Innovation Q&A – 30+ Common Questions About Innovation

Working with our customers and partners involves a lot of interesting conversations about innovation. People often have quite many questions around it, and we've noticed that some of those are being asked more frequently than others.

Because innovation is such a broad concept that can be approached in different ways, we wanted to share some of those frequently asked questions with you to help you understand it a little bit better.

Behind the links at the end of each answer, you'll find more comprehensive information about each topic.

So, without keeping you waiting any longer, here comes the top questions and answers about innovation.

Questions about innovation management

1. How do you define innovation?

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that innovation has an endless variety of definitions. We like the Merriam-Webster one that refers to innovation as being “the introduction of something new”.

Innovation can be a new idea, product or method that is translated into a good or service that creates value or for which customers are willing to pay. The essence of innovation is improvement – the ability to create something better and launch it to the world.

Read more: Innovation Management – The Complete Guide

2. What is innovation management?

Innovation management refers to handling of all the activities needed to “introduce something new”. From an organization's perspective, it means things like employees coming up with new ideas, developing, prioritizing and implementing them, as well as putting them into practice.

Innovation management is simply the continuous process of coming up with and introducing new improvements and developing the business, one way or the other. This can be done for example by launching new products, or by introducing new, improved internal processes.

Read more: What is innovation management?

3. How do you approach innovation?

Innovation can be approached in different ways, however, we recommend taking a holistic approach to it that takes into account different aspects of innovation.

Through our experience in helping organizations with their innovation activities, we’ve found that the simplest way to understand these aspects is to break them down and discuss each of them separately.

We typically approach innovation through the following ones:

• Capabilities – The abilities and resources an organization has for creating and managing innovation, such as skills, knowledge and financial capital.
  
• Structures- The organizational structure and processes that enable the effective use of capabilities.
  
• Strategy – The plan an organization has for achieving long-term success.
• Culture – How things are done in an organization, organizational values, ways of working, etc.
  

What we mean by taking a holistic approach to innovation is to consider each of these four aspects when innovating. It's not enough to do well in just one of these areas as you need all of them to work in order to succeed.

Read more: The Key Aspects of Innovation Management

4. Why does innovation matter?

When looking at innovation from a society’s perspective, it is one of the sources of economic growth, collective well-being, education and environmental sustainability.

The world around is changing in a fast pace and the ability to innovate, adopt new innovations and learn how to use them, is inevitable if you want to stay relevant and keep up with those changes.

Read more: The Importance of Innovation – What Does it Mean for Businesses and our Society?

5. How do you succeed in innovation?

There are many ways to innovate and success depends mainly on the individual aspects such as the market you’re operating in, as well as the unique capabilities of your organization, just like in business in general.

It's not smart to slavishly follow other's success stories because what may have worked well for someone in the past, might not work for you.

When speaking about innovation, there’s no guarantee that previous success will automatically repeat itself as success depends on a number of other factors as well, such as timing and structural aspects of your organization.

There are, however, some practices that might be useful for a majority of organizations:

• Strive for constant improvement – Innovation is about constantly improving and looking for ways to do things better both as an individual and as an organization. You need to make small, continuous improvements to succeed in the long run and often the biggest innovations result from those smaller innovations.
  
  
• Keep creating value for your customers – From organization’s perspective, innovation is just another tool for creating more value for your customers.
  
  
• Empower people but hold them accountable for their work and their decisions – Succeeding in innovation is about finding the right balance between freedom and control.
  
  
• Have talented people on all levels of the organization – Skillful people with innovative mindset is what makes you and your company unique. Find people who have the ability to have a critical but open-minded approach on innovation and are willing to learn and make concrete changes happen.
  
  
• Have tools and structures in place for making sure things happen and the right things move forward – It’s the concrete, everyday ways of working that define your potential to succeed.
  
  
• Have a clear vision and a strategy that everyone understands – To be able to make innovation happen, your company culture should reflect those values and they should be clearly communicated.
  
  
• Focus on implementing ideas as opposed to just talking about them – Actions speak louder than words and the sooner you're able to start, the quicker you'll start seeing some real results.

Read more: 6 Best Practices and Key Success Factors for Innovation Management & What Does Successful Innovation Management Look Like?

6. Why is innovation so difficult?

There are as many reasons for innovation being difficult as there are organizations, each of them having their individual problems to solve.

Often, the issue is that companies aren’t used to managing different kinds of innovations, they’re missing some of the critical capabilities required to innovate or they experience cultural challenges.

Sometimes, more practical things such as the organization’s structures might work as a blocker to innovation. One cause for failure can also be the lack of skill and courage that is needed to fix the blockers of innovation before it’s too late.

What makes innovation difficult is the fact that creating something new almost always involves some level of uncertainty. You don't really have any instructions to something no one has ever worked with before, which is why there is no ready manual you can use for innovation.

