“[Many] organizations have great
landings, but at the wrong airport.”
--Dave Aron, Gartner Group
In the past few weeks, I attended three meetings on Humanitarian innovation. The first posed the question of where do good ideas land? The second, where do proven ideas go to grow up and scale. And the third, how do successfully scaled pilots go mainstream.
This is a common set of questions and ready solutions exist in the for-profit world. Venture capital funds startups, and capital markets take them to scale[1]. But where do the means exist in the non-profit world?
There are some new models of nonprofit funding including social capital,[2] social entrepreneurs,[3] innovation contests[4] and a handful of innovation funds[5]. But the success stories are few.
An innovation center creates a place for good ideas and prototypes to land, and a runway for these to take-off and grow.
This is a common set of questions and ready solutions exist in the for-profit world. Venture capital funds startups, and capital markets take them to scale[1]. But where do the means exist in the non-profit world?
There are some new models of nonprofit funding including social capital,[2] social entrepreneurs,[3] innovation contests[4] and a handful of innovation funds[5]. But the success stories are few.
An innovation center creates a place for good ideas and prototypes to land, and a runway for these to take-off and grow.
Following the above diagram, consider three inflection
points:
- Landing Good Ideas - What's needed is a receptive audience, a friendly landing place inside the organization that will protect and nurture experiments.
- Landing Pilots - Once ideas have proven themselves, there is a need for the second landing strip: where successful pilots go to take-off. This is about long term sustainability and growth that requires the next level of nurturing and funding. It also may mean handing off the innovation to the mainstream department or organization whose business it is to manage and apply this newly proven capability. For digital innovation it may mean a hand-off to a software company.
- Landing in the Mainstream - To truly have impact, our good ideas need to move from successful pilots, to going to scale, and finally to replacing old ways with new, as the production systems (process, program and tech) of our organization.
The Nespresso case is an interesting example[6]. The Nespresso coffee making system was
invented in 1976 by Eric Favre at Nestle.
However, it was not until 12 years later that it became a success and
another 12 years until it became a high-growth product for Nestle.[7] A
new product idea and prototype could not survive 24 years of development unless
it was protected and championed, which is what John Paul Gaillard did. [8]
Avenues of
Innovation Development
Development of a marketing-funnel approach to innovation—as
illustrated in the figure above—provides a framework for growing
innovation. Consider the following means
for “feeding” the funnel:
a)
Avenues for idea feeds
1) Gathering
problems to be solved and needs to be addressed, from the field
2) Propose
a variety solutions to be piloted
b)
Avenues for pilots
1) Internally
run experiments; internal venture fund
2) Crowd-sourced
to volunteer and technical communities (V&TC's) with best prototype awards
3) An
innovation lab to incubate pilots
c)
Avenues for scaling
1) Partner
with an internal “champion” department
2) Internal
venture fund II for next stage, larger initiatives
d)
Avenues for mainstreaming
1) Transfers
to production units; adoption: incremental or replacement
2) Budget
to operate
The point to this multi-stage
approach, is that to get to a few mainstream innovations, you need to nurture
the life-cycle of ideas-to-products.
[1] For
example, see the Wikipedia entry on Venture Capital, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital
[2] Olivia
Khalili, “15 Social Venture Capital Firms That You Should Know About”, Cause
Capitalism, April, 2010 http://causecapitalism.com/15-social-venture-capital-firms-that-you-should-know-about/
[5]
Global Innovation Fund, http://www.globalinnovation.fund/apply-to-gif
and the Humanitarian Innovation Fund, http://www.elrha.org/hif/home/
[7] “In
August 2010, it was reported that Nespresso sales have been growing at an
average of 30 percent per year over the past 10 years and more than 20 billion
capsules have been sold since 2000…”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nespresso
[8] Also
see the interesting Case Study on Nespresso, here http://www.ecommerce-digest.com/nespresso-case-study.html. The case notes that developing Nespresso in a
separate subsidiary also had a large role in its success.
"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."
