It’s the stuff of legend that Henry Ford is reported as saying “if I’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse”. This statement is trotted out (sorry….) to justify not doing consumer research on new products and services. The proposition is that consumers can’t tell you what they want; that they are unimaginative and uninterested until they see and touch the magical answer to all of their prayers, which our product will provide.

Of course there are some outstanding examples where extensive consumer research wasn’t done on highly successful products, where the vision and leadership of the innovator was proven to be correct. The best examples include Apple and Steve Jobs as well as Sony and Akio Morita.

Timeliness is another important parameter. Steve Jobs famously said about the NeXT computer that if he’d given consumers what they said they wanted, they would have developed a computer consumers would be happy with about a year later, not what they eventually produced. The argument is you need to anticipate consumer needs, especially in fast-moving fields. There is a strong point here, but it doesn’t mean you should ignore consumers.

Much more has been written about using consumers in innovation, from lead users to straightforward testers. But when should the different approaches be used? All too often though, the debate seems to polarize between “you can’t market research true innovation”; and “innovation only comes from consumers”, so here’s my attempt at some guidelines. These are inevitably rough, bearing in mind this is a blog rather than a book.

1. IF YOUR MARKET EXISTS WITH WELL-ESTABLISHED CONSUMER HABITS, AND YOUR PRODUCT IS INCREMENTAL….

In this situation, if you intend to invest anywhere near significant amounts of money, you would be foolish not to conduct thorough market research. First of all, you should understand consumer habits and product usage, together with attitudes and emotions around the product category. Next, use that information to derive real insights. Only at this stage should you come up with creative ideas with competitive advantage, stimulated by the insights.

Test your ideas qualitatively, refine them, hopefully confirm your insights, and develop your product. Finally, evaluate your product quantitatively, unless your launch is low key. Even if you’re convinced you have the right thing, consumer research gives you ideas for refinement, whether that is communication, product, packaging, price or another parameter.

2. IF YOUR MARKET EXISTS WITH WELL-ESTABLISHED CONSUMER HABITS, AND YOUR PRODUCT IS BREAKTHROUGH….

Again, my belief is that you would be foolish not to conduct market research. This includes the creative stage. The existing consumer habits provide the context for your source of business. You will be attempting to change the market in some way with your breakthrough product, and consumer use will alter as a result. So test it. Even if consumer research confirms your beliefs, you will almost always find out new information that again allows you to improve your product.

You should also consider the lead user concept, most notably brought to prominence by Eric Von Hippel’s work. This shows that the consumers who are most enthusiastic and creative can play with your product and improve it; indeed they can change it completely. They can also act as communication multipliers. Good examples include Lego Mindstorms and the hacked Microsoft Kinect.

Unless you are selling direct to consumers, you should not forget the retailer, whether of the bricks or clicks variety. You may be passionately committed to your product, but to the retailer you’re potentially just another supplier. What justification do you have that the product will sell? Consumer research data will help you make the case, particularly in the context of a potential disruption to the retailer’s existing business.

3. IF YOUR MARKET DOESN’T EXIST….

If the market doesn’t exist, then the product is automatically a breakthrough. Whether it will succeed or not is a different question. One important factor is your brand recognition. Some brands are so strong they can move across diverse categories with ease; indeed a brand like Virgin has gained consumer permission to play in fields as different as airlines and cola. Part of the brand essence is its ability to diversify.

Such brands and companies are few and far between. Apple has the internal brilliance and external love to do virtually anything it wants. Mere mortals should pay close attention to consumers, even with breakthrough products intended to create new markets.

New products in new markets rarely turn out as the originators intended. Consumers shape the market evolution. For example, Google today is a totally different company to that launched as a search engine, driven by creativity and consumer experimentation. So don’t constrain it at the start by using market research techniques, tools and expectations that have been designed for incremental innovation in existing markets. That doesn’t make sense.

