PAPER EXCERPT : Raising the Innovation Success Rate VIJAY KUMAR

An excerpt from the writings of Vijay Kumar, Associate Professor at the Institute of Design, IIT

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Innovation wins customers, creates competitive advantage, and increases profit. But it’s also a notoriously risky venture to enter into, resulting in extremely low success rates and a hesitancy of executive teams to support it. Does innovation have to be so risky and unpredictable? Vijay Kumar, an associate professor at the Institute of Design, is attacking this issue head on by articulating his vision of a more reliable and powerful approach to innovation initiatives. For a quick glimpse of his vision of improved innovation, Vijay has shared a short excerpt from his recent paper entitled, ‘Innovation Planning Toolkit.’

To maintain leadership position, companies need to be continuously proactive in exploring new opportunities for innovation. Focusing on core offerings, customer support, and relationship management is a safe way to sustain business and maintain continued revenue flows. But complacency with the successes of core offerings and eagerness to serve the core customer base frequently leads to inaction in the search for new opportunities. Companies deliberately need to be in an active sensing mode during which new opportunities are continuously sought. An active innovation culture needs to evolve within organizations. This should be predominantly characterized by continuous exploration and search for opportunities that may not be central to their business objectives. At the core of the emergence of such an innovation culture are the ‘planning processes’ that innovators systematically and collaboratively use to uncover unexplored opportunities.

Robust planning processes that are commonly understood, continuously practiced, and collaboratively applied by innovation teams are likely to increase the success rate of innovations. ‘Innovation planning’, although it may seem like an oxymoron, is really not, as the current growth of the industry providing sophisticated tools for research, analysis, and ideation tells us. Innovations can be planned to ensure their successful uptake. To plan innovations, it is possible to benefit from well-developed processes to foresee people’s needs and the nature of contexts within which those innovations fit. Powerful innovation tools are needed to empower this planning process.

Scholars who have studied factors contributing to the success of innovations have emphasized the need for a high degree of ‘discipline’ during the innovation planning process. Successful innovations are the result of well-informed, purposeful, disciplined hard work. Comprehensive frameworks, structured methods, and rigorous tools are needed to support the planning process in a disciplined way.

Innovation planning needs to accommodate inputs from various specialty areas such as market research, engineering, design, business management, branding, finance, and strategy. Tools that can be used across specialty areas and commonly understood by diverse specialist team members should take precedence.

In short, to innovate successfully companies need a disciplined innovation planning process, supported by structured methods, tools, and frameworks that can integrate multidisciplinary teams and multiple specialty areas.

Vijay has moved well beyond just articulating the need for these powerful tools and well-developed processes to de-risk innovation. Students, researchers, consultants, and business executives from companies like Alamo, Hallmark, Lenscrafters, Monsanto, Pfize, rSAS Airlines, Steelcase, and Wells Fargo are already successfully incorporating his tools in their work. For greater insight into his Toolkit, please join Vijay at the conference.