After a decade working in innovation, I think many of us are sick and tired of seeing a funnel on another slide at an innovation conference. Lots of ideas at the top, just a few implemented ideas at the bottom… we get the idea.
With the rise of the innovation department, numerous organizations are focusing their attention on their company’s ideation rate. A good ideation rate generally predicts other positive company health indicators: profitability, higher employee retention rates, reported customer success, but there’s another innovation health indicator that we think organizations should pay attention to: their implementation rate.
Many people assume that creating new ideas is the beginning of the innovation process, but actually that’s not true, according to Langdon Morris. He explains that ideation occurs in the middle of a disciplined, strategically-focused innovation process. In this article, he outlines an 8-step innovation process that promises better results than the traditional 'spray and pray' approach to developing and managing ideas.
Is innovation a numbers game? We’ve all heard the statistics around the number of ideas it takes to eventually lead to a single successful product. But if we look at why it takes 3000 to 6000 or more ideas to find a single winning concept, the answer becomes fairly obvious: not every idea is a good idea. Mark Atkins explores how we can create better ideas, not more ideas.
Much of the action in innovation during the past five years has been around the front end of innovation – acquiring and gating new ideas. Doug Collins asks whether we are applying the right processes to the fuzzy front end..
This in-depth article provides you with fresh experiences and insights from how SCA, a consumer goods multinational company, has developed and worked with a new model for managing both incremental and radical innovation projects.
Common sense says that if one wants to improve the innovation output, one needs to either (a) increase the size of the opportunity set that goes in the so called 'Innovation Funnel' ; (b) Speed up the throughput of the 'Innovation Funnel' and/or (c) improve the variety of the opportunity set passing through the 'Innovation Funnel'.
