Three things to run a successful business: innovation, innovation, and innovation.
Sounds like the well-known historical sentence by Montecuccoli on what you need for war: money, money, and money. This is a bit simplified approach but reflects very well the point we want to make: innovation is inevitable today to run a successful company.
Incumbent companies realize this too, but due to the large organizations, it’s hard to react and move fast. That would be something that is typical rather for small scale companies and startups.
But how can you build "startup skills" into your core business model when you are a large corporation? The following article gives you a good hint about A.I.M. which is not a new international secret police, but the short term of Agile Innovation Map. Find out more how a corporation and its employees can benefit from entrepreneurial thinking.
Lean, mean, and fast! Agile Innovation Map
For innovation to work today 3 things are required: insights, agile development and the necessary human and digital resources available. We have collected 12 innovation formats for this exact purpose - we call it the Agile Innovation Map (AIM). In this brief article we give you the why, how, what and who of AIM.
Why
Finding the right problems to solve, coming up with great solutions and making the innovation stick is not a trivial task. AIM is our way of building a coherent innovation engine at your organization. There are hundreds of ways to do innovation - we have selected 12 formats that work.
How
By answering a set of questions about the existing and desired market, organisational conditions and conducting an outside-in perspective of what trends and technologies will impact it, a shortlist of complementary innovation formats emerge. The selected innovation formats are prioritized and tentatively placed in chronological order (1-3 years) according to the results of the assessment. Ultimately a plan is laid out and implemented that allows for monthly and quarterly adjustments.
What
The ⅔’s of the innovation formats cover the ideation and conceptualization of great ideas while the last third captures and builds innovative capacity within the organisation. We strongly believe that a successful innovation program representing all three categories will have a great impact on both innovation output and ability. The formats (listed below) range from off the shelf 4-week innovation sprints to long-term accelerator commitments - some rely on bringing in resources and others focus on improving the existing set up. The 12 innovation formats are:
Radar - Technology & trend scouts
Digital Disruption Board - External disruption advisory board
Customer Centricity Lab - A room focusing solely on customers
Garage - Employee makerspace
Hackathon - 48 hour development competition
Sprint - 4 week concept development and validation
Accelerator/Incubation - Intense entrepreneurship program
Excubation - Internal team working externally
ProjectPad - Crowdfunding-inspired decision support platform
Digital Toolbox - Software that improves innovation ability
Intrapreneurship - Training Program for internal innovators
X-Lab - Strategic innovation unit
Download the pdf version from here.