Innovating To Win

Boyd on Linking Strategy and Innovation

I read a nice post on Drew Boyd’s blog, Innovation in Practice, discussion the idea of linking innovation with company strategy.  In it, Drew discusses two models of interaction between company strategy and innovation:

Strategy informs innovation – in this model the company defines a strategy, then innovation efforts are pursued to find way to deliver on and enhance the value of the strategy;

Innovation informs strategy – in this model, innovation activity first generates scads of potential concepts which are subsequently mapped to a strategic evaluation model to select the innovation path that builds the optimal strategy.

Whichever approach you select, it is critical that your corporate strategy and innovation efforts are aligned.  Without alignment, you have no chance of achieving the level of execution required for successful innovation delivery.

However, I would like to highlight a third model: Innovation and Strategy inform each other.  In other words, you are only looking at half of the picture if the dialogue between strategy and innovation is a one way exchange. 

If you are responsible for strategy, you don’t want to lament “Gee, if I’d only known that was an option I would have set that as a strategic goal.”  As an innovation practitioner, you hate saying “Gee, if I had only known that was important, I could have helped achieve that objective.”

Optimal value is achieved through an on-going dialogue between these two drivers of corporate value.

Looking For The Innovation Silver Lining In 2010

As we begin 2010, I think it’s a great time to mention “The Silver Lining” by Scott D. Anthony.  The book which bills itself as “An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times,” touches on some very important themes that we should all keep in the forefront of our thinking if we are to maximize the potential of the innovation opportunity that are ahead.

This is a nicely written and very readable book in which Anthony reviews key innovation concepts that are always important, but especially so as companies find themselves challenged by a difficult environment.  Although some signs suggest improvements in the general business climate, we aren’t out of the woods yet, and the moves made by companies during transitional periods like this are particularly important.  So, the lessons of “The Silver Lining” are even more on point now than they were six or nine months ago.

Some of the key concepts addressed by Anthony include:

Focus – Or as Anthony puts it, pruning prudently.  He discussed how to identify what’s not going to be a winner and also how to identify where to invest in strategic experiments.

Using innovation to improve margin – This is a major area as companies need to continue to find ways to deliver bottom line performance in top line challenged times.  The techniques of simple tuning that yield incremental saving are no longer adequate.  For today’s needs, you need innovations that will drive new cost profiles.

Improving innovation productivity – Let’s face it.  Most organizations have a pretty bleak track record when it comes to innovation.  The generally poor state of innovation productivity is captured in the commonly cited statistic that it requires 3000 ideas to generate a single successful product launch.  Companies can and should do much better than this.  Anthony explores some strategies to begin moving down a path of higher innovation productivity.  He also makes a case for making innovation repeatable & sustainable in the enterprise.  This is essential for an organization to reach its potential.

Sharing the load – The need to open up the innovation process and integrate all of a company’s innovation constituencies into the process is presented.

Emerging markets – There is no arguing the dominance of emerging economies when we consider growth opportunities.  But, products developed for established primary economies don’t align with the new math of global economics.  Companies need must redefine products to fit a different economic paradigm.

My only complaint is Scott’s annoying attempt to coin the phrase “The Great Disruption” to describe the challenging business climate.  It really has no relevance in the discussion and has no real tie back to the terminology of disruptive innovation, so it just leaves an unpleasant taste in your mouth.

But, that is a minor discordant note in a book that otherwise keeps true to an important melody.  I highly recommend the “The Silver Lining.”

Finding New Market Opportunities Through Systematic Innovation

It has been more than a year since the bottom fell out of the financial markets, and companies around the globe are still struggle to figure out which way is up.  There are some early signs of hope, but the future is still is still masked by the murky cloud of uncertainty.  Companies must find ways to not just survive but thrive.  A return to growth is demanded by shareholders who feel the pain of depressed share prices.  But where to turn for growth remains the question of the day.

I have recently heard more companies than ever asking about ways to improve the health and effectiveness of their innovation programs.  This is a direct consequence of global market trends.  These companies understand that growth will not come from doing more of the same.  The engine of growth is change through innovation.

