Accelerating Global Innovation Through Emerging Technologies
Innovation programs stall when they are run as a separate function. The groups that move fastest embed them in the operating business.
Every large group has an innovation function. Very few can point to a line in the accounts that it moved. The difference is almost never the quality of the ideas.
The separation problem
An innovation team set apart from operations produces prototypes that operations has no capacity to adopt. The team measures itself on pilots launched; the business measures itself on throughput and cost. Neither number is wrong, and they never meet.
Fund the adoption, not the pilot
The expensive part of a new technology is rarely building it — it is changing the process around it. We budget adoption alongside development, and we treat the operational lead as the owner of the outcome rather than a stakeholder to be consulted.
Standardize the boring layer
Data access, identity, deployment and monitoring should be solved once for the group. When each pilot rebuilds that foundation, most of the budget goes into plumbing and the interesting work never gets far.
Kill things deliberately
A portfolio with no cancellations is not being managed. Fixed review points, with the authority to stop, are what free the capacity for the ideas that are working.
Measure the operating number
If a program cannot name the operational metric it intends to move, and the size of the move, it is not ready to be funded.
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