handovers don't work in innovation - stop doing them

Autor: Alexander Osterwalder

There's a fundamental mistake I still see happening quite a lot in innovation: a "professional" innovation team tests, iterates, and de-risks ideas and then hands them over/back to the core business. Guess what happens? The proven ideas don't get adopted or they don't scale. Corporate antibodies take them out however great the idea seemed. 

A better way of doing things is to build a professional innovation team that guides small explorer teams coming from the core business. These teams then get larger and better funded over time if they're idea has sufficient evidence and gets traction. Funding comes from the core business or from corporate if the idea is too radical to fit any business units P&L. 

Here's what I see working as opposed to the "handover approach":

1) Build a professional innovation team that helps/guides teams from the core business to explore, test, and iterate radical ideas. Make sure they understand how to test & iterate ideas, because it's very different from their jobs in the core business. 

2) Start with an incredibly small team to start exploring an idea. Kill the idea if they can't find evidence or get traction. Expand the team size, skills, and experimentation budget with increasing evidence. That should be funded by the core business to have skin in the game - yet make sure that leaders from the core business understand that many ideas will fail. 

3) Make sure you constantly get new teams from the core  with new ideas (and sometimes old ones that should be re-tested because markets change). There should only be one criteria to not let teams explore an idea: lack of strategic fit. Then you build a culture of evidence-based investments. Teams with out evidence for a customer problem go back to their day job. Teams with evidence get more time and funding to increasingly focus 100% on their idea with traction. 

Handover challenges go away on their own if you do this well and put the right governance in place. That's exactly what we put in place when we build innovation ecosystems for our clients. Governance and programs that allow them to scale innovation systematically. 

Fuente: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/osterwalder_governance-innovation-lessonslearned-activity-7274422876278063104-rD5e?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios