The author: Gerard Harkin has worked with organisations of all sizes in many industries, building new propositions, enhancing products and services, and delivering revenue growth. He has twenty-five years' experience in innovation in both consulting and commercial roles, an MBA and a degree in engineering. He is the Head of Innovation at 3inno.com.

If you would like to understand how bean bags and post-it notes enhance innovation, you should look for another article to read. I am not going to cover any of that stuff. I want to share something more important - commonsense advice from years of helping organisations to innovate.

Want to encourage a culture of innovation? Read on!

About the author: With twenty-five years' experience in innovation in both consulting and commercial roles, an MBA and a degree in engineering, Gerard Harkin is a specialist in innovation and growth. He has worked with organisations of all sizes in over a dozen industries, building new propositions, businesses and products. He is the author of Innovation Unplugged and has written over 100 innovation articles.

I want to highlight useful points and not the obvious stuff found elsewhere.

​This advice comes from real lessons I’ve learned from living and breathing innovation for twenty-five years and from establishing my own company. During this time I have talked with many startups and small businesses. Here is what I have learned (Part 1!):
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This article was written as a guest blog for Brighton Business School. Click here to read the article.
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The Innovation Confessions website has moved to www.InnovationConfessions.com, click HERE to visit the new site

Innovation Confessions invites people to share real experiences from innovation projects that did not go according to plan, so we can all learn and become more successful innovators.

​We are extremely excited about Innovation Confessions. Our mission is to transform how we tackle local and global challenges by sharing practical advice from mistakes made in real innovation programs. The knowledge comes directly from people involved in projects – straight from the horse’s mouth!

There is immense value in learning from these cases. However, it is rare for organisations to see mistakes in innovation projects as opportunities to improve. This has to change if we want to transform how we tackle local and global challenges. We need to learn from mistakes and share the learning across the private and public sectors.

Innovation Confessions matters because it enables, for the first time, the sharing of vital lessons from innovation initiatives across sectors. 

​Have you been involved in an innovation project that did not go according to plan (i.e. mistakes were made)? Did it have a significant impact on your organisation?

​Perhaps you come from an R&D, marketing, IT, commercial, strategy, sales, NPD, or operations background? Have you worked on technologies, products, services, propositions, business models, growth, etc., in a large corporation, a nonprofit organisation or as a social innovator? If so, please read on!

Gardening provides some great analogies for management practices. In this short article, we use a gardening analogy to explain why it is important for an organisation to nurture small ideas. By creating the right conditions for small ideas to grow, companies increase the likelihood of attracting big ideas!

When Monty Don spoke with naturalist Ellie Harrison at the Chelsea Flower Show, he asked: “What’s the easiest way for a gardener to attract wildlife to their garden?” Ellie responded: “First thing to remember, is that by looking after the invertebrates - the creepy crawlies, these will feed animals further up the food chain. So if you’re after badgers or particular types of bird, remember you have to start with the invertebrates – get that right, and it all goes well.”

​Ellie’s message that taking care of small insects in your garden attracts bigger animals made me think how companies nurture small and big ideas. 

Managers often ask: How long should an innovation programme take?

It depends mostly on the beginning and end point, types of innovation, market context, project resourcing, and team. But the following are approximate timelines for large technology companies seeking substantial growth in new markets:

I think about innovation a lot. As a business adviser and consultant, I help set up and manage revenue growth programs for both large and small sized businesses. Here are my top tips for setting up a program to deliver the right business outcomes. 

As a business adviser, consultant and writer, I’ve assisted many companies to innovate and grow revenue.

From working across a dozen industries, and keeping up to date with what’s happening in the world of innovation through reading books, reports and articles, I believe that there are five damaging notions (or myths) which are getting in the way of organisations innovating effectively. These myths are a growing concern.

​The damaging myths are:

​As a business adviser, writer and consultant, I’ve worked with many companies to accelerate innovation and grow revenue. I also keep up to date with what’s happening in the world of business through reading books, reports and articles.

​One of the things that really puzzles me is why so few managers know the decision rules applied by their business to filter and select business opportunities. This could be costing you millions of pounds in lost opportunities or in moving forward with the wrong ones. 

Reading this short article will help you prepare for an ideas workshop at a company meeting. A sample agenda is included.

All organisations have annual meetings with staff from strategy, sales and marketing, R&D, finance, etc. What is missing from these meetings (and I've attended dozens of them) is staff collaborating across the silos to come up with innovative ideas and solutions to improve the organisation!

The vast majority of innovation projects are under-resourced. When support levels are low, the right team structure will help you do more with less, in the same way, that a football team with fewer players can win a match if properly organised. If you are setting up an internal team to look for new growth opportunities outside of you core business, make sure you include these four components in the team structure.

Managing a portfolio of innovations across the near and medium term is straightforward enough. In this context, there are a lot of knowns, the business tools are well vetted, and the probability of success is high. In fact, most of your innovation budget will be directed towards near-term (incremental) innovation.