Quite often the best information is gained by doing small experiments or test markets. Alternatively you can launch the product in a low risk way and let users play with it, communicating in a (hopefully) viral fashion. Lead users take on an even more important role here.

Great products can start this way, often masked as beta versions or prototypes, but continually feeding back consumer experience for iterations and improvements. Consumers not only interact, inform and improve the product; they do your marketing as well.

Finally there will be situations where, despite all the contradictory information and consumer research you have, you believe so passionately that what you have and plan to do is right. Recognize the risks, and if you’re prepared to take them, make sure they are proportional to the return – and good luck!

It must be a terrible feeling to be trying to innovate in the depths of a corporate morass, surrounded by the urgency of the day-to-day and banging your head on the metaphorical brick wall. Nobody seems to care and the corporate leadership is not only distant in the organization chart but never contribute to innovation.

If you work in the kind of company described above, my sympathy is with you. It’s only slightly better when the corporate leadership issues an edict along the lines of “we must have more innovation”, but without setting the strategic context, providing appropriate resource or taking an explicit interest. This is innovation in a vacuum.

The good examples of support from the top show how it should be done. When A.G. Lafley set the target of sourcing 50% of Procter & Gamble’s ideas from outside the company, he set the agenda. Resources were provided with the External Business Development and Connect & Develop groups. The innovation was not paralyzed with endless reporting and restrictive metrics. Instead simple questions in important meetings ensured that the company responded.

Reckitt Benckiser has delivered the second best shareholder return in the FTSE 100 in the last decade through a relentless focus on innovation, with clear targets and a driven culture. Innovation is an integral part of corporate strategy. The senior management are passionate about the products not just the numbers. At the same time they allow, indeed demand, a very high degree of entrepreneurship and teamwork from the innovators. Innovation is institutionalized and delivers.

The legendary Steve Jobs was also passionate about the products, and insisted that what Apple did delivered absolute simplicity and user engagement. Some may criticize his attention to detail, but it is infinitely preferable to a company where the top managers only care about the numbers.

So ask yourself – where does innovation figure on your leadership agenda? What role do senior management play? Do they lead or hide? Is every innovator clear on what they need to do and why? Do the senior management give explicit, open and clear support to the need for innovation and the people developing it?

The message is clear – top management leadership and support for innovation is crucial for success. They must put innovation into a strategic context, be passionate about product performance, promote entrepreneurship and demand real innovation performance.

Many of you will have heard or read the following statement – “innovation is everyone’s responsibility”. It’s often well meaning, intended to invite participation from all the creative minds in the company. However, it’s wrong.

Large, complex organizations often struggle with the efficient delivery of innovation. Their size and structure can make the flow of projects slow and cumbersome. Competing politics and “turf wars” inhibit innovation probably more than other parts of the business. Even in smaller companies at the other end of the organization spectrum, the implementation of innovation can be disorganized and even chaotic.

So how should companies approach this problem? First of all, with a paradox – the responsibility for innovation should be clear, but the innovation professionals should have a lot of freedom to operate. They should feel liberated.

Responsibility for innovation is primarily about the decisions that need to be made and when. The first, and potentially most important, is the structure and organization of innovation. Questions that should be asked here relate to resource, reporting and networking. There should be a clear match to the organizational design you already have, for example whether it is devolved or centralized.

There’s often a temptation to define everything by structure and job descriptions, forgetting how most companies really work – networking and personal contact. Efficient structures, organograms and job specs are the easy part, whether you do it yourself or take consultancy advice. The real differentiator you have versus your competitors is your people. They are the ones who will define and drive innovation projects. It’s their creativity and initiative that will distinguish your products and services from the rest.

Therefore it’s crucial to ensure that the key parts of the company are networking and collaborating strongly. Self-directed teams are one option you can take to drive innovation forward. They link departmental silos, have clear mandates for operation, and are expected to network for support and decisions rather than constantly refer back to the operating manual.

You will need to define who is responsible for the creative part of producing ideas, whether that is de novo, using external or internal crowdsourcing, or whatever works for you. A key part of this is responsibility for collation, assessment and prioritization.

