In a world of hyper competition, innovation is imperative to gain competitive advantage. The process of successfully implementing innovation has to begin in the organisations strategy, culture, people, systems, processes, competitive landscape and its external key drivers. When setting up an innovation initiative and the first process the organisation make decisions on governance, speed and flexibility of potential future innovations. To visualize these choices and the implications they bring, we have developed the i360 Innovation Management Map. This is a tool to help you interlink important aspects when implementing an innovation process. As shown in the figure below, we map the nature of innovation processes from risk minimizing to opportunity maximizing, against the speed of the go-to-market strategy, and the scope of the innovation portfolio.

The axes are explained in more detail below, with a listing of the key drivers that might motivate an organisation to choose a specific approach, and the competencies needed to succeed.

Innovation Process

Risk Minimization

Key competencies:

• Risk management capabilities, risk affection/attraction rather than risk aversion

Key drivers:

• Optimization in a red ocean, i.e. sticking to what you have and trying to optimize with low short term risk. However, this also implies long term risk as you most likely will be outdated.

Opportunity Maximization

Key competencies:

• Customer intimacy
• Measurement
• High speed iterations

Key drivers:

• Blue Ocean strategy initiatives. Means higher risk short term but if successful a high margin and volume for a period of time.

High bandwidth

Key competencies:

• Active portfolio management
• Brand knowledge
• Modularization
• A and B testing
• Prototyping

Key drivers:

• Uncertain market. When hard to predict trends.
• Risk spread

Low bandwidth

Key competencies:

• Market knowledge
• Customer insights

Key drivers:

• Short term cash flow, no room for failure and no need for jack pot
• Expensive and inflexible production system. meaning you can not easily adopt for new kind of production

Speed to market

High Speed

Key competencies:

• Risk Management
• Business Model Innovation
• Customizations
• Modularization

Key drivers:

• High level of competition, disruption and shifting market logic
• Industrie 4.0 (read more here) including internet of things

Low Speed

Key competencies:

• Market knowledge
• Governance and compliance

Key drivers:

• Long production cycles
• Market barriers
• Regulations