Innovation Management

Innovation inside an established company is mostly a resource-allocation and governance problem, not an ideas problem. Ideas are cheap and abundant. What is scarce is the willingness to fund something small for long enough to learn from it, and the discipline to stop funding it when the learning is bad.

The two failure modes

• Starvation. New bets are judged against the core business's margins and volumes, lose every comparison, and are quietly defunded. The company concludes it has no good ideas.
• Zombies. New bets are launched with fanfare, never given a kill criterion, and absorb budget and senior attention for years on the strength of narrative alone.

Both come from the same root cause: no explicit rules for how a new bet gets money and how it loses it.

A portfolio that works

• Fund in stages against evidence, with each stage buying the answer to one specific question and nothing more.
• Define the kill criterion at funding time, when nobody is emotionally invested, and honour it.
• Judge early bets on learning velocity and evidence quality; switch to commercial metrics only once there's a real market signal.
• Ring-fence the budget so new bets aren't competing line-by-line with core roadmap items they'll always lose to.
• Staff bets with people who have permission to be wrong, and a route back to a good job when the bet ends.
• Keep the portfolio small enough that leadership can actually hold all of it in mind.

Stopping well

A programme that never kills anything has no information content — the decisions are made by inertia. The organisational skill worth building is stopping a bet without treating it as a failure or punishing the people on it, because that is what makes the next round of honest evidence possible.

How I work on this

This is where my academic and operating work meet. My PhD at Mines ParisTech was in innovation management and product design theory, and I co-authored An Introduction to Innovative Design, a primer on C-K theory published by Presses des Mines — work I have since taught at Mines ParisTech, Strate Collège Designers, Chalmers and Tokyo Tech. I have also had to do it for real: Financial Manager for Tempo was a new product launched inside an established company, and it now serves over 3,000 business clients. Theory is useful here mainly because it makes the expensive mistakes predictable in advance.

Work with me on this

Ingi Brown advises on innovation management and related work. Email ingi@ingibrown.com or see the full background.

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