don’t just change just for the sake of it, this does not make sense but changing it for a new strategic purpose does. If you markets are changing, if we are moving towards more volatile trading conditions this provides the strategic intent and motivation to change.

Are you ready when the CEO enters your office and expects different innovation?

In the coming months and over the next few years CEO’s will be finding their way to your executive office, more and more. Or equally to the marketing teams office or R&D centres, demanding far more from innovation.

As responsible for managing within the innovation system do you have you a complete ‘handle’, an in-depth understanding, of what is truly possible to respond to this increasing demand from the CEO?

Not just knowing your existing innovation system and structure but what are the possible options and ways to rise up and respond to a new set of challenges?

I would suggest that you should be already working on it because the way we are all doing business today, is certainly about to change, if it is not already under-way.

It happened to me some years back

I recall one event many years ago when it was expected to improve productivity within the system by 15 to 20% in the organization I was working for.  Admittedly not the innovation system but the whole organizational system.

I had to go out and deliver this as my area of responsibility across a global operation. Equally, there was a further demand to reduce operating costs by 15% and standardise the process so it could be understood and totally visible to the CEO.

The outcome delivered was 25% improvement in productivity and 25% saving in operating costs to channel differently. Both outcomes allowed for increasing throughput desperately needed and holding operating costs so as this allowed us to channel much of this to different new value-adding activities to raise performance even further and drive through more volume.

It took a significant amount of time, commitment and resolve to alter structures, systems, processes and the mindset across a global organization that had been very defensive in its local organizations.

What it did do is radically altered the market competitive position of the total organization and gave the customer more of what they wanted, guaranteed delivery to his desired needs when it was expected.

Why can’t these types of results be applied to the innovation system you have?
Don’t be dismissive simply because my example is a business process re-engineering one, what do you think innovation has become?

It is a business process, with its entire supporting infrastructure, systems, management structures, processes, controls, culture and practices.

Recognize the beast that lurks across your organization called innovation in all its forms, it can make or break you, it is that important to your future.
Innovation needs to find slack, it needs to utilize technology, it needs to find new ways to combine and explore.

To achieve this you need to engineer time, to save on your existing costs, to improve on your existing process and to allow for experimentation, fresh generation of ideas and concepts and allow for the three ’S’ needs.

You need to stretch, to scope and too scale differently on your innovation activity if you want more real distinctive innovation breakthroughs that truly accelerate growth.

What are my three big imperatives (BHAG’s) that push you towards re-engineering innovation?

1. We need to improve the operations around innovation. We need to improve the formal and informal aspects of managing within the innovation system. We have to adapt our organizational structures to improve the balance between local and global responsiveness. We need to capitalise on all the information systems, communication technologies and infrastructures we have introduced progressively over the years and not harmonized or integrated fully. We need to account more for open innovation. Finally we need to look harder at what adds real value and what doesn’t and rebalance the two
2. The scope of the operations is increasingly complex and we need to reduce this. We need to build more scale where it matters to outperform competitors and outperform in (deteriorating) market conditions. We need to add flexibility, we need to maintain standardization in approach, we need to add a higher risk profile into our innovations.  We need to share in a more inclusive innovation strategy and we need to maximise our global processes to help deliver in reducing time frames. We need to make innovation life simpler.
3. The chance to build fresh capabilities into your innovation systems. When you need to reconsider innovation beyond the existing incremental you have delivered you need to find compelling value propositions. To achieve this everyone involved needs to lift their heads up and find some solid, decent time to be allowed to think through this challenge. Knowing the (changing) innovation strategy and the need, being more included in this dialogue, adding their personal insights built on solid market understanding and not just through reliance on other people’s focus reports. Having a growing sense of trust that the outcomes of any re-engineering will release them.

We need to build  new competencies and capabilities into our innovation system, so as our people engaged in innovation can be able to contribute to improving more helpful processes for them to do their job and, feel engaged in a more compelling work experience.

A place where their contribution is truly valued and seen, feeling included and able to ‘freely’ reach out across internal and external networks. Placing real trust and investing in the skills will open up individuals to want to take on new experiences and challenges. They can see they are making a real difference.

So any first step is to see and then respond.
So what do we really need to do to seize emerging opportunities quicker, at tomorrow’s new innovation speed?

