The Innovaya Q&A

The simple answer is that you establish a process of selecting, testing, and then scaling and deploying your innovations. Once these innovations are deployed, they need continued refinement to be effective and they should be monitored for when they are no longer providing the desired benefits to those they are intended. See our Innovation Life-Cycle for a more detailed explanation.

Any idea could become an innovation; however, to become more intentional about what innovations could help you, scan your environment for emerging needs and shifts. Then you develop options for possible innovations. To learn more about this, look over the Survey phase.

Once the options across and within innovation ideas have been identified, they are evaluated and prioritized. Organizations typically are unable to do all the work they would like.  Based on how the organization plans to staff its innovations and the capacity the organization has to do innovation work alongside its day-to-day operations, a set number is brought into be worked on. The criteria for this evaluation and selection is set by the organization. See the Select phase for more detail.

Innovations at the highest level risk, usually ones where it is uncertain they will be used, are tested using the Lean Startup approach. After each test, a decision happens as to whether to persevere on the idea as-is, tweak it to better match needs, or the idea can be killed as it no longer will have the necessary benefit. This testing occurs in the Sow phase.

We continue iterating on the innovation idea in the Grow phase. The testing transitions into a more incremental, iterative development approach as the idea becomes more certain. This approach is applied to all ideas, not just technological innovations. Deploying the innovation occurs towards the end of this phase.

Once an innovation is deployed it is in the Harvest phase. It needs maintenance; small, incremental improvements are key for an innovation to continue to providing benefits to those it is intended to serve. Using improvement techniques from the Toyota Production System can help ensure these benefits continue to be produced. It’s also worth looking for evidence showing that an innovation is trending towards end-of-life so it can proactively be considered for replacement.

A proper innovation management system produces evidence and metrics throughout its life-cycle. Not only can these be about the innovation, using approaches from innovation accounting, they can be about the system’s health itself. To make these visible for decision-making at all levels, an Innovation Portfolio can be established.

Periodically reflecting on how well your innovation is going and deciding on actions to improve the system is fundamental to improving your innovation. Many kinds of issues may occur and it is important to decide on the importance, frequency, and causations behind these to make useful improvements.

Your capacity, or fluency, is how well your organization ‘speaks’ innovation. It can be measured by how many people in the organization know how to do this innovation work at a particular level of fluency. This fluency can be coached to the state needed for your organization. Not all organizations need the highest state of fluency. See the Fluency page for more detail.

Innovaya helps increase the fluency within the organization by coaching; allowing your staff to do the work for your real-life innovations while we offer guidance. This helps make the concepts stick. Learning by doing creates long-term muscle memory. Depending on your desires, we also help coach people to become coaches internally. This helps the organization continue without needing others to manage their innovation.

We work to find out an innovation need you have. This could be an immediate need to find and develop options for a current disruption or helping you set-up for longer term success. This generally looks like a fixed time & price workshop with a preset amount of coaching afterwards. See our What We Offer page for more details.

Much like the higher states of innovation we advocate, we want all of our people, current and future, to not only be vested in the work we do, but also in the decision-making in how we evolve our work for clients. This is a domain in constant evolution. To do this, we decided on a structure where all of members will have a say in how the organization is run.

Innovation is carried out by people. If we consider growing the capacity of people to better innovate (i.e. cultivating them), and that ideas themselves are something we also grow until they reap benefits, then it seemed natural to think of it in a gardening or agricultural metaphor.