Q: Why are businesses increasingly interested in the topic of innovation?
A: Many businesses have spent decades cutting costs by re-engineering processes and leveraging new technology. Now the focus is on growth. More and more businesses are interested in learning how to better innovate to drive growth and add top-line revenue.
But innovation is not easy. The world's largest organizations struggle with creating an environment in which innovation can be repeated and sustained.
Q: Why is innovation so hard?
A: To succeed, innovation can't depend on ad-hoc processes driven by creativity or one-off ideas. It demands a formal process and tools to be managed effectively. Sustained innovation depends on the alignment of strategy with process, and process with people and technology.
Q: How does roadmapping fit into innovation?
A: Roadmapping supports intentional innovation that can be sustained over time. I think of roadmaps as a way to plan, visualize, coordinate and collaborate innovation efforts involving many constituencies. Unfortunately many organizations believe that they are doing roadmapping when they use an ad-hoc process in PowerPoint, but once you move beyond that and understand the true process of roadmapping, you see that using PowerPoint for roadmapping is a complete waste of time.
Q: How are organizations using roadmapping to further their innovation efforts?
A: The people concerned with diffusing and realizing innovation in the marketplace aren't just in R&D-they're in marketing, sales, finance, the channel and other areas of the organization. Roadmapping potentially crosses a number of activities and functions involved in an innovation process. Roadmapping can be used to help collaboration and communication in the process, and help to provide organizational alignment.
Stewart McKie is an independent technology innovation consultant with over twenty years experience helping software companies and Fortune 1000 companies. A veteran of the ERP space, he is currently focused on the automation of innovation via process modeling and software tools. Stewart is a widely published author of books, white papers and articles and was the technology editor of Business Finance magazine for five years. As an analyst at Ventana Research, Stewart initiated the firm's Innovation Performance Management practice.