Six simple opening steps to begin to think through

1. Redefine our need from innovation
2. Sketch out an opening road map of how to tackle any re-engineering of innovation
3. Identify some opening improvement opportunities that can really galvanize change and significant for the organization can get behind.
4. Take a hard look on what you need to achieve for any change like this and what it means in efforts and resources. Often not as much as you initially think.
5. Begin to organize and draw in a team that can undertake the redesign and can share in this. This calls for expertise but seek out a real diversity of opinion but can all come together as a united team once the debating has run its course and results come in.
6. Seek a growing commitment from those around you, determine the appropriate approach and be ready to clear the decks and take the initiative out of your office into the heart of the organization.

So, concluding my opening case for re-engineering innovation.

As I suggested in my opening remarks in part one of this, innovation, as we know it today, is grinding to a halt for many. The existing treatment and values we offer in innovation’s name are tired, overworked, often over-engineered and under-delivered into the marketplace to make real difference.

We need to radically re-engineer the innovation systems and structures to offer a better value from all the innovation activity that is going on within organizations.

In  not recognizing the crisis within, is not providing the opportunities to explore & extract the best opportunities we can deliver to meet our customers needs and what markets are looking for in growth and stimulus today.

We have available more means at our disposal to move from the existing to the preferred than ever before. Innovation needs to go back to being the real option for significant growth by offering something that ‘wow’s’ the consumer and creates fresh new markets, found by tapping into the unknown needs and jobs-to-be-done that our consumers are trying to achieve with the existing products and services but failing.

We are in volatile times or heading towards them. The markets and consumers requirements are changing, much is by being forced into making change and they, our consumers, don’t like that.

So we have to find different ways to meet these changing conditions with radically altered approaches within our innovation management to respond and be more agile, to draw the consumer back in.

Without question we do need to put back the ‘wow’ factor back into innovation if we want to first survive and then begin to thrive in more compelling ways and in tougher times.

There is a time for this need to re-engineer what we do in the name of innovation and this might actually be that time

The post The Case for Re-engineering Your Innovation Process (part two) first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

When are we going to recognize that innovation, as we have it organized within many organizations today, is failing to deliver on its promise of providing the growth expected and so often talked about by the CEO?

Larger organizations, let’s face it,  are so caught up in the incremental trap. Risk mitigation rules at every level of the management of innovation, as it ‘churns’ slowly through the complex innovation process, built up over the years.

If an organization is totally happy with spending all its knowledge and internal resource on providing incremental products to its customers and gets away with it, then fair enough but does it have to be so?
Alternatively, if shareholders, customers and competitors sense there should be far more, then the organization is travelling a road that indicates the pathway to decline.

The worry becomes simply, can it reverse this mind-set of incrementalism and risk mitigation in driving its innovation? There is a different pathway on offer but to travel down it, you have to think about some serious form of radically altering your existing innovation structure and processes.

Much has happened in innovation in the past ten years.

Often you wonder if any new understanding really has permeated through the outer skin of some organizations, perhaps with the notable exception of open innovation.

We have greater technology, software, and understanding of systems, people, and structures than ten years ago. We are better at measuring innovation in inputs, throughputs, outputs and outcomes or have the potential to do this. Of course, that is, if we chose too.

The real issue for me is that much of this potential, these potential advancements are often seemingly being ignored, or certainly not fully leveraged. We just keep adding more and more on top of the existing systems, instead of stepping back and looking for a more radical redesign, one that can change the innovation dynamics.

The one that transforms and goes well beyond our existing slow growth reality, seen today based on present performance of so many. The extra margins of profit today are more likely to come from reducing not enhancing.

So why do I argue we need some radical re-thinking of how we manage innovation?

Well most of the economies are flat on their back; the money in the pocket of the consumer is dwindling and less certain than in recent years. Many of our larger organizations continue on in their juggernaut fashion, believing they are that irresistible force that is indestructible and that they can keep on going offering increasing extensions to existing products, passing on higher prices expecting those higher sales. Will this last? I doubt it.

They are busy chasing higher revenue, not so much in existing markets but more by expansion into new markets. Much of the existing market activity is quickly negated by competitors, which stalk every move and cover off any short-term advantage to try to regain the status quo. Layoffs, reductions across the board just continue to eat into the very fabric of the organization to extract profit, often at the price of real innovative growth.

