Podcast: Adjacent Innovation
How do you improve the success rate of your innovation programs? Everyone wants to focus on the "new/new" (new product/service with a new "go to market"). These kinds of project are high risk and hard to convince management that the project will be successful.
One way to de-risk the project is the take a "new/new" and break it down into a series of adjacent innovations ("rules of two"). Adjacent innovations keeps one area stable (e.g. Go To Market) while focusing on creating a new killer something (e.g. product or service). The benefits of this approach is:
- Focus - By minimizing the number of "new" areas for a program, you can focus on what is truly important and leverage what already exists.
- Scale -- Adjacent innovations tend to scale faster than new/new since you are leveraging some area (channel, supply chain, customer, etc) that already exists within your organization.
- Management buy-in -- Management can get their heads around adjacent innovations. Not to mention they will see early impact/success which ties into their typical quarterly focus.
Adjacent innovations are NOT incremental innovations. Adjacent innovations is about focusing your "killer efforts" around one area (e.g. product or service) to ensure success.
To learn more about how to use adjacent innovations, listen to the Sept 23rd podcast.
This
transcript of the Killer Innovations Podcast is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Tags: incremental innovations technorati tags innovation creativity innovation programs quarterly focus new killer organization management quot high risk success rate leverage supply chain stable
Comments
Hi there Phil
The "magic quadrant" is a great tool for quickly focusing attention and enabling comparisions. I like your use of it here and can see how it could be very helpful in evaluating ideas, especially after a brainstorming or ideation session.
http://thinkinghow.com/think-fast-and-get-more-ideas/
Posted by: Steve | September 24, 2008 01:14 AM
Interesting...we're working on (what I now realize is) an adjacency, or at least we'll launch it as one. If the new product does resonate with our existing clients, we'll then move into new markets with it.
Casey Hart
www.informermessages.com
Posted by: Casey Hart | September 30, 2008 05:04 PM
Hello Phil,
Thank you for the podcast, it is nice to listen to your ideas and suggestions. I found them to be real-world focused and helpful in my thoughts process for business development innovations. Thanks again, Alexander
Posted by: Alexander Bryukhanov | October 8, 2008 04:07 PM