Leadership: The Philosopher’s Stone of Innovation…? (Part 1)
Posted on February 22, 2008
Filed Under Gregg Gallagher, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy, Strategy Execution |
I had the opportunity to speak before the Association for Strategic Planning this week on the topic of Innovation - an inherently rather broad and deep subject, so my approach was one of surveying the various paradigms of innovation (creativity/ideation, invention, implementation, value-creation, etc.), and that all of these conceptual frameworks for understanding innovation are valid and need to be considered in the context of business innovation, which should have customer value creation as it’s central focus.
Following the talk, Stan Marcus of Capital Business Credit engaged me in a discussion surrounding the key role of strategy in the identification and creation of customer value. He identified one of the key challenges facing executive leadership regarding innovation strategy is that of choice - the identification of the one or few key products, opportunities or other initiatives that the organization should focus on executing, selected from what is most often a seeming abundance of riches - i.e., a large number of identified options, all with uncertain, indeterminate paybacks.
So how is the choice made? Some authors urge metric-driven, opportunity portfolio management processes which apply rather rigid, theoretically “objective” evaluative criteria across a number of dimensions (strategic fit, ROI, level of risk, etc.). The process becomes a rather deterministic black box in which you feed the data in on the left, and the prioritization decisions re product/service innovation are spewed out on the right.
Such approaches are intellectually attractive from the standpoint that the organization can apply agreed-upon metrics and processes to generate decisions that would otherwise be driven by subjective and sometimes highly idiosyncratic sources.
Others would argue that very often the assumptions upon which such metric-based approaches are based are themselves highly subjective, albeit cloaked in a veneer of legitimacy provided by their Excel-based delivery.
To quote Bill O’reilly: “What say you?”
Comments
One Response to “Leadership: The Philosopher’s Stone of Innovation…? (Part 1)”
Leave a Reply
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Jason Rakowski