Innovation Framework
Innovation is an agile process, which requires a lot back and forth between different stages in the process. It is also important to clarify that innovation can be expensive and provide a risk of non-direct payback of the investment. However innovation is a process of learning and if it’s executed in a good manner a successful outcome could be gained from the innovation processes either by improvements of a product/ service, a new product/service or as a corporate learning for future projects. As the process should be agile and flexible the project will be able to move faster, change direction quicker and maybe even be ended before the resources is burned out.
Innovation framework – how innovation is created within a cluster and a company, Inspired by Dr Olayele Adelakuns innovation framework, 2018
This figure depicts the framework we used to understand the innovation process for companies when visiting companies during the trip to Silicon Valley. The image is created and inspired by Dr. Olayele Adelakun’s innovation framework.
An important part of innovation is the resources surrounding the company, competitors, universities and investors. All of these fragments are important parts in the cluster in order to create a network that can provide talents, research, industry innovation and founding. The parties of a cluster could be defined as universities, competitors, investors and the company itself. During our trip we looked at how the companies we visited took advantage of the resources within the cluster. One term that we used was co-opetition which means that two or more companies within the same industry both collaborate and compete with each other. Co-opetition means that companies will share certain information with each other in order to expand or develop the industry and make their positions bigger on the market.
In order for innovation to be able to happen within company different factors have an impact depending on the age and size of the company, the business strategy and the culture and leadership (Defined as Demographics). The innovation can then be divided into three different stages; Product innovation, the Process of innovation and the Output of the innovation.
Product Innovation is about the product itself that needs to be changed by help of innovation. Different things that can impact the product innovation are the product strategy, the idea flow, the view of disruptive versus incremental innovation, the available resources and how the innovation is motivated.
Innovation Process is about how an innovative idea get’s born and how a company is able to execute on it. Interesting things to look at is who is responsible, what is the feedback loop on the innovation process, how is resources allocated and which method is used for execute on the idea.
Last, the output of the innovation needs to be measured and incentives for innovation be evaluated. Also the impact of the innovation should be discussed. By having a quick feedback loop with defined measures a company becomes quicker to react on the market.
As mentioned earlier the framework was used in order to understand the success factor of innovation in companies around Silicon Valley.