Once you have a systematic and routine way to innovate, you are confronted with a new problem – how to decide how much innovation is enough. For many, this is an odd question. If innovation is essential for survival and growth, most people would want all the innovation they can get. But that is oversimplifying. Too much innovation can overload the system, confuse the organization, and lead to ideation fatigue. So how much is enough?
Here is a useful analysis that can tell you how many ideas are needed to reach your specific growth targets called “Mapping the Innovation Gap.” The steps are:
What you end up with is the number of new ideas that need to be generated each year to have a realistic chance of achieving future revenue growth targets. It can be a sobering number depending on how aggressive your targets are. With this number, a general manager can then task the team to “schedule” innovation, and then hold them accountable for generating the necessary number of ideas.
The bottom line: To grow, companies need a systematic innovation method, and it needs to be applied systematically.
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