The Case for an Innovation Center of Excellence

Many organizations struggle with the issue of how to best establish innovation as a self-sustaining and value-driving component of the corporate environment.  These businesses recognize the critical need to move beyond the business-as-usual mission of process optimization for bottom-line tuning and refocus their energies on fueling the growth engine of the enterprise with innovation.  But when actually working to achieve this goal, they are challenged to find the road to success. 

Even skilled innovation consultants have difficulty with this issue.  The evidence of this is easy to see in the blogosphere.  Recently, Jeffrey Phillips, in his “The Politics Of Innovation” post on the Innovate On Purpose blog, argued for the centralization of innovation responsibility.  The gist of his argument is that when responsibility is diffused across a wide population, ownership is not defined, and the innovation mission loses out to the urgencies of the moment.  However, a comment posted in response to the article points out the problems that can occur when innovation responsibility is taken away from teams that will feel threatened by such an approach.

So what is the answer?  How can organizations help foster innovation as a permanent and purposeful part of their culture while addressing the issues of change management that cannot be ignored?  Here is the advice I would offer based on what works at many High-Performance Innovation organizations around the globe.

The Innovation Center of Excellence

Consolidating responsibility for driving innovation with a single team is a sound idea.  Jeffrey is correct to state that a signal point of accountability is a necessary and critical success factor.  But there is a subtle and very important difference between Jeffery’s idea and the idea that I am advocating here: the establishment of what I call a corporate Innovation Center of Excellence.  This office should not be chartered with the ownership of the production of the actual innovations.  Instead, the charter of the Innovation Center of Excellence is to drive the successful deployment of innovation best practices in support of the organization’s goals.  It will execute to this charter by bringing uniformity, repeatability, and best practices to innovation across all domains of the organization.

The diagram to the right depicts the core elements of the corporate innovation office.  The Center of Excellence operates as a horizontal function and delivers four basic services to the corporation: facilitation services, training services, knowledge management, and innovation management.  To make clear what these functions comprise, let’s drill down to the next level of detail.

The facilitation services component of the Innovation Center of Excellence consists of a highly skilled team of innovation specialists.  These are people who have been trained in the disciplines and techniques of structured innovation and who have achieved mastery of these skills.  Their role in the organization is threefold: facilitation of innovation projects with the company, consultation on innovation methods, and development of more master innovation practitioners.  This team is a highly leveraged corporate resource.

The training services component of the Innovation Center of Excellence is responsible for the development and delivery of innovation skills training throughout the enterprise.  The training should be at several levels.  At the introductory level, training should give employees an introduction to the concepts and facilities of repeatable innovation best practice.  Beyond the introductory level, there should be a path of education that can lead people toward innovation mastery.  You might ask, “Why do I need an education team if I have a facilitation team?”  Simply put, innovation is too important to bottleneck behind a small leveraged team.  The idea here is to develop various levels of innovation skill throughout the organization.  By seeding innovation skill in vertical functions, you empower these functions to be more self-sufficient and nimble.  Development of mid-level innovation practitioners who are vertically oriented creates the ability to manage simpler innovation efforts locally, while maintaining the ability to engage with the corporate innovation masters for complex or cross-organizational projects.

Knowledge management is fundamental to any corporate innovation initiative.  The knowledge management function in the Innovation Center of Excellence is responsible for monitoring the domain topic requirements that must be fulfilled in order to support the innovation agenda for the corporation.  Some organizations will prefer to locate this function in their IT group.  But this structure can work effectively only if the innovation knowledge management function is matrixed into the Innovation Center of Excellence.

Innovation Management is the final component of the Center of Excellence.  This functional responsibility encompasses coordination of facilitation activity and allocation of facilitation resources; general management of innovation deployment; monitoring and measurement of innovation ROI; identification of training and best practice needs; and
scheduling and managing internal communications with the corporate innovation community.

The centralized corporate innovation office described here will help develop leveragable innovation best practice skills at every level of the organization.  It will create a highly visible focus on the organizations innovation agenda, and with proper execution it will build the momentum needed to establish a self-sustaining innovation culture.