Next, you are likely to have some sort of innovation process, like Stage/Gate. Who makes the decisions to move forward at each gate? Who really needs to give inputs? Who writes the gate papers? Do people have the responsibility to take certain decisions as the project progresses rather than having to refer everything to the gate committee? Are people constantly asking for approval (hopefully not)?

Within each project, there will be people accountable for delivery and people responsible for doing the work. A common format for defining roles within projects is RACI – Responsibility (doing the work), Accountability (for delivery), Consult and Inform. There is a big health warning on RACI – you can spend an awful lot of time defining who to consult and inform, then put the detailed charts into a drawer and never look at them again. Concentrate on what is really important.

Just as in investment, the decisions to be made around the innovation project portfolio are probably the most important ones. They should be made at the top management level of the company. Any lower and it says that innovation is not a key priority, and may indeed be an abdication of leadership. Everyone working on innovation should know that the leadership buys in to what they are doing, and the priority ascribed to it.

Innovation projects in large companies always face challenges when encountering a handover at an interface. Whether that is Research to Product Development, or then on to Manufacturing, it’s a challenge. Multi-functional self-directed teams ease this handover, as they are more likely to anticipate issues faced by the receiving department earlier in the project.

Devolving responsibility is not abdicating it. You don’t need to lock yourself away, then hope and pray that things are going well while the self-directed teams get on with the job. There should be sufficient interaction and networking to enable knowledge of progress without onerous reporting requirements.

People generally know what makes sense and what doesn’t. So don’t inhibit them by having overly complex Stage/Gate systems and detailed RACI descriptions that mean they spend more time reading manuals and writing gate papers rather than getting on with projects. Defining responsibility equates with maintaining control, whether implicitly or explicitly. Beware of what you control, otherwise you will stifle your innovation teams and erode the competitive edge of what you produce.

Is there a contradiction here with the successful approach taken by, for example, Steve Jobs at Apple, where even the tiniest detail apparently needed Jobs’ approval? Not necessarily, as long as the ideas and products rule rather than hierarchy. You need to know what senior managers are passionate about, and if it’s the performance of the product you should be thankful.

I believe that companies work best with a clear framework of leadership and responsibility within which individuals and teams have a high degree of freedom to experiment, and to deliver their projects using initiative and creativity. So here’s the paradox again; you need to define responsibility clearly without paralyzing the organization and trying to run it “by the book”. Give the responsibility for innovation to your people, and set them free to deliver it.

I’m sure you’ve heard the statement – “we’re doing this innovation for strategic reasons”. Quite often “strategic” used in this context as a euphemism for “it’s not going to make any money but we need a reason to justify it”. Strategy should rarely be used as the sole reason or even excuse for innovation. It should always be strategic and make money.

So what is strategic innovation? The short answer is that anything you do in innovation should be rooted in strategy. This applies whether that strategy is total corporate, divisional or functional. Any sensible company should have a view of the markets in which it will compete, where it will source new business e.g. market expansion, share gain, recruiting new users etc. It should reflect on internal competencies and define the battles you can and must win. Once you know that, you can put your innovation priorities into context.

In many companies innovation is seen as something special, over and above routine operations. In those circumstances it is even more important to ask the “why?” question. Anything that disturbs “business as usual” will be greeted with more challenge and skepticism than a simple addition to the manufacturing schedule or another sales promotion. You will need a very clear reason, and that should primarily come from a reason to support the achievement of your strategic goals.

The status of innovation in strategy may be driven by a stated but non-specific need to innovate, and then activities put in place to deliver it. This is wrong. It must be informed by the stated strategic goals of the company. Of course the strategy does not define the detailed rationale and specification for every single project, but each project should make strategic sense. Innovation that is ad hoc is both ineffective and inefficient – meaning you do the wrong things and probably do them wrong as well.