One common question I hear is: “How can we find new markets more effectively?”  Fortunately, there are some straight forward answers that can help these companies get on the right track.  There are a few basic approaches to driving revenue growth:

• Finding new markets for existing products
• Extending the revenue life of products in their current markets
• Finding new applications for technologies or methods
• Entering adjacent markets

For each of these basic approaches, there are a number of systematic innovation methods that support the approach.  Yesterday, I had the opportunity to show a company how to apply one such method using repeatable innovation best practices to find candidate new markets to drive revenue growth.  The method I demonstrated is aimed at identifying a set of key technical capabilities, understanding the core value benefits delivered through the capabilities, isolating customer pain in new markets that represent need for the value benefits, and defining the market opportunities that exist at the intersection of the customer pain and the value benefit.

Showing how the theory of high performance innovation practices can be put into practice is always an enlightening experience.  For the people observing the demonstration, it provides a tangible proof point of what is possible through sustainable innovation practice.  For me, it is always a reaffirming exercise.  So it was yesterday as I showed how the voice of this company’s technology, the voice of the customer, and the voice of regulation were speaking in unison and suggesting a new multi-billion dollar market opportunity--an epiphany that had only taken me 30 minutes to identify by following the path of sustainable innovation, leveraging innovation best practices and technology to amplify the voices of innovation and hear what they have to say.

Understanding how to develop strategic innovation competence is a critical success factor for companies.  Whether it is the every day innovation needs of the enterprise in finding new ways to define and execute on operational excellence or the strategic Big I initiatives around developing new products and markets, innovation is the elixir to drive the health and success of the company.  Globally, companies are critically reexamining what they are doing to establish sustainable, high performance innovation as a value-driving core competence of the organization.  Are you?

Deloitte Poll Highlights Weak State of Innovation Practice

In case you missed it, a recent on-line poll conducted by Deloitte confirms the dismal state of innovation practice in companies.  At a time when companies need to produce more vehicles for value delivery to climb out the financial doldrums, innovation is a vital force that can be brought to bear on the challenge.  Yet, most companies are not prepared to meet the challenge.  In the Deloitte poll, 31% of the executives surveyed indicated that innovation happens by accident in their company, and only 14% said that innovation is clearly defined within their company.

It is no wonder that many companies are struggling to get their arms around this innovation thing.  Just last week, I visited with several leading companies, and questions around innovation, establishing repeatable innovation as a value-driving core competence, and building a sustainable, high-performance innovation culture were the key topics these companies wanted help with.  Fortunately for these companies, they recognize that fundamental change is need if they are to emerge from the quagmire of accident innovation.  Yet, many companies aren’t even aware that there is a problem in the organization and that there is a path to innovation success.

A couple years ago, an Innovation Practice Maturity Model was described in a post on Innovating To Win.  This model has withstood the scrutiny of practice, so it seems timely to review the characteristics of each of the four stages of the model.  Ask yourself, “Where does my organization fit in this model, and what should we be doing to advance our innovation capabilities?”

Stage I: Accidental Innovation
At this first stage, the organization has not begun implementing structured innovation.  Companies are generally unaware that there exist approaches to achieve repeatable, on-demand innovation.  Innovation is poorly, if at all, understood.  Because these organizations do not recognize innovation as a competence that can be developed and harnessed, there is no infrastructure to support good innovation disciplines and no sponsorship to promote such practices.  As a result, innovation is not repeatable, predictable or reliable, and ROI on investment in R&D falls well short of expectations.

Stage II: Situational Innovation
Organizations evolve to the second stage when awareness of structured innovation methods lead the organizations to test these methods.  Limited investments in tools and methods are made to support a specific test case.  A team is assembled to try out the new innovation methods in the context of a highly visible project.  Narrowly focused knowledge asset mining may also be done in support of the project as well.  While these initial projects are often highly successful, the momentum coming out of these projects is rarely leveraged because the organization is not yet committed to the path of innovation excellence.  As a result, innovation skills are often not retained and must be rebuilt with each new iteration of trying out the concept of structured innovation.

