Innovation Workshops for Innovation Managers

A focus on the system not projects

Innovation managers love their dashboards, spreadsheets, and metrics. A lot of time and effort is spent creating and updating the organization’s pipeline of projects, each with its own timeline, value, costs, risk, etc. But even with this level of data, there is not an accurate value for ROI. The problem isn’t the project metrics.

The problem is that managers are too deep into the weeds and companies need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. Investing in innovation is more than just funding projects with R&D budgets. There is an investment in systems and creating ideas for projects. Likewise, returns from innovation are more than just profits from new offerings. There are returns from improving processes, saving costs, and culture.
That is why this workshop starts with defining what innovation is and how you invest in your innovation system. There are no right or wrong ways to define or categorize your innovation system, but you have to have enough alignment with your team before diving into the numbers. 

Realistic estimates, not wishful thinking

To model ROI from innovation, we have to evaluate investments, returns, and timing. However, this information is rarely recorded or available to innovation managers. Managers are sent on an impossible data hunt or forced to rely on their individual experiences and assumptions to make decisions.

Our estimation process requires zero pre-work, data mining, or accounting knowledge. Instead, we use your team’s experiences to get a sense of what is actually happening and compare them against each other. These are not exact measurements, but with each round, we get more alignment and closer to reality.

Starting with data from other companies helps calibrate your team to be in the ballpark of realistic numbers. From there they make their own estimates based on their experiences. After everyone on the team gives their own estimate along with their assumptions we read each other’s responses and adjust our estimates accordingly. Each round of conversation and reestimating narrows the range of responses where truth is likely. 

Eventually, rough estimates gain more confidence as your team learns from each other.  Lastly, we take the data and run a simulation of your innovation system. Instead of ignoring the uncertainty of your estimates, we include it in our model as variance to forecast ROI. The result is a realistic range of what you can expect from investing in innovation as well as identifying areas where there is the most uncertainty and opportunity for growth.