You should also beware of innovation solutions seeking a problem. It is highly unlikely that you would find a strategic match for such a project, so make sure it doesn’t suck valuable resource away from a project that is strategically aligned.

In an ideal world you will have an innovation strategy and plan as a cascade from the overall strategy. Even better, you will include Open Innovation within your innovation strategy, having decided what will be developed inside and what sourced inside.

Very occasionally an innovation opportunity comes along which is so spectacularly attractive that it can influence the strategy. It can provide upside potential beyond most of the options currently under development. In that instance there should be no hesitation on behalf of the project team. They should ensure that agreement is gained to alter the strategy appropriately. Then, once the correct priority is given, the whole company needs to be aligned behind the new initiative, such that the whole “go to market” machine is not only prepared but also motivated.

Last but certainly not least, the people doing the innovation work must be aware of the strategy. Increasingly companies also understand that close external partners, for example core suppliers, also need to know the strategies. If they know, they will be able to bring new ideas aligned with the strategy, as well as being more motivated to work with you to achieve your strategic goals.

This sensible approach ensures that all noses are pointed in the same direction, resources are applied where they will have the biggest impact and the company has the best chance of meeting the objectives of its strategic plan.

I wrote an article for Sensei recently on technology strategy.  Sensei do some smart work enhancing human performance for companies, you can find out more at www.senseiuke.com.  Here’s the article…..

For most companies, a technology strategy should be a fundamental component of the overall strategy, at either corporate or divisional level.  In this context, technology means the science, tools, mechanisms or systems that enable your products or services to function.  What it doesn’t mean is Information Systems.  For example, a car manufacturer uses a wide range of technologies to enable the car to deliver all of its functions and needs to understand how these will develop.  What is the future of fuel cells?  What will be the impact on engine design?  What will be each company’s role in the development?  All these questions are fundamental to the strategy of the car company.

The technology strategy should “cascade” from the overall corporate strategy.  I won’t go into detail about developing corporate strategy as this is covered in other Sensei articles but clearly you need one and the technology strategy needs to take its context from this ‘parent’ strategy.  In companies such as pharmaceuticals and high tech equipment manufacturers it is common for the technology strategy to inform the corporate strategy but it is usually the other way around

So how do you develop your technology strategy?  As you might expect there are several ways to do this but you may find the approach outlined below gives you a good start.  The sequence we recommend has three phases – Input, Assessment and Portfolio Planning.

1.  INPUT

In this phase, you need to understand what is currently happening in several key areas.  Your customer and consumer habits and needs never stay static.  Even some of the subtlest changes can impact future requirements for your product or service.  For example, if you are an installer of telephone landlines, the rapid adoption of mobile phones in developing markets may mean your current technology is obsolete in those countries.

In addition to trends with customers and consumers, a clear understanding is needed of what drives your market and can affect your growth plans – the market dynamics, what drives the technology, what trends  will most affect your business and what your competitors are doing.  It is also useful to understand what is happening in adjacent technology segments. The insights provided by this research and enquiry process will enable you to build future scenarios, where you predict the shape and characteristics of the technology landscape in your business.

This is predicting the future and of course is fraught with danger, yet it is important to try and assess the likely scenarios that your organization may face and select the one that is the most appealing to follow. Predictions in consumer behavior often have a high degree of linearity, as shifting consumer buying patterns can take some time.  However history suggests that the development of technologies is more likely to be discontinuous and can often follow the “S-curve” shape rather than a straight line.

Your scenario development should include predictions on disruption.  What could wipe out your market completely?  What emerging technology could make your product obsolete and your market disappear? It is no fun to be in charge of a business made obsolete by new technology unless you get there first! What opportunities do you have to completely change the market dynamics and win?

This stage of strategy development should include some diverse inputs, ideally from outside your company.  It’s very easy to remain ‘within your box’ constantly reworking what you already know and miss some learning or opinion which could be very valuable.

