(2017-09-18) Blank How Companies Strangle Innovation And How You Can Get It Right

Steve Blank: How companies strangle Innovation – and how you can get it right

Pete Newell and I were working with a (BigCo) company that was getting its butt kicked from near-peer competitors as well as from a wave of well-funded insurgent startups. This was a very large and established tech company; its engineering organization developed the core day-to-day capabilities of the organization. Engineering continually felt overwhelmed... at the same time deal with a flood of well-meaning but uncoordinated ideas about new features, technologies and innovations

This company had no formal innovation pipeline process before proposals went to the committee. Approvals tended to be based on who had the best demo and/or slides or lobbied the hardest. There was no burden on those who proposed a new idea or technology to talk to customers, build minimal viable products, test hypotheses or understand the barriers to deployment

The result was a set of formal processes and committees to help create a rational innovation pipeline. They would narrow down the proposed ideas and choose which ones to fund and staff. As you can guess, in the nine months this process has been in place the company has approved no new innovation initiatives.

What the company needed was a self-regulating, evidence-based innovation pipeline. Instead of having a committee vet ideas, they needed a process that operated with speed and urgency, and innovators and stakeholders who curated and prioritized their own problems/idea/technology. All of this would occur before any new idea, tech or problem hit engineering.

At the end of this prioritization step, the teams meet another Milestone: is this project worth pursing for another few months full time? A key concept of prioritization across all horizons is that this ranking is not done by a remote committee, but by the innovation teams themselves as an early step in their discovery process.

The ideas that pass through the prioritization filter enter an I-Corps incubation process. I-Corps was adopted by all U.S. government federal research agencies to turn ideas into products.