Unhappy with your innovation strategy? Ask these nine questions

In order to formulate an actionable innovation strategy, you need to understand your internal situation, external environment, boundaries, and how you envision success.

You can drill into these by asking following nine questions:

1. What is your business?
2. What parts of your business are under pressure?
3. How is the world changing?
4. What might these changes bring?
5. How could we exploit these changes?
6. How can we leverage what we have?
7. Which strategic objectives do we want innovation to contribute to?
8. Where do we want to grow?
9. How does success look, smell, hear, and feel like?

Summarise your answer on three pages, with first page covering the narrative of why are you investing in innovation (no fluff or PR speak, this is for internal use), second page directly stating what's out (it's not set in stone, you will learn from the market), and what's in (so innovators bring forth ideas that are strategically aligned).

Stuck? Get in touch or study following:

How to formulate a winning innovation strategy

A practical framework you can immediately use to formulate your innovation strategy.

Bruno PešecBruno Pešec

Doing and managing innovation

What is the difference between doing and managing innovation, and why should you care?

Bruno PešecBruno Pešec

Are we on the same page?

Strategy can be a powerful filter, but won’t be of much help if it is poorly thought through, unintelligible, and inaccessible to the intended users.

Bruno PešecBruno Pešec