The Innovation Process

What exactly is the innovation process and where does it start and end? This is a good question to ask anybody interested in or responsible for innovation management at a firm. I'm going to post about the second part of this question, the where-does-it-start-and-end part.

First of all, the innovation process doesn't end. It's incessant and iterative (as opposed to linear).

It starts in the mind and essentially results in hard cash. From the firm's perspective, the value creation that precedes the cash is created by cutting costs; adding perceived value, so that people will pay extra; or both of these, which is what world-class firms do.

World-class companies also know what customers don't value (the hard part); and remove these "unwanted" features in order to cut costs to the bone. At the same time, they are constantly looking for ways to improve their offering. It is paradoxical: cutting costs and creating value, but this is, as they say, " . . . the world of and."

The journey from the mind to the cash is fraught with often-predictable difficulties, and as Clayton Christensen puts it:

"Though the outcomes of successful innovations appear random, the processes that result in their success often are not."

There seems to be a general agreement these days that innovation is a learnable skill.