Innovation here is higher-risk product discovery - the design of new mechanisms to extract value with low assurance that things will actually work well. The emphasis here is that managing innovation is explicitly about managing risk - methodically considering and communicating risk to stakeholders, "failing gracefully and fast". Egger from SAP references assessing budding products in terms of "desirability, feasibility, viability", which is a design thinking thing [0]. A win an innovation program is when you don't over commit to risk. You put some resources into a program, at some phase assess risk per some rubric, and go on the the next stage or not.
He makes the point that in spite of having an innovation function, you want an innovation culture:
"But what you really want to do is not have an innovation team. You just want to have people who are focused on willing difficult projects into existence, and de-risking those projects. And so in an ideal world, what a company, personally, what I believe it should strive towards is help the bigger organization to get good at product discovery themselves, and not lead innovation or be the “innovation office”, but rather then be the steward who helps to incorporate new methodologies and help them to get better at de-risking. "
What is a good approach to enable workers on the ground to "willing difficult project into existence in a bigger corp?
Typically, ground workers (devs) plate is overflowing with work, coming from product management which are just increments or maintenance of existing products.
There is not much Slack build into the daily processes to allow for rough ideation, concretization and much less implementation/prototyping.
Other then allow for a certain amount of dev time to go into innovation (a la googles Friday off for personal project) i can't think of much.
What is a good percentage of dev time to go into innovation 10%, 25%, ...?
Whenever I read or listen to such interviews I want to hear what the people working in these organizations are thinking. Usually there is a huge mismatch between reality and what these managers are presenting.
Whenever someone says "innovation", I hear "change for change's sake". There has to be a reason why they don't call it "improvement", "adaptation", or anything else with actual meaning.
Innovation shares the latin "nov" with novel. Innovation is different from improvement or adaptation based on a subjective idea of how different and novel it is.
I'm tired of innovation worship. Novelty is not the solution to all problems. In fact, most new ideas are terrible and a big distraction, especially new ideas that are sold primarily on their novelty.
We should care more about adaptability, about understanding and productively responding to our conditions. Sometimes the best response is to stay the course or reuse an old solution.
From the transcript “ I would say 99% of the change that creates value is incremental change, and we’re just adopting faster and better ways of doing stuff. ”
I'm glad that they are sensible if you wade through this transcript. It'd be nice if they used descriptive terms consistent with their message, rather than reaching for fashionable cliches.
He makes the point that in spite of having an innovation function, you want an innovation culture: "But what you really want to do is not have an innovation team. You just want to have people who are focused on willing difficult projects into existence, and de-risking those projects. And so in an ideal world, what a company, personally, what I believe it should strive towards is help the bigger organization to get good at product discovery themselves, and not lead innovation or be the “innovation office”, but rather then be the steward who helps to incorporate new methodologies and help them to get better at de-risking. "
[0] https://designthinking.ideo.com/