Innovation is a mean, not a goal. Innovation enables you to achieve your organization’s strategic objectives. Portfolio management is the tool to monitor whether you are on track with closing the gap between where your organization is and wants to be. Make a start with innovation portfolio management in four steps.
Mindset is the title of a book by Carol S. Dweck, PhD. It describes ways to go about being smart, learning, failure and praise. Not surprising, because mindset is about learning, it has founds its main application in education. However, the framework is also very relevant for innovation.
For senior management of law firms, 10 innovation management dilemmas. Do you know how to address each of these dilemmas? We are giving hints, but some answers lead to more questions. Addressing these dilemmas will help you building a great and innovative law firm.
What is disruptive innovation? Clayton Christensen defined it as a cheaper, inferior, niche product that in a short period of time upends the entire market. Larry Downes and Paul Nunes, have a different opinion. In their view, disruptive innovations do not have to start as inferior, nor are necessarily linked to technology, making disruptive innovations an even greater threat to even more industries than ever before.
Products are not successful, it is the people behind the scenes that make these products successful. Hence the efforts of innovators is a better indicator of where the product is going than the product itself. Thirty years of research has not made us better in predicting innovation success. To be more innovative, we need more people engaged in innovation, and be more stringent in the efforts they put in to validate their ideas.
It is bad that 1 out of 10 innovation fail, but for another reason than you may think; The number of innovations that fail is too low. You need many more innovations to ensure success in the market place. We are focusing on the wrong metric. The metric used here is the number of projects that enter the innovation pipeline versus those that make to the marketplace and succeed. Over the years, the “best” companies have become very effective in trimming down the number of project in the early stages. However, what remains very difficult to predict is which projects to keep and which to discard. The chances of throwing away the child with the bathwater are significant.