Innovation in your business is fundamentally about risk mitigation.
“It is hard to describe what Bas & Shay accomplished for our business. Moving from Problem solving to strategy, solution design, organizational structure, competitor analysis and as far down as the actual individual steps for refined product development. This is what excellence looks like.”
Clint Kerkes ~ Chief Operations Officer – Claim Central Consolidated
* Shay Koren is a dear friend and colleague of mine. We still often partner on large projects and draw upon each others’ knowledge & skill.
Start Asking the Right Questions
How to make sure your organization maximizes a project’s chances of success whilst minimizing financial or brand exposure for the rest of the organization?
This is the question every organization should be asking themselves. On this page, I’ll help you to start answering this fundamental question.
Anyone claiming a guaranteed success of an innovative project is lying. You cannot know whether a new product or service will be successful until it is. Either the project is not truly innovative or it is uncertain if it will succeed. You cannot have both.
With this knowledge, your company first needs to ask itself a few questions.
- Do we really want to be innovative?
- How innovative do we want to be?
- What does success look like for various innovative activities within the business?
- What are the opportunity costs of innovating vs. not innovating?
- How much are we willing to invest in / risk on innovation?
And Finally,
- How do we minimize the costs of innovation and maximize potential returns?
I help organizations get to the best possible answer to these questions.
The answer to these questions does not lie in sexy projects or initial excitement. It lies in a framework for innovation, suiting to the appetite for risk of your organization.
Just like any other investment, you should not bet on one horse.
To maximize your ROI (Return on Innovation), you need to answer 2 questions.
- How to optimally diversify your investment in innovation?
- How to make decisions Rational, Reliable and Repeatable?
Without a proper answer to the above questions, your efforts, no matter how well-intended, will return to an Ad-Hoc way of making decisions on innovation.
This is as crippling to sustainable innovation as micro-management or excessive layers of decision making or bureaucracy.
Whether embedding innovation in your organization horizontally, vertically or both, without a procedure that allows both for rapid execution and a clear framework for decision making, your projects will eventually run out of time, money or otherwise lose momentum. Inevitably, it’ll become part of your (unnecessary) innovation graveyard.
I help organizations by embedding innovative activity in their business, suiting their identity and risk tolerance.
Bas van den Bergh 