Stage III: Repeatable Innovation
In this stage of innovation process maturity, the successes with early trials have led to genuine enthusiasm for the broader deployment of innovation best practices.  The organization develops innovation specialists who become leveraged resources within the company and are assigned to projects on an as-needed basis.  Investment in innovation infrastructure grows as both the innovation specialists are equipped with the proper tools, and the general knowledge worker population is given access to innovation tools and knowledge research technologies.  While the company begins to experience the benefits of repeatable innovation, innovation is still opportunistic, targeting specific projects, and tends to be contained within pockets of the organization. 

Stage IV: High-Performance Innovation
In this final phase of innovation practice development, an organization is committed to establishing innovation a core competency.  Formal corporate programs for innovation best practices are created.  These programs help to integrate innovation as a key part of the corporate culture and the organizations established product development processes, providing an operational framework to unify strategy, communities, knowledge assets, and process.  A hierarchy of innovation practitioners is developed to optimize the availability and leveragability of innovation skills within the enterprise.  Innovation skills are widely deployed within the entire innovation worker population, with basic innovation practice training becoming an integral part of team and individual employee development.  In this stage of innovation practice development, corporations begin to broadly leverage knowledge assets.  Innovation best practices, supported by precise knowledge retrieval, become integrated into the organizational fabric.

Companies that make innovation a core competence are ready to take advantage of opportunity in good times and in bad times.  Do you see your organization in the four stages of the model?  Are you ready to wield the power of innovation on demand?

Harnessing Knowledge for Innovation – What You Said

Knowledge is the raw material of innovation.  When an opportunity is recognized, when the underlying challenge is understood, we leverage our knowledge and experience to synthesize the new concepts that are the core essence of our innovations.  The knowledge we use in this process comes from a variety of sources, both internal to our community as well as external.  Many companies are facing a serious challenge to developing their innovation edge.  Some of the most valuable knowledge they have is inside the enterprise represented in inaccessible documents and undocumented worker knowhow.  As we continue to make our way through the greatest generational turnover businesses have ever experienced, it begs the question “What initiatives are your organizations using to manage the outflow of corporate knowledge cause by generational turnover?”

This was the subject of our last Innovating To Win poll question, and you can see the results to the left.  These results are interesting from a number of perspectives.  Let’s look at a few aspects of the results and consider what this means for innovation.

From our results, it appears that there is no clearly dominant strategy for dealing with the innovation knowledge crisis that many companies perceive.  No single option has crossed the 50% threshold of diffusion.  This supports the notion that there is a lot of confusion in companies as to the scope of the problem and how to best address the issue.  This lack of clarity represents a serious risk to companies.  I recently talked with one company that acknowledged that there are losing 100 subject matter experts per month to retirement.  This is not a small issue for any company.

Of the selections in the survey, access to external knowledge clearly was favored as a mechanism to enhance the corporate innovation intelligence. While in the general context of enriching the innovation intelligence ecosystem and improving your innovation capacity by redefining the box external knowledge access must be a vital part of the innovation knowledge strategy, it is not a substitute for leveraging your internal knowledge.  People who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.  This is a truism for innovation practitioners.  External knowledge provides you with fresh perspectives and new thinking.  But, your internal knowledge contains highly targeted concepts which capture both the foundational knowledge of the organization, but also the lessons learned so that you don’t keep reinventing the wheel or repeating the same costly mistakes.

This point is further highlighted by the relatively low score of traditional internal information dissemination techniques.  Not one of experience harvesting, sharing lessons learned, and internal knowledge management scored over 30%.  This is horrible testimony to the failures companies have experienced with traditional knowledge management initiatives.  But if information access is so important to the innovation process, why have these traditional methods failed?  In short, knowledge management has been a data centric, IT led initiative.  As such, it is doomed to fail from the start.  A different perspective is needed to successfully unlock the value of internal knowledge assets—a strategy that is user and purpose centric.  The communities that make up the enterprise innovation constituencies must be mapped to their roles, innovation tasks, and relevant information assets in order to define the shape of the innovation intelligence infrastructure needed so support innovation.  The innovation infrastructure must then be deployed in a way that knowledge enables every innovation worker and allows them to have knowledge seamlessly integrated into their every day innovation work.  Removal of the barriers to access of tradition knowledge management is key to successful mobilizing corporate wisdom and converting the sea of data into actionable knowledge.

