Targeting Innovation Investments | Innovation Minute Ep. 9

In the last video, I introduced a framework for being able to prioritize your innovation investments. And we looked at the fact that activities that we perform inside of organizations are either support, core or differentiating. Today I want to dig a little deeper into this and in particular I want to focus on core versus differentiating. One of the things we need to understand is that if we look at how companies invest innovation, what I've found is that in most cases, 80% of their efforts are invested in things that are core, not differentiating. This means that you're putting your most important time, energy and resources into things which won't even set you apart from the competition. Now, it doesn't mean you don't have to do these well, because if your core is not working, innovation isn't going to matter. But you don't want to be doing your best work for things which are core. You want to be able to shift from 80% core to less, 70, 60, 50, 20, whatever it is, so that you're really truly innovating where you differentiate. The more energy you put into differentiating activities, the more return you will get from your innovation efforts.