It may seem paradoxical to talk about ‘organising and planning innovation’, as it seems to be the ‘bright idea’ of an inventor. Of course, innovation calls for creativity, but in the B2B/B2G high-tech company, as in other sectors, it is not a Lepine competition!
Innovation in business
What defines an innovative company is its ability to offer new value propositions that succeed in their market, i.e. whose “value for money” is preferred by customers and the target market because it is deemed superior, depending on the case, to the company’s own previous offer, to that of competitors or even sometimes to the customer’s “do it yourself” option.
As a result, an innovation may be technically successful but fail in the market due to insufficient value for money.
To innovate, the company can propose innovative products on the basis of innovative technologies, but it can also do so on the basis of existing technologies. It can also propose new services or a new transaction model.
All the successive capabilities and activities leading to successful innovation must be organised and process-based, i.e. the company must decide how they will be conducted and how decisions will be made. They must of course also be financed, and trade-offs must be made both on which innovation projects to undertake and how to sustain them over time or possibly discontinue them if they prove to be a technical or economic dead end
Factors favouring innovation
What factors then determine a company’s ability to innovate?
We can mention some of the company’s key collective capacities, again without claiming to be exhaustive or in any order of importance, since all these activities depend on each other in a sequential or iterative logic:
- Generate innovation ideas
- Selecting ideas: worth exploring, compatible with the existing or foreseeable budget, capable of leading to an effective launch of a new product, likely to succeed within an acceptable time to market, with sufficient chances of winning over the competition
- Mature and incubate the selected ideas
- Testing new business and product ideas
- Imagine and test value propositions
- Determination of technical and economic feasibility
- Prototype or develop MVPs (minimum viable products)
- Leading technical developments
- Prepare commercial launches
In addition to these collective capacities, there may also be those needed to co-develop innovative products or services with clients. We will not go into detail here, but examples include the ability to co-finance products over the course of successive projects or the ability to negotiate and defend intellectual property rights
The capacity to innovate is a collective capacity
This means that it requires both processes and a “culture of innovation”.
This shared culture of innovation is characterised by, for example
- The determination of the top management to develop and maintain this culture of innovation
- The constant preoccupation with preventing disruptions, never taking any position for granted
- The same concern to seize all possible opportunities to cause disruptions for its own benefit
- The courage to abandon certain ideas or projects and to focus investments on others
- Recognition of the right to make mistakes because not all projects will result in profitable products
- Alignment and effective cooperation of all teams involved in innovation, whether these teams are technical, commercial, marketing or business development