It is for this reason, that the lagging take up of next generation technology as represented by internal Web 2.0 collaboration and passive collaboration frameworks is disappointing.  The future of innovation knowledge enablement is in connecting innovation workers based on what they know.  When you can get the right people engaged without taking them out of the context of what they need to get done, you have succeeded in accelerating the time to value for the enterprise.

It looks like we all have a lot of work ahead of us if we are serious about getting ahead of the looming knowledge drain issue that is already upon us.  We must do a better job of understanding where the information exists, capturing it, and then mobilizing it in an effective and timely manner.  When I was young, my parents would tell me that knowledge is power.  They were right.  Knowledge is innovation power.  Innovation power coupled with crisp execution is the secret sauce of business success.

Don’t forget, a new poll is now open.  The headlines are filled with news about the latest steps government officials are taking to turn around the economic malaise.  But are these the right steps for innovation or missteps?  This is the question for our latest Innovating To Win poll.  How do you assess the long range impact of current intervention policies?  Let us know.  You can find the poll in the left hand sidebar. Please remember to vote.

Know Your Innovation Course

Flying was huge part of my father’s life.  He was the mechanic and navigator on a good will flight from New York to Bogota in the early days of flight.  That’s him on the left in the photo of the two man crew just before leaving on the trip.  Later, he toured South America demonstrating the latest fighter planes for the Curtiss Hawk company, and was a flight instructor to the Colombian air force.  He even wrote a book on air navigation.

So, it was no surprise that when I was eleven I found myself attending flight school and learning to fly sailplanes.  Among many things I learned in flight school was the importance of planning your flight and understanding how to monitor and make corrections to your course.  Whether you are operating under visual flight rules or instruments, you always need to know where you are, where are you going, and what path you intend to take.

Years later, after moving to Boston, I decide to learn to sail.  I trundled down to India Wharf and joined the Boston Harbor Sailing Club.  There I learned to handle ships of different sizes both in the protected harbor and on the open waters of the Atlantic.  I’ll never forget my final exam for the Club’s sailing certification course.  I found myself handling a 36 foot boat by myself in the middle of a raging thunder storm.  I’ll also never forget the time and attention spent on learning the rules of navigation on the open sea.

I find these lessons of flying and sailing are also very applicable to the world of innovation.  Too many practitioners approach innovation as if just thinking about it will yield big results.  But this is never the case.  High value innovation requires diligent planning and crisp execution.  This is true for both the every day incremental innovations that sustain the value of existing products and the breakthrough innovations that open up new revenue channels for the enterprise.

Some people argue that innovation isn’t predictable and therefore attempts to manage it are futile.  Fortunately, these individuals are simply mistaken.  It is certainly true that when we embark on the path of innovation, there are many unknowns and as consequence it’s difficult to be sure of the outcome.  But it is important that we not confuse uncertainty of outcome with predictability in the path of innovation.  That is to say, irrespective of the outcome there are well understood best practices of innovation that will reliably get you to the optimal conclusion more rapidly.  Sometimes this conclusion will mean canceling a project sooner because you have been able to identify quickly the flaws in the program and thereby avoid wasted costs.  Other times this will mean opening up a market sooner and with a higher value proposition.

When during the course of an innovation project you run across the unexpected rut in the road, having a well structured approach to innovation allows you to quickly analyze the issue and adjust your bearing.  Knowing how to systematically identify and select alternative paths to value spells out the difference between the winning execution that leads to high value creation and the being just another victim of the accidental school of innovation.

Remember, you can’t make course corrections if you don’t know what course you’re on.  Repeatable, sustainable innovation practice gives you the tools to plot the course to value creation and make the mid-course adjustments that are part of innovation.

Reasons To Block Innovation

“Keep your friends close, and keep your enemies closer.” – Sun-Tzu

The momentum behind innovation continues to build at companies around the globe.  Everywhere I go, I hear and see great things about new initiatives and executive commitment to innovation as organizations chart their course through the choppy waters of global economic turmoil to the smooth waters of success.

