Our services and capabilities:

• Aligning innovation with business strategy - resolving tensions between creativity and delivery

• Catalysing innovation across sectors, between organisations, and across teams

• Supporting technological innovation and business innovation (e.g. in processes) alike

• Bringing together diverse perspectives and skills to formulate and implement strategies

• Supporting Knowledge Transfer and Knowledge Exchange

The innovation/mainstream 'chasm'

Successful innovation depends on aligning all parts of a business. At the same time, because innovation often requires highly-specialised skills and sheer time, it is often deliberately separated from the mainstream business - hence the advent of R&D Functions. This is a mixed blessing and needs careful management.  

Innovation influences company valuations in the short term and is critical to company survival in the long term. It also presents special challenges. For example:

• Major companies find it easy to identify and buy smaller firms with 'complementary' skills, yet

  commonly fail to integrate them into their existing organisations. They often underestimate the

  huge cultural constraints on merging different groups of people.

• All too frequently, innovation sits uncomfortably with 'normal' business operations. It can even be

  viewed as a mysterious process which will work best if left at a distance.

These innovation/mainstream 'chasms' between people and functions have their origins in the in-house R&D functions established by technology-driven companies from the 1950s onwards. These delivered benefits by turning expertise into commercial products protected by patents. The companies were able to sell their proprietary products into new and growing world markets.

Today, competition is fierce and product life-times are shorter. It is much more costly to develop new products. Patents remain important but do not guarantee success. Innovation increasingly involves such a large number of specialist capabilities that these have to be sourced externally, rather than being built internally. At the same time, technology has vastly expanded the ability to access information and work collaboratively.

Innovation conjures up images of science, technology and new products. These are all part of the picture, but

some of the most exciting opportunities arise by bringing together unrelated areas of knowledge. Making this happen is as much to do with how the different cultures work together as with technical considerations.

The trend is for external sourcing not to be the exception but the rule. ‘Open Innovation’ is a term used to describe an advanced form of this model. Interestingly, as the possibilities for sourcing capabilities from outside increase, it becomes ever more critical to have in-house excellence in managing Networks and relationships. It also becomes critical that the business of innovation is adopted fully by key business functions rather than being viewed as synonymous only with R&D. Our article Innovation by Networking develops this theme further.

The original in-house R&D functions developed into enclaves with cultures and processes quite distinct from those of the rest of the business. Meanwhile, the rest of the business focused on short-term 'mainstream' issues. While these arrangements worked for a time, they are no longer appropriate. Indeed, they risk blocking the kind of innovation needed today, as they:

• Create obstacles to external access to knowledge and technology ('not-invented-here')
• Reduce sensitivity to emerging market requirements
• Use metrics that have produced a stream of patents and inventions but been less successful in producing innovations to excite markets and propel businesses forward

How to cross the chasm?

The chasm between 'innovation people/functions', and 'mainstream people/functions', seriously

constrains creativity and productivity. Crossing the chasm requires new ways of thinking about

and managing innovation. This means recognising that:

• While innovation remains important in developing new products, it is equally important in improving

  processes and finding radically new ways of doing business

• Investments in innovation need to be managed as specific ventures rather than via arbitrary flows

  of money to the R&D function

• The capability for innovation needs to be embedded throughout the organisation rather than being

  the preserve of the R&D function

• The key to strong and sustained innovation is an understanding of the frameworks, processes and behaviours associated with both innovation and mainstream business

Our 'innovation toolkit' enables 'innovation people/functions' and 'mainstream people/functions' to work more effectively with each other in their collective interest. This applies across sectors, between organisations, and across teams. The toolkit tackles frameworks, processes and behaviours. It particularly emphasises the need for collaborative working between disciplines internally, and with stakeholders externally.

Our support extends well beyond the provision of ‘general innovation management tools’. In particular, we stress the importance of ‘market pull’ as much as ‘technology push’. The key challenge in commercialising innovation is to distil clear technology functional requirements for innovation projects from market and customer needs. Our approach, delivered through Brain-Pool Workshops which bring together the relevant stakeholders to deliberate on these requirements, precisely meets that challenge. The output is a very clear and unequivocal brief which those seeking to commercialise innovation can use to explore external sources of technology.

Catalysing Innovation

We support organisations in managing innovation through the specific interventions listed below. These are equally relevant to innovation in business processes (e.g. to implement lean manufacturing) as to technological innovation in its own right. Our support often combines several of the following elements:

• Roadmapping Workshops: These provide a powerful springboard for strategy development, capturing the perspectives of external stakeholders to complement and refresh internal thinking. This approach applies equally to 'Horizon Scanning', 'Foresight', 'Future Planning', and 'Visioning'. Our workshops also kick-start engagement with those key stakeholders who could also be collaborators.

• Developing Strategies for Innovation: We cover future external perspectives (e.g. scenario planning, market assessment and competitor analysis), internal capability assessment, strategic options analysis and 'conversion to action'. We also take full account of uncertainty and complexity. Our approach can be applied to individual innovations or to portfolios of opportunities. Our tools ensure that innovations are fully articulated and specified, not just left in the form of ‘great ideas’.

• Developing toolkits to support innovation:  We design and develop suites of practical tools to support advisers working at the interface between research and businesses in commercialising innovations. We also provide the training needed to embed these.

• Aligning Research to Strategic Goals and making change stick: We identify and develop research proposals, check that they are aligned with wider strategies, use a tool to facilitate prioritisation, and define and initiate projects which effectively translate them from 'proposal' to 'action plan'. We make changes 'stick' by providing powerful toolkits and training.

• Catalysing Partnerships: Building strategic partnerships for innovation is challenging. We catalyse analysis (assessing potential collaborators), engagement (to build business relationships in stages), and practical delivery (through facilitation and support).

• Developing and Facilitating Clusters, Networks and Communities: Here we kick-start, develop and maintain 'clusters', 'networks' or 'communities' for innovation. Our programme avoids some of the notorious pitfalls by harnessing our specialist Toolkit, including stakeholder mapping, community design, Brain-Pool Workshops, and practical technology platforms that support 'communities'.

• Knowledge and Technology Transfer and Exchange: Successful innovation depends critically on the role of Knowledge Exchange professionals. We support their work with a Toolkit and training to transfer and embed new skills. This is relevant both within and between organisations, for example: between academic bodies and commercial companies; in driving and facilitating business and innovation clusters; or in facilitating Knowledge Exchange within complex organisations. Our Toolkit includes:
  • An Innovation Model - revealing how innovation happens and highlighting the catalytic role of Knowledge Exchange professionals
  • Roadmapping templates - for Technology and Knowledge
  • A Web of Knowledge and Technology - a framework to identify gaps and linkages in knowledge and technology
  • A Collaboration Progression Model - to guide and maintain momentum from first contact through to successful completion
  • Knowledge Liberators - techniques to stimulate the sharing of all-important tacit knowledge between collaborators
  • Quick Business Cases - templates for the development of business cases, focused on what matters, not form-filling
  • Strategic Research Plan - templates and methodologies for strategic research planning
  • Supporting technologies - e.g. Brain-Pool collaborative Workshops and mind-mapping tools

We use Brain-Pool Workshops to support several of the different types of intervention listed above.

Knowledge Transfer Networks (KTNs)

The Government has established the Technology Programme 'to facilitate further investment in science, engineering and technology with the active participation of business and industry'. Over 20 Knowledge Transfer Networks are now supported by the Technology Strategy Board. Click here for details of our support for KTNs.