New innovations are always in a "delicate state" in a sense that you need to get several aspects right at the same time and just one wrong decision might ruin it.

Read more: Why Is Innovation So Hard? & Common Challenges in Innovation Management

7. What is innovator’s dilemma?

Innovator’s dilemma is a well-known concept introduced by Clayton Christensen in 1997 that explains the common phenomena related to innovating at an established organization.

It sheds some light on why highly successful incumbents get disrupted.

The core of the dilemma is that in the beginning innovation, and more specifically the disruptive kind, is usually inferior to existing products and services on the market if measured by the same metrics and value drivers.

Thus, new products are initially valuable only to a small subset of the market with different value drivers and won’t be of interest for the mainstream or high-end customers, which is where the incumbent companies typically have higher profit margins.

Because disruptive innovation initially caters to only a small and not-very-profitable customer base, the rational decision-making processes of the established companies are obviously biased to not invest in these disruptive initiatives in the early stages.

Once the disruptive innovation enters the mainstream, the established companies typically pick up on them again, however at that point it’s often already too late since the new entrant is on the exponential part of the S-curve. This makes catching up quite unlikely, even with the additional resources the incumbent has at their disposal.

Read more: Innovator’s Dilemma

8. How can you make innovation a little bit easier?

Innovation doesn't have to be rocket science. Instead of getting too caught up with the challenges of innovation, there are also some things you can do to pave the way for innovation.

Based on our experience by following a few simple steps, you can make innovation a little less difficult within your organization, no matter your current level.

• Set clear goals that are aligned with your strategy
• Have a big goal you’re ultimately aiming for and then break it down into smaller, more achievable milestones
• Constantly enhance your organization’s innovation capabilities
• Keep the customer at the core and create value
• Build an innovative culture by promoting active collaboration
• Find balance between short- and long-term performance

Read more: 7 Simple Steps for Making Innovation Less Difficult

9. How do you build a process for innovation?

Figuring out the right innovation management process, or processes, can be a challenging effort. As innovation is, by nature, highly unpredictable, one way to see how a certain process could work for you is to try it out in real life.

Not all processes suit every organization and choosing the right ones depends on a number of things, such as your goals, the way your organization currently operates and the business and industry you're in.

If you’re working in a larger organization, you’ll almost inevitably need more than just a single process for the different types of innovations in different parts of the organization, so there’s no point in trying to fit everything into one innovation pipeline.

For more practical examples on how to structure the way you collect and develop ideas, I recommend taking a look at our guide to idea management processes.

Read more: Innovation Management Processes – Figuring Out the Right One

10. What is an innovation program and how do you build one?

Innovation program is an umbrella term for programs and projects that organizations create with the goal of creating new innovations and building their innovation capabilities.

The term is often used to refer to individual projects, but we prefer to think of innovation programs as the portfolio of individual initiatives such as innovation labs, intrapreneur programs, centers of excellence (CoE), accelerators and idea challenges that aim to make more innovation happen.

Read more: What is an innovation program?

While there's no silver bullet, taking a systematic approach to it can help you create a scalable machine for driving sustained innovation performance. To do that, you might want to watch our webinar in which you’ll learn about:

• Why so many innovation programs don't succeed
• Practical tips to building an innovation program
• Best practices for getting started with the program
• Building the momentum once you're off the ground

11. Where do innovation programs go wrong?

Whenever we talk to executives and ask how their past innovation efforts have succeeded, we usually get quite a muted response.

Most have tried at least some innovation initiatives or programs, and many have had positive experiences from some of them, but overall the end result often seems to be a bit of a disappointment.

What makes it difficult is that for an innovation program to be successful, the organization has to get a lot of things right, while still adapting to their individual circumstances.

Here are some of the findings we’ve made based on a number of different studies. You'll find more information on this particular study behind the link below.

Read more: Why Do So Many Innovation Programs Fail?

12. What is an innovation strategy and how do you create one?

Strategy is about making choices between a number of feasible options to have the best chance at winning.

Innovation is just one of the means to achieve your overall strategic company goals now and in the long term. When the big picture is clear, you can take a closer look at how your organization should innovate to achieve that grand goal.

To develop your strategic approach to innovation, you should:

• Determine your objectives – What do you want to achieve and why?
• Understand your company’s competitive advantage – What’s your unique value proposition?
• Know your market, customers and competitors – What field are you playing in?
• Develop your core innovation capabilities – What are the skills required to achieve competitive advantage?

Read more: Innovation Strategy – What is it and how to develop one?

13. How do you measure innovation?

The purpose of measuring innovation is quite simple: to see where you’re standing at the moment and to ensure you’re going to the right direction. Innovation metrics allow you to see if you’re doing enough of activities, and more specifically, enough of the right kinds of activities to be able to achieve desired results.

Metrics have a huge impact on behavior, which is why it's important to try to analyze how your KPIs drive your employees' behavior.