Yet despite this trend, you don’t have to look far to find individuals who are not on board with the program.  These are the innovation detractors—people who are more focused on their own agenda and don’t care if the corporate innovation and business goals are casualties along the way.  These individuals are usually lurking in the background working quietly to undermine the change in the wind in order to protect their private interests.  But occasionally, they step out and reveal their true nature.

Leveraging knowledge to drive the identification and synthesis of new solutions to innovation challenges is fundamental to a strong innovation program.  Yet there are those who would limit the company’s vision in order to protect their own.  I recently had a Director of Knowledge Management request that we not show our innovation technology to his company's engineers because it was setting expectation with his knowledge workers that he was not able to meet with his current solutions.

There are identifiable innovation skills and best practices.  Equip your workers with these skills, and your innovation workers will become more productive.  But I have heard R&D managers asking to short cut training on innovation skills so as to not take too much time away from engineers.  If you don’t invest in your people, you can’t expect them to deliver to their maximum potential.

One challenge many companies must grapple with is ensuring their freedom to operate once they have selected an innovation path.  At times, a company may run into a competitive piece of IP just as they are ready to go to market.  What then?  We equip our clients with a specific technique for patent busting that allows them to find alternative, non-infringing methods to achieve their objective.  Following this method also provides them with documentation to substantiate the non-infringing nature of their solution.  Sounds pretty useful, eh?  Well, I have heard internal corporate IP attorneys state they didn’t want their engineers to have access to this method.

These are some examples of resistance to innovation that I have seen at some organizations.  What have you seen?  Do you know who are the enemies of innovation in your organization?

Driving Growth Through Innovation

As I was perusing Chuck Frey’s Innovation Weblog this morning, I noticed a recent post by Charlie Alter titled “Demand innovation step 3: Finding new growth opportunities.”  In this article, seven principles are highlighted.  As I pondered the points, it struck me that the advice put forth in this article was actually pretty poor.  Let’s dissect the suggestions made by Charlie Alter and understand what a good innovation driven growth strategy should look like.

Alter: “Shift from a “Product Centered” sales growth strategy to an “Economic Centered” model”
 
Better Advice:
Customer/Market Centric innovation is the most effect path to growth hands down.  Focusing on the term Economic Centered can lead to serious problems for a company.  The last thing you should want to do is get sucked into the vast gaping void of commodity hell.  Yet, this is exactly where you will end up if you make economics the central piece of your innovation strategy.

The keystone supporting the architecture of your business and innovation strategy must be value.  It is the value proposition that gets customers to buy; it is highly differentiated value that drives market share attainment; it is tight full product value alignment that builds customer affinity.

This high value delivery is achieved by immersive understanding of the opportunity space defined by your target customer’s unspoken needs, goals, and aspirations.  While Alter does acknowledge this, the emphasis on economics is wrong.  The focus must always be on the customer.  Customer focus leads to high value delivery.  Deliver high value and the economics will follow.

Alter: “Stop relying on developing the latest blockbuster products and develop a series of evolutionary”

Better Advice:
Sorry, if you want to be the leader, you can’t pick between ‘Big I’ and ‘little i’ innovation.  The only winning game plan is to pursue both.  Strategy and tactics are two sides of the same coin.  The evolutionary innovations that provide incremental value enhancements to your existing customers are very important.  It is these everyday innovations that sustain the value of your existing revenue channels, help ensure the ongoing profitability of the business, and can provide the cash needed to fund new opportunities.

However, becoming reliant on incrementalism is a go out of business strategy.  It is this mindset that creates the environment for disruptive market change.  By focusing too tightly on the current needs of today’s best customers, companies become inured to the constantly changing market/customer ecosystem in which they operate.  They stop changing and developing.  In an ever changing world, when you stop changing, you start dying.

Learn to eat your own lunch before someone else does.  In parallel with the incremental innovation, companies must engage in continuous reevaluation and innovation of their products, their services, and themselves.  It can be scary to think of creating a new product that may undermine an existing cash cow.  But always remember that someone is going to do it.  Isn’t better if that someone is you?

