Eight principles of Innovation Management

Victoria Milne is founder of Verity Merit and the UK Head of Delegation at the ISO TC 279 for innovation management and has been working on the standard for many years. Joanne Hyland is co-founder and President of the rInnovation Group and author of the book ‘Changing the Dynamics and Impact of Innovation Management: A Systems Approach and the ISO Standard’.

Here they discuss the eight principles of Innovation Management System (IMS), developed with input of learnings and best practice from across the world. 

Victoria comments that the eight principles all work together: “The framework is not meant to be a ‘tick box’ exercise but more a way of developing the right mindset and offering guidance based on successful processes.”

She continues that the IMS has been described by some practitioners as being like a ‘Trojan Horse’. As the standard has been developed by the ISO, it is understood by compliance and accepted by others in the organisation who have never before been involved in innovation. It can therefore be used to create a safe environment for innovation to flourish.

Future focussed leaders

Having a future focussed leadership with leaders that are curious, courageous, open to uncertainty, and empathetic to behaviour change is really critical, as the culture and organisational structure need to be capable of the high levels of adaptability to new technologies and innovations.

Victoria continues: “The right leadership is of fundamental importance. As it is the role of leadership to articulate the organisation’s aspirations, it doesn’t mean that it is definitely going to get there, but it sets the strategic direction for the next three, five or more years.

“The innovation is then aligned with this intent, and value created measured against progress towards this ambition.”

Strategic direction

Joanne picks up the discussion about strategic direction.

She comments: “Most strategy within an organisation comes from extrapolating out from what we know. However, for innovation, it has to be cast from the future – it’s not probabilities, but the possibilities of what could be.

“With radical or breakthrough innovation, there is a high level of uncertainty; we often don’t know what the value is going to be early on, and we have to be able to tell the story in a different way. So, we have to be thinking about capturing insights early on by asking the right kinds of questions in workshops and so forth, about the technical considerations, the market, the resource available and the organisational certainties.

“This needs to be done in a systematic way. If we don’t use the right structure and the right approaches, we’re not going to be able to exploit those insights and get to growth.

“Traditionally in R&D management there has been a focus on process – progressing from one point to another.

“But if you try to use a structure for radical innovation that is designed for a stage gate or a phase gate, it will become force fitted into what we know rather than what is possible, and will result in incrementalism.

“I look at the framework as being a guidance or a checklist, and as it is designed around the eight principles it is a system, rather than a linear process.

Realisation of value

Joanne: “Whether you are looking for significant growth, transformation or renewal, it’s about how you set up the IMS from the start so that you can be successful at exploiting those insights and realising value.

Victoria agrees: “For me it is critical that everyone understands that innovation is about value realisation. Having this understanding from the start means that we become a lot more customer-centric because we’re thinking about our customers and stakeholders.”

Culture

A critical aspect of innovation is learning. To innovate you have to be open to life. Having a culture that is open and progressive enables everyone within the organisation to contribute, to work on ideas, and have their skills developed in such a way that it enables them to play their role – where they fit best – will help to deliver real growth and real productivity.

Victoria: “We could equally start this discussion from a different perspective, with possibly the most important principle: culture.”

Joanne responds that an element of this is mindset: “We have seen a lot of people that are just not wired for the world of uncertainty. They’re not comfortable having no answers. And that’s okay because we need different people in an organisation.”

“If you were to put me in a quality role or even in a development role I would be so bored because it’s consistent all the time. But some people like the repeatable process, to have the answers, and others like to be able to think about what the possibilities are for the future. You need to have the right people in the right place and that helps people to be successful.”

A systems approach

Evidently, all the eight principles of innovation management need to work together, but are they always relevant?

Joanne says this question comes up a lot: “There are frequently questions around the stage of the organisation and its readiness for the IMS. Particularly, ‘is what you would do on the corporate innovation side always applicable to the small business start-up side of things?’”

Victoria comments that it does come back to the importance of the eight principles that we all share. “The standard gives us the flexibility to be able to recognise that while there are common elements, different success factors apply depending on your context. I think that is really important for us to continue to have a dialogue around this.”

Takeaways

• You can take these eight principles away and really customise it to your organisation, whether it is small, medium or large, but you need to ask some critical questions that are relevant to business context and ambition.
• The IMS can support scale-up of SMEs as it creates a common form of reference that is widely understandable.
• The IMS creates a framework to support innovation managers by articulating the skills needed and resources that are required to innovate successfully.

There is more discussion on https://www.linkedin.com/company/bsiinnovation/

More about Innovation Leadership.