Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire

Appendix C. The Innovation Baker's Dozen

The Innovation Baker's Dozen is about visualizing all the key components that keep the innovation process moving within an organization, and it also serves to help all parties understand what is currently in place in the organization to capture and support ideas and innovation. This goes far beyond the question of whether the company has a suggestion box. Of course every company should have the modern-day equivalent of a suggestion box, but what good is a suggestion box if nobody submits ideas? And what good are ideas if the best ones never are transformed into valuable new products and services?

The Innovation Baker's Dozen helps the organization see whether it has the infrastructure in place to create fully baked and ultimately tasty and valuable innovations, modeled on the 13 major steps involved in making a loaf of bread. It is presented in a list of exploratory questions and summaries you can use to establish how ready your organization is to support success at each step.

The Innovation Baker's Dozen

1. Gather Seeds

   • Definition: The seed gathering part of the process is defined by how ready the organization is to gather ideas and how effective the organization is at gathering ideas. Success in this stage is defined by how easy the organization makes it to submit ideas, how strong the belief of stakeholders is that their ideas will be listened to, and how effective the organization is in gathering large numbers of potentially innovative ideas ...