Top 3 of 2016

As a business adviser and consultant, I’ve worked with dozens of companies to accelerate innovation and create new revenue growth. During this time, I've learned that hiring the right innovation manager is not only important to business, it's essential. Having worked closely with dozens of managers, here is what I consider to be the key traits and skills of a good innovation manager:

​Most managers I work with simply talk in plain English about their ambitions or challenges or how some ideal is not being met. For example:

• To build and launch new customer propositions
• To find business opportunities in markets that are new to my company
• To grow revenue/profit
• To respond to a competitor’s unexpected move
• To fill an innovation pipeline with attractive opportunities

​These types of business challenges will be familiar to many of you.
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Innovation, to me, is simply a powerful way to solve business growth challenges. It turns them into positive outcomes. 

This short article describes a number innovation options to help grow your business.

Companies that rely solely on R&D to deliver growth might be making a big mistake (and I say this as an ex-R&D person!). In this short article, I highlight some of the other options available to companies who want to defend and grow their business. Although it is mostly geared towards managers in large technology companies, no matter what type of organisation or industry you work in, I hope you find it interesting.

Many articles focus on the importance of having the right enablers in place before setting up an innovation programme. However, anyone who is tasked with leading innovation programmes knows that you have to make do with what you have, especially nowadays when budgets are tight. Put simply, if you waited for the right enablers to be in place, you’d be waiting a very long time! 

In this article, we spotlight the ‘real’ factors from a successful year-long innovation programme, from the perspective of the team members. 

This article is the second in a series of three articles about involving large numbers of staff in generating ideas using crowdsourcing tools.

​A previous blog introduced the seven stages of an employee crowdsourcing programme. To recap, the stages are:

1. Defining the objectives, project planning and set up
2. The launch event
3. Going live with idea generation and submission
4. Idea prioritisation and selection
5. The Dragons’ Den event
6. Routinely communicating the business benefits from the implemented ideas
7. Managing the ideas log (i.e. continuing the process of implementing ideas that did not make it to the Dragons’ Den finale but are still worthwhile implementing; periodically communicating the results back to the business)

​This article covers the key activities in stages 2, 3 and 4. 

I volunteer to help a local school with its entrepreneurship programme. The programme encourages students to be entrepreneurs by coming up with new business ideas, preparing business cases, and even starting their own business. It's an excellent initiative!
 
I do my best to help the students generate new ideas. With so many idea generation techniques available, the challenge was to select the best ones for school pupils to use (200 students in total). The creative techniques had to be easy to communicate and simple to use. The five techniques I use are covered below. 

In a business context, innovation is mostly focused on profitable growth. This is important because:

1. Your competitors will eat you for breakfast if you don’t remain competitive and innovate
2. Innovation compensates for price erosion and shrinking margins
3. In mature markets, growth through geographical expansion has its natural limits, and therefore growth has to also come from new products and businesses created through innovation
4. Where there's insufficient growth, staff levels may need to be reduced to compensate for price-erosion and/or wage bill increases
5. It creates shareholder value: share price is influenced by consistent performance with premiums for future growth potential (innovation confidence)

​However, managing innovation is easier said than done. It involves making correct choices and executing in the right way, neither of which is straightforward to do!

Managing innovation depends on the type of innovation, the phase of market maturity, competition, and internal factors such as management, culture, the organisation, etc.

Also, different rules apply depending on whether the focus is on evolutionary or breakthrough innovation. Let me summarise the key differences.

4. How cross-business collaboration can enable better growth opportunities
When you get it right, collaborative growth across business units can really pay off – it enables a faster time to growth, at a reduced risk, compared to going it alone. more

It is more than 10 years ago since the EU recognised entrepreneurship as one of the "eight key competences for lifelong learning", which all individuals need for "personal fulfilment and development, active citizenship, social inclusion and employment".

Entrepreneurship was defined as "an individual's ability to turn ideas into action. It includes creativity, innovation and risk-taking, as well as the ability to plan and manage projects in order to achieve objectives". At that time, the EU’s recommendation was that countries should try to ensure that “initial education and training offer all young people the means to develop the key competences to a level that equips them for adult and working life”.

The teaching of entrepreneurship skills in schools is clearly of high importance, and even though the Ambition AXA Awards survey of 2,000 young people found that 77% of 11-18 year olds would like to start their own business in the future, a survey of 1,000 teachers conducted by the Aldridge Foundation, found that only 30% of teachers say they would know how to teach entrepreneurship skills. There is a gap, and for progress to be made, we need to approach this subject differently.

Collaboration across a company can lead to better innovation outcomes and faster growth. However, it's more common for business units not to collaborate. Silos do exist!

Let me give you an example from my career working with the Philips LCD team in the early 1990s. Although our office was located next door to the Wireless Technology team, the idea to combine wireless functionality with LCDs (i.e. a wireless display!) didn’t dawn on us at the time - by operating as two separate teams, we missed out on an opportunity. It's the downside to business silos!

Years later, however, I saw an excellent example of collaboration at Philips when both the Lighting and TV businesses cooperated to develop the Ambilight TV – merging lighting technology with flat screen TVs to create sophisticated effects that enhanced the user experience. Combining competences in two different business units, while leveraging a product leadership position and channel to market, resulted in a major market win for Philips.