2.  ASSESSMENT

Most technology assessment starts with segmentation.  There are lots of options but one that I like originated with the Arthur D Little consultancy.  It looks at Base, Enabling and Discriminating technologies – the descriptions are fairly self-explanatory – combined with your competitive position, categorized as Clear Leader, Strong, Favourable, Tenable or Weak.  Intellectual Property, e.g. patents, is a fundamental criterion to consider in this assessment.

Coupled with a simple approach to risk and potential return, this assessment phase gives you an overview of the areas where you need to gain competitive advantage, where you need to build to compete and where you’re in danger of being so far behind you may need to exit.

Once you have prioritized technologies through segmentation, you should then understand the level of technology maturity and how they will develop over time.  One way to do this is through technology road-mapping, where you can group technologies and map their development over your chosen timeframe.  This helps to spot dependencies and aids the next part of the strategy process.

3.  PORTFOLIO DEVELOPMENT AND PLANNING

This is the phase where you decide what, when and how you will develop and apply technologies.  Important considerations include your internal competencies, resources, your Must Win Battles, major technology gaps, and major technology opportunities.  You should end up with a technology portfolio and plan, which provide the framework for action.

You will have an answer to the Make/Buy/Ally question for each important technology or group and from this you can derive a separate Open Innovation strategy.  This will tell you which technologies you wish to source outside.  Increasingly Open Innovation is offering companies much more promise.  For example, Kraft quote that 98% of food-related IP exists outside their company; Procter & Gamble estimate that there are over 200 times more relevant experts outside their company than there are inside.  The potential is clear.

The final part of the technology strategy is implementation.  A beautiful portfolio diagram may be comforting, but it is nothing if it stays in a filing cabinet and you carry on with business as usual.  The technology strategy does not need to be complicated or overly precise.  It is a tool to guide action that can contribute significantly to success in the market when you couple it with your resolve and determination to win.

Open Innovation (OI) offers companies greater opportunities for innovative products and services by increasing the access to inventions, technologies and products that other companies possess.  In order for it to work effectively, it must be internalized in a way that gets a project moving fast.  This is a key part of the process and certain people can play a key role.

The people I’ve met who work in OI within large companies are invariably personable, highly competent and experienced.  I don’t think there is any issue with the OI professionals.  However there do appear to be some challenges with integration of OI projects in organizations, whether that is gaining traction with the initial idea, building a project team that effectively incorporates the external partner or struggles further on in the project.

Those of us who have worked extensively in OI know the feeling when an external opportunity falls within the responsibility of somebody who has the ability to grasp the information quickly; realize there’s something in it; mobilize others; influence up, down and around them; and simply get things done.  There’s a feeling of organizational energy within and around them, which is why such people could be called “Superconductors”.

They usually sit at a node in the organization, have lots of links and contacts with other people in the company and act as more than just a routing point.  They are superconductors because information and potential is not only routed quickly but seems to be amplified as well.  They are usually natural enthusiasts with a curiosity and drive to deliver.  The superconductors are the nodes in the internal network.  Signals gravitate towards them, and the ensuing messages are sent to the other people that matter.

Equally, a lot of readers will have experienced the sinking feeling when you have to take an external opportunity to somebody who will suck the energy out of it and slow it down.  They may be nodes in an organization design, but only on paper, and they are more super-resisting than conducting.  I guess you could call them insulators.

This is not to say that OI professionals always want a “yes”.  An informed, knowledgeable and early “no” brings clarity and avoids a future waste of time for you and the external company.  It’s much better than a qualified “yes”, which really means, “I don’t know (or perhaps care)”.

HR groups do their best to fill the organizational boxes with people who meet the brief of experience, values and competencies.  Yet why is it that some people can superconduct rather than resist?  Companies need to look closely at the people in key positions in the innovation chain.  Not only do they need the requisite academic and business qualifications, increasingly they need to communicate, influence and mobilize.  Just as much depends on the character of the people as on their positional accountabilities.  That doesn’t mean they can’t be helped.  Companies can coach and train people to improve already good superconducting performance, and to help those whose lack of awareness may be hindering the transmission of innovation opportunities.

