Public
6 May 2019
Our Proposal
Innovation projects within a bigger company are in many cases done in a isolation. Steering group and other project participants are company employees which increases the risk of going into a wrong direction. Specially today when companies aim to grow beyond their traditional field of business, this risk has increased while current employees typically lack relevant industry specific knowledge.
Solution would be to expose these innovation projects very early to external advisors (i.e. people with relevant knowledge and willingness to share their expertise as advisors, mentors, steering group members etc.). In many cases people with relevant expertise exist and are willing to share their knowledge while they also get something out of it - mainly by learning something new and increasing their network.
In some cases using consultants and/or user testing may be viable option but that lacks the continuity that external advisor brings.
Main benefit is to lower the risk of having a wrong focus on the innovation project. In addition, the apporach may open up new unexpected co-operation possibilities and use cases for the innovation that project team has never thought of. Finally, opening innovation projects also enhances public image of the company as a innovative and open organization.
A platform to match projects and advisors already exist (www.boardio.com). That could be used to pilot this approach and thus get feedback early on.
It would be interesting to develope this idea further and pilot it with a bigger company with several innovation projects.