A Repeatable Process for Corporate Innovation

To be effective, the repeatable process you design should accomplish the following:

Remove obstacles:

By doing discovery work and starting small, you will have developed an understanding of what is getting in the way of innovation inside your company. The process you design should, at a minimum, remove obstacles such as lack of leadership support, a demand for long business cases and unrealistic ROI expectations. The impact of annual budget cycles should be minimized.

Provide incremental resources:

Teams need protected funding for innovation. You need to design a process that describes how this funding will be released to innovation teams incrementally. Small amounts of money can be released for intrapreneurs to test their ideas through experiments with customers. These funds should be released without the need for a long business case. If intrapreneurs show progress towards a profitable business model from their experiments, more funding can be released to them.

Provide guidance:

The process you design also needs to provide clear guidance on how to get the funding for innovation. What types of ideas is the company looking to invest in? What amounts of budget and resources are available? How are intrapreneurs expected to use those resources? What are the expectations for running experiments? What are the success criteria for receiving the next incremental batch of funding?

Set out the right expectations:

Innovation is often stifled by leaders who ask the wrong questions at the wrong time. The innovation process you design should guide leaders on how to set the right expectations. For each stage of the innovation process, leaders should be asking the right questions. For example, during the early stages, they should not be asking about future revenue. Rather, they should be asking about risky assumptions and what the team is doing to test these.