So, do you know your company’s superconductors?  Do you help or hinder them?  How can you help them to superconduct your OI more effectively?  Where are the blockers in the network?  Answering these questions will help the OI team be more effective and deliver more for your business.

The obituaries and tributes are fulsome and quite rightly so.  Steve Jobs was an extraordinary man who built Apple into an extraordinary company.  In the best tradition of declaring interests, let me say that I am also an Apple loyalist, an iPhile.  I love the products, so my views may be slightly biased when I say that the Apple of the last 10 years is one of the most successful business stories ever.

So how did they do it and what can we learn?  Many better commentators than me have described why Apple is an innovation powerhouse.  They have tried to analyze what has made them successful and tried to formulate the recipe for success.

The message whether explicit or implicit, is that doing what Apple does is a path to glory.  But here’s why this is the wrong thing for others to do.  Only Apple is Apple, and only Apple can do what they do.

The key is in Steve Jobs’ remarkable address to the Stanford graduation class of 2005 when he said – “your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.  Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.  Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.  And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

I think this applies just as much to companies as individuals.  Yes, try to learn from them by understanding what is relevant and can work for you; but don’t try to repeat exactly what they do.  The key thing to learn from Apple is to build your own path to the future and follow it with passion and determination.  To paraphrase another American icon, do it your way.

I suspect the vast majority of innovation professionals would agree that measuring what you do is important.  That may well be a statement of the blindingly obvious, but the debate diverges dramatically when considering what is actually done.  Luis Solis of Imaginatik wrote a good post on Innovation Excellence clearly distinguishing between input and output metrics.  I’d like to build on Luis’ article by adding four other considerations to the debate.

First, it’s important to distinguish between LEADING and LAGGING metrics.  Lagging metrics are history, they tell you what you’ve already done.  For example, the percentage of sales from new products is a lagging indicator; it’s something you can’t change.  However looking at the potential value of new products in your pipeline is a leading indicator.  It predicts the future and if you’re not meeting your projected targets, you should still have time to do something about it.

In terms of driving performance, leading metrics are much more valuable to managers in charge of innovation.  They are the areas that should align with incentives and that should drive portfolio and project management.  Lagging metrics are much more relevant to reporting (see below).

Secondly, PROCESS metrics can be very useful, helping you understand your progress towards meeting your goals.  For example, how many of your projects are currently planned to meet their targets?  By the way, this should never be too close to100%, as it shows you’re not being aggressive enough (another blog post…..).  Process metrics enable you to optimize your resources by applying them to the areas in need of the most attention.

Thirdly, REPORTING metrics relate to the information that people further up the organization need to know.  For example it’s difficult to get away from reporting the percentage of sales from new products because it can be useful to external analysts.  Another example could be metrics based on patent applications and granted patents, as this is often interpreted as a measure of how innovative an organization may be (not by me, by the way).

It’s important to understand why you measure what you do.  You should always understand whether it’s input or output; leading or lagging; process; or measured because you need to report it.

That’s where the final point comes in – the FREQUENCY of measurement.  Planning, considering and collecting data all take time and effort.  If you’re measuring the activity of people in fifteen-minute increments using seventeen metrics and reporting weekly, your organization will be sucking resource away from what really matters – delivering.  It also won’t be a fun place to work.

Remember accuracy is more important than precision in this regard.  I would recommend a measurement frequency as low as you can get it without losing the real value inherent in metrics, particularly those that help you make decisions.

Measuring things is a crucial activity in innovation, and doing it right can significantly improve your performance, just make sure you get the balance right.

Everybody who works in business is busy.  There are deadlines, crises, urgent requests from on high, and email inboxes stuffed to bursting.  How many times do you reply “very busy” when asked how things are going?  Scheduling meetings is a diary nightmare; it’s easier to seek perfect alignment of the planets than to get eight senior people in the same room within the next month.  The personal workload and efficiency challenge is particularly acute these days.