Look for new markets, too.  You can tap into vast new revenue opportunities and extend the revenue life of your current products by applying simple sustainable innovation practices.  Can you identify new communities of users for your existing product?  What is the fundamental component of your offering that is the source of its value?  Can that component be retargeted to a different space where it can enjoy a second revenue identity?  Are there licensing opportunities to be had?

It is these two approaches, self re-invention and white space development, which should be at the heart of your strategic innovation thinking.  With the dual tracks of tactical and strategic innovation, you will ensure both the short-term and long-term success of your company.

Alter: “Look at the size of your business, no matter how large or small, for the advantages it represents”

Better Advice:
It is always import to look at the elements of your business and consider how they can be leveraged to competitive advantage.  But never try and justify the status quo by focusing solely on the positive.  Every aspect of your business, its size, your organizational design, your sales mechanism, etc., presents both advantages and disadvantages.  You need to understand both sides and consider how to optimize each element of the whole to deliver maximum customer value and corporate performance.

Taking the specific issue of organization size as an example, don’t assume your current configuration is the right one.  Does your size and organization really fit the optimal business model for your market and target customers?  The answer to this question may change the way you think about the business.  You might find you need to grow the organization to map properly to the business model and growth goals; perhaps you will find that you have excess capacity that must either put to a value driving use or trimmed out.  You might even come to the realization that a fundamental shift in the business model is important.

Alter: “Make sure profitable growth is driven through every level of your company”

Better Advice:
On this point, I fully agree with Alter.  Every company must maximize its return on investments.  Every dollar (Euro, Pound, Yen, etc.) which is misspent detracts from that attainment.  As Charlie advises, do redirect those wasted resources into activities that can drive revenue and value growth for the company.  This is as true for a start-up as it is for a major enterprise.  As Clayton Christiansen put it, “Be patient on revenue, but impatient on profitability.”  One doesn’t have to look far these days to see the wreckage of start-ups that became proof points for this when their venture capital partners decided to turn off the funding flow.

Alter: “Develop lots of small or even maverick ideas for growth rather than a few large ones”
        “One simple rule is that the more ideas for growth the better”

Better Advice:
More is not always better.  Contrary to the popular mantra that you need to throw as much stuff against the wall to see what will stick, the go generate a ton of ideas approach to innovation is counterproductive and a legacy view of the world that tenaciously hangs on because sometimes something does in fact stick.  When you have too many ideas to wade through, the sea of ideas itself becomes the roadblock to innovation.

Companies have limited resources and cannot afford to waste cycles winnowing down a mountain of questionable and mostly incremental concepts looking for that one gem.  Rather than letting a million flowers bloom and die only to find that in doing so they have depleted the nutrients in the once fertile ground that was your business, you are much better off selecting a handful of high quality ideas that have a much better chance of success because you can properly focus your energies on tending the innovation garden.

This is fundamentally where needs led innovation diverges from the old school thinking of idea first innovation.  By clearly identifying the target audience, their needs, and then applying sustainable innovation methods to find the best way to deliver value to that audience through a brilliant solution that meets the needs, you will have the surest path to corporate value creation.  In short, you don’t need 3000 ideas to create one new product, you just need one.  Sustainable innovation practice is all about identifying the one idea the first time.

Alter: “Form a small cross-functional team and visit your best customers to determine what types of challenges and problems they encounter during their business processes that “surround” the products or services they buy from you”

Better Advice:
On the surface, this is basically good advice.  Understanding the entire use model and eco-system that your product or service is a part of can help you develop many good strategic insights.  However, always remember the limitations of your current customer experience.  Today’s best customers may not in fact be tomorrow’s high value customers.  Be wary of the pitfalls of steering the future course of your enterprise by always looking in the rearview mirror.

Do pay attention to your top customers, as they can help you understand the requirements for on-going incremental innovation as well as give you insights into easily entered adjacent markets.  But don’t neglect your underserved customers.  Understanding their issues can give you insights into vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a disruptive agent.  Also remember to listen to all the voices of innovation: the voice of the customer, the voice of technology, the voice of regulatory influence; and the voice of your business.  When you can properly harmonize these different voices, you are properly orchestrating the business strategy for innovation.

