Corporate Innovation in 2024: Shifting Gears

1. Strategy First, Now More Than Ever

Gone is the time of detached innovation centres and unaligned investments. Today, corporate innovation projects must address problems and adapt to trends and changes affecting the organization. If you are responsible for innovation in your company, you need to translate these problem areas, challenges and trends into actionable innovation search fields. 

These search fields are where new ideas come from, attracting submissions and inspiring creativity in your team.

The more actionably you can communicate these search fields, the more innovative ideas and projects you will get in return. If you can link your company's struggles and opportunities to macroeconomic factors that also personally affect your workforce, you will unlock a treasure chest of employee ideas.

2. Quality Comes From Quantity

Embrace ideas by constantly sourcing your ideas and keeping the innovation funnel filled. Leverage town-hall meetings, internal communication initiatives and invite your employees to actionable workshops to deep dive into your identified innovation search field. A participative approach and low entry barriers will ensure that your funnel contains a higher quantity of ideas.

Link idea management: the sourcing of many ideas - to innovation management - the execution of few ideas.

How?

By filling the funnel and promoting promising ideas (i.e. ideas that contribute to your search fields and show sufficient potential) into a structured validation and execution process.

Remember to not neglect the non-promoted ideas. Instead, show appreciation, scout for quick wins and funnel them into your continuous improvement processes.

3. ROI Becomes Your North Star 

(You heard it right, even in innovation this is true!)

Remember the good old times where you could enter the executive board room and pitch how fancy and different innovation is from core business and why ROI is not the right KPI for what you are working on in your lab?

Well, we’re in a different reality now.

The KPI for your innovation portfolio, your Return on Innovation must equal Return on Investment. Measure the potential of your ideas from early on, discount it by the probability to be implemented and correct the discounting factor and realistic potential along the process.

How?

Start with your best guess (e.g. from all the submitted projects 3% will make it to implementation, from all the projects promoted to execution, 30% will make it to implementation, etc.). Correct the numbers based on what you can actually achieve. Much like a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM), where the potential of deals is tracked from the first or second meeting onwards, and adjusted as the deal progresses, the potential of your ideas needs to be assessed early on and reassessed as the ideas develop.

Don’t underestimate the signalling of a transparent, weighted innovation pipeline. Once your innovation pipeline is up to speed, this weighted innovation pipeline view might be the only thing you need, to get the necessary buy in from your board.

4. You’re a Fool if You Don’t Leverage AI

In 2024 it’s a given, that your innovation pipeline and much of the project work needs to happen digitally; that your key project data needs to be recorded and analyzed and that an effective coaching can be done virtually. That’s step one.

Step two is to leverage the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in innovation. AI is developing rapidly and security concerns and other corporate hurdles are being answered. Even banks now work with AI - while pre-pandemic, employees couldn’t even access their laptop from outside the office building. The change is here for real.

Is there a patented recipe for how to use AI in innovation? No there isn’t (yet). But AI is for accessing large amounts of data such as market insights, for structuring raw data such as customer insights, challenging content you create, and for cutting speed in the generation of low fidelity Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and materials. All these, are key ingredients of an efficient validation and execution process.

To summarize it, not trying to make use of this new super power, will leave you behind and be quite foolish.

Instead, start here, in the validation and execution of ideas and while gaining trust and valuable learnings and insight, venture on into reshaping ideation and idea generation. Your 2025 you will thank you for being among the early adopters!

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger

At rready, we see 2024 as a fabulous year to work in Corporate Innovation. It’s these tense times, where scarcity and shifting metrics spark creativity and build the foundation for a discipline to grow above and beyond. Hang in there, and let’s build the base for a prosperous innovation century.