Jacob Dutton identifies seven foundational questions every corporate innovation team must answer: who you serve (internal or external), how you're arranged (co-located or remote), your geographic scope, where your role ends and the business unit's begins, how you kill failing ventures, how you launch successful ones, and which services you provide versus the core business.
Chapters
So, let's assume that you've got this North Star, and that's great, and that's really good progress. But before you get going on running sprints, missions, accelerators, there are some fundamentals that you need to have in place before you're ready to fire up the engine. And if you overlook these fundamentals, we call them the brilliant basics, they'll become a spanner in the works later on down the line. So, what are they? In our experience, the best corporate innovation teams in the world can confidently answer 7 questions when they're in the, in the hot seat. The first question is, are you an internally or externally focused team? The second question that they can answer really confidently is, are we in one location together, or are we in multiple locations virtually, and we're a remote team? Are we going to operate globally? We're going to operate in specific regions, or are we going to operate locally? The 4th question that you need to be able to answer is, where does your involvement end in corporate innovation, and where does the cause begin? What is your criteria going to be for killing new ventures, products, and services? How are we going to launch new ventures, products, and services? And the final question and kind of subcomponent, the brilliant basics component, is what services do you provide, and what is the cause providing? So that's component 2. You've gotta get clarity on who your innovation efforts serve, plan for what you'll do with successful ideas once they're proven, and agree on what your criteria is gonna be for killing bad ideas.