Sustainable Innovation at Boston Scientific

Here’s a very interesting podcast with Dan Kussman, R&D Manager for Boston Scientific’s cardiovascular group.  In this podcast, Dan talks about the role of sustainable innovation and the importance of making innovation an ubiquitous activity for everyone, every day.

Dan discusses how innovation must be more than a mere buzz word if an organization is going to survive in today’s ever more competitive world.  He also touches on the push-pull dynamic of innovation and the need to strike a good balance.  He also discusses the need for cultural integration and investments in innovation.

Watch the podcast below and hear some terrific insights from Dan on Boston Scientific’s approach to building a sustainable innovation environment.

Innovation Chess

When I’m not deeply engaged in innovation, I enjoy chess.  Earlier this year I started a chess blog as part of my own chess self-improvement plan.  Well, I got a comment last week reminding me that I have not posted on my other blog in a while.  Oops!  Of course, my CEO is delighted by this because he feels the more my game suffers the more the business thrives.  He may be right -- especially these days.   While the business is doing great, it does take more care and feeding in the current economic climate than in the past, a fact which is reflected in my work schedule.

Of course this extra attention to the business of innovation doesn’t mean that I don’t get the chance to practice chess thinking.  There are many parallels between the worlds of innovation and chess.

You can only see so many moves ahead
There are many factors that influence the business situation, and you will never have full visibility to all of them.  Because of this, you can never make plans that will not need adjustment over time.  This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan; you absolutely must.  However, you need to be reviewing the situation on a regular basis and determining if your plans are still the right ones.  Are the market conditions still the same?  Is the breakthrough you had been considering still relevant?  Is a competitor changing the landscape?  Is there a disruptive threat emerging just over the horizon?

Strategy and tactics are equally important
A grand plan poorly executed is just as ineffective as a bunch of activity that is not aligned around a plan.  It seems pretty obvious, but I have seen many people fail at innovation (and chess) because they focused solely on one dimension of execution.  This is a fundamentally flawed approach.  Strategy and tactics are like the yin and yang of innovation.  They balance and play off of one another.  You need to have a vision of where you want to go if you plan to get there.  You also need to have the innovation skills needed to navigate the path to where you want to be. 

Bring your whole game, or go home
Innovation and chess are merciless to the uncommitted.  There are many skills that you must bring to the table in order to deliver on successful innovation.  If you have a weak point in your game, you will be punished for it.  It’s not enough to have an idea—ideas are cheap.  The difference between winning and losing in innovation is realization.  Are you engaging your entire value delivery network to maximize the potential of your innovation efforts?  Are you employing innovation best practices to ensure that you are delivering the optimal manifestation of your concept to the market?   Is your innovation process enabled to achieve this best deliverable in the most efficient manner?

Think proactively not reactively
Play the game actively.  Whether in business or chess, it’s never comfortable when your competition has the momentum.  Turn the tables by putting the completion on the defensive.  Futurist Daniel Burrus advises to identify your most urgent issue and skip it.  On the surface that may sound odd, but there is great wisdom in this suggestion.  Your most urgent issue is usually a response to yesterday’s problem.  By the time you respond, you are already too late.  The cost of that late response was the opportunity to get ahead of the curve by creating the game-changing innovation that will put you in front of the pack.

Practice makes perfect
When you play a lot, your game gets sharper; when you haven’t played in while, you feel rusty.  For companies that plan to succeed at innovation, the message is clear.  You can’t expect to resuscitate your innovation capabilities when you feel an urgent need.  You must build a sustainable innovation program that makes innovation practice a part of what you do every day.  People are examining issues all the time.  Every one of these issues represents an opportunity to reinforce the skills of innovation.  Provide the culture, the process, and the infrastructure so that your workers can hone their innovation capabilities, and you will see significant improvements in the value creation achieved by your organization.

As you can see, chess and innovation are very similar.  Regardless of which arena you are in, my best advice is always play to win.