How Fast Is Your Innovation?

“No company is smart enough to know what to do with every new opportunity it finds and no company has enough resources to pursue all the opportunities it might execute” John D Wolpert in Harvard Business Review, August 2002.

“Under pressure in the market and under pressure from the board, the innovation team generates many ideas but, incapable of choosing from them, clogs up and in the end achieves nothing. Nick Sawbridge The Morning Cup November 8th 2006”

In food and drink there are so many markets, sectors and niches that choosing which ideas to progress is frequently a slow, inefficient and subjective process and yet this stage is probably the most important of all. Do you recognize any of these reasons in your company?

● Inconsistency of judgment criteria. “Someone keeps moving the goal posts.”

● Focus on business as usual. “It’s hard enough keeping up with today’s problems let alone creating more for tomorrow.”

● A lean organization with no spare capacity. “We’ve just had another re-organization”

● Concept confusion. “The idea was never clearly written with a proposition, reason to believe, and target consumer that we could all understand”

● Ideas are cheap. “We’ve been working on these ideas for months without real progress. Lets have an away day and generate some easier ones”

To be really successful you need to be able to allocate sufficient resource to developing an idea – and although it’s difficult and risky, that means making a decision.The question is do you want to progress 100 projects at 1 mph each or 1 project at 100mph?