Organizations are increasing their complexity by the very nature of the business model they are pursuing.  They are reducing decision-making away from the markets and the field and centralizing this, therefore requiring the building up of the necessary controls to make sure there is compliance and fulfilment of these decisions.

They are increasingly remote and losing the very trust of many of their employees by this ‘drip by drip’ set of actions.

Complexity comes with a growing cost.
It is slowing everything down. More people are spending all of their working days coordinating and justifying more than ever. The productive person, seen before to be the one producing something new or different is today plainly different.

They are more likely seen as dynamic by the way they respond to requests, the way they communicate and coordinate, the way they chase and monitor.

They shut down more in creativity by their need to satisfy growing demands placed on them.  Organizations are employing hundreds, if not thousands caught up in feeding the machine not driving the value-adding process.

We spend increasingly more time in seeking out efficiency and being more effective but effective at what? Certainly not on working with great innovation in the majority of cases!

The need to shift from efficiency to agility for innovation
Our focus is on efficiency and control, delivering more and more incremental better products, trying to stay one step ahead of competitors.

By being in increasing control by planning and knowing your outcomes well ahead of the real need you are running your process to minimise risk and variation.

The need is to have constant visibility and anticipate obstacles by employing the means to make this happen, being in total control, taking out uncertainty, taking out experimentation and replacing it with certainty. Six sigma enthusiasts must be delighted.

What if we changed this?

We want to bring in agility, the ability to adapt quickly to changing market conditions, to lead market change that increasingly shows signs of volatility and uncertainty. Would our existing ruthless grinding execution machines be up to the different challenge?

Challenges like building in accelerating effective exception handling, separating the prevailing present business and application logic to be driven by different innovation logic of rapid, more radical, responsive product and service offerings that provide solutions that get closer to meeting some often radically changing customer needs.

We need to be looking to take greater variation and turn it into a market winning advantage.

To achieve greater agility we need to cut rework, we need to seek faster problem resolution and reduce cycle times way down, reduce downtime involved in waiting for escalating decision-making of the past, minimise any backlogs and combine current innovation into bigger big bang solutions that can cut through market uncertainties to maintain your share of wallet, mouth or bandwidth.

We need the principles of Six Sigma but with distinct differences. A corporate culture dominated by Six Sigma management theory will be primarily inclined toward inwardly focused, continuous improvement types of innovation activity — process, customer service, systems, operations, and so on. The aim is small, incremental innovations that really can add up but only can go so far!

Seeking a more entrepreneurial environment
A culture that fosters disruptive or encourages distinctive innovation is going to be more entrepreneurial, more outwardly focused on new markets, technologies, and business models. The goal is to find big new growth platforms that add significant chunks of revenue and profit.

Innovation is uncertain, unsure territory and requires sometimes a significant level of unstructured thinking to spot the emerging patterns and opportunities; the innovation system needs to build this in as slack.

We need to ask the underlying question is whether the discipline of process management will fertilize or strangle those new ideas that come from light-bulb moments of brilliance”

The need is for a different orientation

We cannot make money without innovating for growth, and we cannot save money by not having efficient processes. W

hat we need is to strike a new balance from what we know that works and what we know is questionable if the activity does not have a real value add component to it.

The task would be to re-invent how we work to carry out this. We need to focus on the fundamentals within our existing processes and even be ready to tear down many of the current ways of managing innovation within the business.

We need to seek solutions from a fresh perspective. When you begin to question you begin to re-engineer.

Part two, published tomorrow, will delve further into this case for re-engineering innovation.

The post The Case for Re-engineering Your Innovation Process (part one) first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Much of the information is imperfect, the returns are often fuzzy and unclear in the early stages and the doubters line up ready to block and deter new ideas from entering the commercialization process.

Justifying new innovation can be often really hard to make for others.

How can you reduce down many of these uncertainties?

Often what is missing is ensuring the innovation business case takes a clear methodical approach and builds the arguments up in a sound structured way.

Far too many cases are based on emotion and gut feel. Some of these clearly work but an awful lot get lost along the way, especially in the more structured organisation.