Innovation metrics are typically divided into two different categories: input metrics and output metrics. In other words; what goes into your innovation process and what comes out of it.

To get the most out of your innovation metrics, we recommend you to:

• Focus on a few metrics at a time
• Find a good balance of different metrics
• Prioritize the ones that are the most relevant at the moment
• Align with strategy
• Assess the maturity and uncertainty of the innovation
• Don’t force the same metrics for everyone in your company
• Use as an opportunity to learn and improve

Read more: Measuring Innovation – The Definitive Guide to Innovation Management KPIs

14. What theories and frameworks can you use to classify innovation?

Innovation management is a diverse topic with many different layers and several different models, theories and frameworks that can be used to classify different types of innovations and explain common regularities.

Understanding some of the commonly accepted innovation models and theories helps make sense of the complex topic.

While none of them can capture the essence of innovation alone, and although some of the models can be (and have been) criticized, they allow you to form a pretty good overview of the subject.

We’ve listed quite a few of them in our previous post about Key Innovation Management Models and Theories and Types of Innovation – The Ultimate Guide with Definitions and Examples

15. What is open innovation?

Open innovation is a form of innovation where knowledgeable and creative individuals who work outside the company, or, in a different team, can also contribute to achieving strategic goals through innovation. Sharing intellectual property both ways can often be useful for different parties in different ways.

More information is often better, however, it has also been proven that good ideas may become mediocre or even die if you rely on too many opinions.

So, instead of automatically inviting everyone in the open process, you should make sure open innovation is a suitable method for your specific case and engage only those who are actually relevant.

Often, companies use open innovation to:

• Engage larger audiences
• Engage relevant audiences
• Improve cost efficiency
• Involve their customer in their R&D process
• Improve PR & brand value
• Find new talent & partnerships

Read more: Open Innovation – What It Is and How to Do It 

16. What are some real-life examples of open innovation?

There’s plenty to be learned from companies who’ve been using open innovation to get more ideas from different groups of people.

What comes to open innovation cases, only the sky is the limit. Some might use open innovation to add value to their hardware, while others use it to gain more information for developing new products, for example.

Netflix, for example, launched an open innovation challenge called Netflix Prize in 2006, that was open to anyone from the public as long as they were not professionally affiliated with Netflix.

The intent of the competition was to find a filtering algorithm that improves user movie or series suggestions by 10% compared to the existing one. For the winner of the competition, Netflix offered a grand prize of 1 million USD.

In just over a year, over 40,000 teams from 186 countries had entered the competition and in just under 3 years, two teams had found a way to improve the suggestions by over 10%.

You'll find other interesting examples and key learnings from a wide range of companies using open innovation in different ways behind the links below. 

16 Examples of Open Innovation – What Can We Learn From Them & Types of Open Innovation

17. What are some of the challenges in open innovation?

Although open innovation has become a popular way for different sized organizations to innovate, there are also some challenges they face when implementing it. 

Often, the more people you involve in the innovation process, the more there is to consider as the discussion has to be facilitated to remain active, relevant and fruitful.

The most common hurdles to open innovation can be categorized as either strategic, operational, legal or cultural.

• Strategic challenges and limitations
  • Unclear goals
  • Wrong type of audience
  • Opportunity cost

• Operational and structural challenges
  • Building an effective process
  • Developing and implementing ideas
  • Finding the right open innovation platform

• Legal challenges
  • Intellectual property rights
  • Terms and conditions

• Cultural challenges of open innovation
  • Negative attitudes towards open innovation
  • Lack of commitment
  • Rewarding and motivating participants

Read more: Open innovation challenges – How to overcome the most common ones?

18. How do you succeed in open innovation?

Based both on our own experience working on open innovation with our customers, as well as the successes of some of the biggest companies in the world, we’ve identified some key success factors for open innovation:

• Have clear goals
• Facilitate the collaboration
• Be transparent
• Reward participants
• Find the right communication channels
• Commit to what has been agreed upon and to the goals that have been set

No matter how big or small your group is, it’s important to first understand how open innovation can help achieve the goal you’re aiming at, when to use it and why.

Read more: 6 Key Success Factors for Open Innovation

19. What are some innovation tools and resources?

Because innovation is already challenging in itself, it really doesn't make sense to spend time on reinventing the wheel. Instead, you can use some of the existing tools that have proven to be great for creating something new.

We’ve combined some of our favourite innovation tools in one toolkit and have categorized the tools based on the following themes:

• Strategy tools
• Process tools
• Idea generation and validation tools
• Idea management software
• Additional material related to innovation

These practical tools help turn knowledge into concrete actions and make the most out of your innovation journey. Because we strongly believe that shared knowledge is the best knowledge, we highly recommend sharing these tools with your colleagues to achieve the best outcome.

Learn more about how to use the toolkit: Innovation Toolkit – Tips, Tools and Templates for Managing Innovation and click the link below to get your own copy!