… the evidence is mounting.
In the preface of his new book Permanent Innovation, Langdon Morris makes the following observations:
Many people believe (and I used to be one of them) that innovation starts with “ideas.” People, the common view holds, come up with ideas, and then they turn them into innovations. The managed innovation process was therefore assumed to begin with ideation.
After following this approach for some years ourselves we’ve found that it’s not an accurate description of how innovation actually happens, nor is it an effective guide for how it should be managed. Instead, the most successful innovators are those who begin from a strategic perspective, thinking broadly about their goals and the key trends in society and technology, in order to define their strategic intent. They then develop detailed models of risk and reward as it pertains to the uncertainty of innovation development, and all this gets translated into “innovation portfolios” of their innovation investments.
The design of this portfolio embodies a set of themes and goals, and also identifies many unknowns, or questions. The pursuit of answers to these questions is the purpose of research, and the output of research is then the input to ideation.
In this way, the innovation process is inherently strategically aligned, risk-managed, and goal-directed. And as you undoubtedly noticed, ideation is definitely not the beginning, it’s the middle, and hence the need to … reflect this more accurate and more useful understanding.
We agree.
Developing ideas without strategic intent is equivalent to adopting the “any road will get you there” approach.
More information about the extensive and highly credentialled writings of Langdon Morris is available via the InnovationLabs website.
More on our thoughts regarding innovation strategy is available here.
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[...] innovation. There are a number of other well credentialled innovation management authors including Langdon Morris are also lining up to support this [...]