So often good ideas are ‘killed’ because the Business Case was not as well thought through as possible. It simply became the necessary chore at the end of a set of events that were in themselves a mountain to climb.

It is putting together the best possible business case is the last nine yards, sometimes the hardest to achieve but the accumulation of all your efforts rest on this document in many cases.

A good business case for innovation concepts needs to show the areas of clear discussion, not just ‘brushing over’ the unknowns but attempting to quantify and qualify them as best as you can with the (imperfect) information to hand.

A business case needs to ensure conclusions do reduce down the more ’emotive’ parts, so as to allow the ‘idea or concept’ to firm up, stand tall and be seen for their real merits.

Deep conviction needs to come through when there are a number of unknowns to allow for genuine discussion and growing identification in solving issues and evaluating risks as a common point.

We often do miss vital steps or forget to view the issues from all our stakeholders’ perspectives also.

We write often the business case from our own perspectives not from others, especially not from the consumer insights that might have started us off on the given journey in the first place.

We also need to reflect and account for the multiple stakeholders, both internally and externally, that this idea is trying to address through the innovation concept we are proposing.

Knowing the issues, reducing often the ‘noise and distractions’ and making the professional case is what we need to do to attract commitment to the projects we are working upon, we also need to consciously work on keeping it on track. This all helps.

So what is the suggested approach we should be taking?

Firstly I would argue each organization needs a clear systematic model that you go through, that everyone goes through, and that takes the business case through a structured step-by-step approach.

It needs to allow enabling arguments based on facts to build and grow, to lay out challenges and uncertainties. This enables that everyone involved can see the same steps of the approach taken in making their business case.

Transparency gives similarity and the ‘common’ business evaluation provides a consistency of approach to all cases, irrespective across the organization. It gives everyone the same platform to justify their business case.

Within this step-by-step approach, you do need to require a comprehensive case building technique.

This building step technique will help move you towards a compelling business case that provides all stakeholders with their essential information in this more transparent, consistent process for everyone.

The Business Case needs to include within its proposal:

• There will be different creativity tools to start the process but the need is to structure the project information on a comparable basis. This requires laying out often difficult definitions of success- It is providing suggested guidelines to individuals listening to attempt to get everyone on the ‘same page’ so as to judge the case.

• It needs to provide different options for alternatives to ‘getting ready’ within the case and what these might mean. Then it clearly points to where these issues can be possibly resolved in future resolution, commitments and resources. Innovation in its early stages is full of open questions and the hard work is trying to answer these as best you can, ignoring the difficult issues does not help your case I would argue, it is better to address them as best you can.

• Then we move into building the business case preparation, cost and benefit analysis (where we can), clarifying opportunity needs (for instance unmet customer needs), offering different factor analyses, assessing stakeholder interests, and clarifying uncertainties where you can.

• The next group of factors to consider is making clear assessments of competition, outlining the tactical moves to be considered for market attractiveness, the implications, the ability to execute and what business model does the business case take to provide the fit and attract the commitment. Finally how to stage this- through piloting, trails or moving towards full-blown commercialisation and what each will entail in commitment and resources.

• Lastly, to go back through the Business Case elements to present a format that builds up and breaks down the case logically with the best available inputs that include the unique selling proposition and the future resources needed to translate this case into a winning commercial prospect. do lay out clear timelines and milestones and the projected financial and commercial value it would provide as best as you can. do remember discussing the unknowns actually does reduce conflicts and allows for more combining best opinions and shared thinking.

Moving an idea into a mainstream activity is one of the hardest aspects to achieve

Making the innovation business case a winning one is not down to luck, it is down to a systematic approach to building up a compelling case for this.

Approaching this is a well-structured, methodical way that takes out much of the guesswork and the emotions if it is seen as logical, well thought through and defined. Innovations are often ‘fuzzy’ but adding to this with a poorly crafted approach opens the door to disappointment.

Making the case in a well-structured process gives greater opportunity for identification and realisation. Crafting a compelling business case based on the best available facts and raising open issues allows for a mature discussion of its merits.

Hiding facts, poorly laying out the business case, and not putting enough thinking into this final document are often more the reason for an idea being ‘killed off’ than you think.

Do you have a good innovation business case structure?
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The post Building for the Innovation Business Case first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.