So it’s not surprising that the urgent too often outweighs the important.  When the ship is burning you naturally try to put out the fire rather than check the course.  It’s a natural human response to alleviate the source of immediate pain rather than invest time and effort in future comfort.  However minor challenges can be treated as crises that need a firefighting approach.  We seem to love a crisis and stepping heroically into the breach.  Don’t get me wrong – putting yourself out to deliver something urgent is admirable, as long as we don’t lose the balance.

And what suffers?  Important things.  Like innovation.  Like the future growth of the company.  Like worrying about that new competitor whose product might just put us out of business in a few years if we don’t start to think about it now.  Is the task that has today’s deadline more important than building business for the year after next?  Only you know the answer for your company.

Innovation is not usually something that has to be done by 5.00 today.  It’s a longer-term challenge.  But we know that projects aren’t done in one go, they’re done step by step, and if you don’t take those steps day by day then we all know what happens – innovation projects become late.

The later stages of projects are not usually a problem.  That’s because there are impending deadlines, promises to customers, sunk investment and we know we just have to hit the dates.  It’s the early stages of projects that are more likely to suffer from a lack of urgency.  But in terms of NPV a three months’ delay at the start of a project is the same as three months lost at the end.

So how do we find time when there isn’t any?  How do we ensure innovation projects maintain momentum and importance?  The answer of course is that it’s a question of balance.  We can’t apply a dogmatic or draconian mandate.  Only by consciously scheduling time for innovation day by day will progress be made.  Only by making short term commitments on longer term projects will we shift the centre of gravity towards the importance of growth.

The most efficient people I know are the ones who always seem to have time.  They appear relaxed and focused, but when they have to break off the conversation it’s done clearly and politely.  They’re decisive, focused and on top of their game.  It’s like football – the best players always seem to have lots of time on the ball, they’re never rushed.

The companies I know that do innovation well schedule it as part of “business as usual”.  They recognize that late today is late at launch.  They ignore neither the urgent nor the important, because innovation is both.

Open Innovation is now an accepted methodology for enhancing your new product or service development pipeline.  It is deployed to varying degrees depending on the industry or even the company attitude.

There are many different approaches to finding and engaging with external partners, including technology scouting and corporate portals.  But which is the best?  Unsurprisingly, the answer is “it depends”, on several factors.  For example, do you already know each other, does one party know about the other, or are you mutually unknown?  For many large organizations, either the company name or one of their brands is known.  That’s always a good start.

In order to give some structure to your partnering approach, it’s worth a sanity check to see whether your approach is optimal.  The diagram below is one way of doing this.

The best place to start in any OI initiative is the people you already know.  You have the relationships and systems in place and, particularly if your innovation is incremental, you are likely to find the solution ready and waiting.

It’s dangerous to always rely on the same people.  You will lose out on diversity of input, become complacent and ultimately lose competitiveness.  You should always be open to approaches from outside that could be better than your current options, or even give you the chance to develop something completely new.

That’s where corporate portals such as Kraft’s Innovate With Kraft or Reckitt Benckiser’s RB-Idealink come in.  They can channel ad hoc proposals from outside to the same decision point, protect the rights of both parties and find genuinely new propositions.  Of course they’re useless unless people know about them, so they should be accompanied by some publicity to help drive traffic to the sites.

Corporate portals are also useful as the centrepiece of your publicity, the theme on which you can build.  In other words, it’s the cover on the book rather than the book itself.

Last, but certainly not least, you can use your own people to target leads where you believe future partnerships could result.  These “technology scouts” are your front line troops, spending most of their time out of the office networking and securing new opportunities for the future.

Scouts and portals are just two of the tools that organizations can deploy in OI.   Whether it is these, Open Problem Solving, competitions or intermediaries, you can use a matrix like the one above to help you understand what you want to do and where you should deploy your resources.  That way you’ll be able to assess whether you are using the best methods you can to secure additional growth options over and above what you already possess.