Category: #industrialinnovation

As far as I have experienced, Innovation cannot be successful without being structured as a Project. Companies can develop their day-to-day activities in a fuctional way, this is, each department just doing their job and a manager that integrates the activity of all these departments.

But innovation projects (which are, as I already commented in some other article, the ones that are going to guarantee the market position of the company in a long-term basis)must be structured as projects.

A project can be defined as a group of activities developed in a concrete period of time using several resources and oriented to get determined objectives and results.

There is a lot of Project Management bibliography, but when we talk about small projects there are three phases one has to consider:

DEFINITION AND PLANNING PHASE, oriented to clearly define the objectives of the project and the results expected (which are not usually the same: a project can be “develop a new service”, and results expected could be “enter a new market segment” or “increase sales”), the deliverables that will generate the project, the management structure, the project team and the project planning, once a business case has proved that the project makes sense for our organization.

PROJECT CONTROL AND FOLLOW-UP PHASE, mainly including activities like risk and problem management, change management, documentation management and (last but no least) financing and economical management.

CLOSING PHASE, basically oriented to analyse the project profitability, to prepare knowledge transfer and to evaluate the performance of people in the project.

Common sense is key for project success (just like for any other business activity), but it is amazing the amount of innovation projects launched by companies without a business plan to support them. Let’s start by planning and a lot of money and emotional pain will be avoided!

Lately I’ve had some meetings where a well-situated bussiness man asked me what is really Innovation and how could we talk about Innovation in a tangible way. Innovation is a process. Innovation is an attitude.

To make it tangible, let’s talk about the process. The Innovation process starts with a diagnosis of current situation, any bussiness manager can do this (and does it systematically) on his or her business, this is, staying aware on what happens around my company, how do my competitors move, what techology can make my bussiness easier. To systematyze this process one can subscribe to a good periodical review on the sector, assist to determined events, listen to any provider that comes up with new ideas, support consultants pressure to buy the new bussiness aplication (and buy it if it is really worthy), etc.

Next step is to develop once a year (at least), and according with the analysis performed, a list of innovation projects that could make sense for my company, and characterize them in a developed-enough way so that one can have an idea of how much (more or less) should they cost and how worthy they are for the bussiness. With these criteria on mind one can prioritize the list developed.

The third step includes projects financing, this is, getting the resources that will guarantee projects implementation in the right way. There are several institutions that lend money to develop projects and determined governments give financing facilities, but never lose of mind that the most important risk and the work is for the bussiness manager. This point, financing, might change the initial priorityzation made in our list of projects, as depending on public policies one may be able to finance project number 3 in our list…

Until this point we haven’t actually started to work on the project, we just have thought of it! Now it is when Project Management process starts with its steps of Design, Implementation, and Testing and all the substeps that the concrete project needs, until it is completely implemented and working on the actual environment.

But the Innovation Management process includes two more steps, which are as important as the ones already presented and which are normally ignored by many companies, that do not take the benefits of them. The questions one answers with these two steps are:
1) How do I protect the results of the project? Maybe you don’t want or you can’t protect them in the traditional patent way, but with a confidentiality contract or simply keeping the secret you are already defining the Innovation Project Protection Policy for your company. There are many ways of maintaing the competitive advantage derived of the project, you just have to find which one is good for you.
2) How do I let my customers know that I am working for them and contributing to the development of knowledge in the world with the development of these projects? This is the last step of the innovation process: difusion. Maybe the innovation process developed doesn’t have a direct impact on customers, but sure they are willing to know that every day you work to improve what you do.

I think that if you look at Innovation as a process you can think of tangible results: if you can’t think of them you might not have innovating attitude, which is the basis to survive as a company in this world of today. We will see how to get innovating attitude some other time.