Linking Innovation with Strategy
Innovation that is linked to strategy is seen as more realistic and supportable. Innovating is efficient because you avoid creating ideas that are out of scope. Firms struggle with this as Idris Mootee observed in his blog, Innovation Playground:
“The most amazing thing with strategic experience innovation is that it
takes one kind of company and leadership to create the idea and another
kind of company to scale it up and drive industry transformation and we
see it in markets after market.”
Andrew Hinton offered this insight on his blog, Inkblurt:
“We hear the words Strategy and Innovation thrown around a lot, and often we hear them said together. “We need an innovation strategy.” Or perhaps “We need a more innovative strategy” which, of course, is a different animal. But I don’t hear people questioning much exactly what we mean when we say these things. It’s as if we all agree already on what we mean by strategy and innovation, and that they just fit together automatically.”
There are two approaches to linking innovation and strategy: Strategy-Informs-Innovation and Innovation-Informs-Strategy. Here is how: