Be Less Zombie

12Innovation Strategy: Turn It On

A checklist, action plan and resources to turn on your innovation strategy.

Innovation delivers when it's deliberate. Only then can it resist the overwhelming power of status quo business dynamics.

Whilst there is a wide range of potential ‘most important’ factors in an innovation strategy, my experience is that when you are starting out, these steps will help you make most progress most rapidly:

1. Work back from the future: Define a picture of the future and work backwards to define what needs to be true to attain it.
2. Define money metrics: Agree a non-negotiable financial metric that makes innovation an inevitability (e.g. 30% of revenues from products that didn't exist three years ago).
3. Chart customer destinations: Create an approximate customer progress trajectory and make some choices about where you want to play in relation to the average. (If this feels too new or too hard for now, skip it, read the relevant chapters, work on it in the background, and bring it in back later.)
4. Allocate resources: Define some innovation portfolio resourcing targets that make the financial and progress targets achievable: Bake in sufficient levels of more disruptive exploration that, left to its own devices, the organisation would otherwise avoid. Start with a 10/20/70 split of investment and then learn your way towards a more accurate allocation based on your unique context.
5. Appoint owners and funders: Define who is going to own and fund the innovation (central ...