The Innovation Master Plan: The CEO's Guide to Innovation, Volume 2

Abstract

The Innovation Master Plan: The CEO's Guide to Innovation, Volume 2 Langdon Morris (Walnut Creek, CA: Innovation Academy, 2011) The world of the twenty-first century is a dangerous place for corporations: according to Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan, 75 percent of today's Standard and Poor's 500 will disappear by 2020. (1) If you're the CEO of a large company, chances are that your corporation will disappear. What can you do to help your company survive? According to Langdon Morris, the key to survival is being able to adapt to change rapidly and flexibly through innovation. It is in this sense that The Innovation Master Plan is a survival guide for CEOs, situating an innovation framework as a disciplined, rigorous, and systematic approach that also goes well beyond innovation tools to address the larger pattern--the large-scale risks and opportunities that an organization faces in a constantly changing business ecosystem. Langdon's master plan takes the form of a detailed framework for embedding innovation in the DNA of a company. Five key innovation questions frame the discussion--why, what, how, who, and where: * Why innovate? Innovation is vital to a company's survival because change is accelerating, and its results are unpredictable. Morris characterizes innovation as a means of achieving a carefully considered corporate strategy. Thus, the first requirement in Morris's master plan for innovation is that innovation must be linked to strategy. The innovation process itself must proceed together with strategic thinking to assure that its outputs are fully aligned with the corporation's strategic intent. * What to innovate? The corporate portfolio governs where the organization focuses its innovation efforts. The second requirement of Morris's framework is that innovation must be implemented in the context of portfolio management, with each element in the portfolio a non-correlated asset, or one that performs differently given any set of economic conditions. This means that every firm needs to be working on potential innovations that address a wide range of future market possibilities to assure that the available options will be useful under a wide variety of possible future conditions. Noting that portfolio diversification in noncorrelated assets assures some degree of financial stability in a rapidly changing marketplace, Morris identifies eight detailed steps for managing a corporate portfolio, complete with external and internal evaluation criteria. Throughout this section, he repeatedly underscores the fact that strategy and portfolio management are key first steps in developing a corporate innovation competency. * How to innovate? For Morris, there is a flow and rhythm to the innovation process: innovation begins with strategic thinking to assure that the outputs are fully aligned with the corporation's strategic intent and moves through the flow of portfolio management and metrics, research, ideation, market development, and sales. …