Rob Shelton: Develop Breakthrough Innovation Capabilities

Summary from The Front End of Innovation Conference-Europe 2008

Robert Shelton from PRTM Management Consultants is a co-author of the book “Making Innovation Work”. His interest as author and consultant is to educate leaders how to improve the innovativeness of their company.
Much is known about the management of innovation. But the question why some companies lose the battle for innovation, others regain their innovativeness is not fully understood.
Surely, innovation starts with business strategy and ends in growth. Sustainable competitive differentiation is achieved by a continuous flow of breakthrough innovation. But, how do leaders sustain innovativeness?
He used his didactical skills to make his points very clear. Firstly, “How you innovate” determines “What you innovate”. You need a clear vision about future technology change as well as business model change. Breakthrough innovation either leverages new technologies or a new business model. Very rarely you have both coming together, which would result in radical innovation.
His advise to companies looking for business model innovation is to leverage an ecosystem of value offerings. He illustrated the Digital Home, where innovation will lead to a different social experience. Innovators need to understand the customer experience, look at unmet needs and potential behavioural patterns.
Roberts second point was “Innovation is a team spirit”. Therefore an innovation platform is needed to rally internal and external resources. External resources like partnerships are getting increasing attention. As he nicely illustrated, the often-described funnel where many ideas come in and some targeted innovations come out needs to be modified. One needs to “drill holes into the funnel”, which provide an interface to partners and also allow some ideas to drift out in other than the original directions. This is because innovation is inherently messy. The target as well as the value of innovation projects often changes over the project’s lifetime.
Lastly, he stressed the importance of metrics and motivation. Both are innovation turbochargers. Strangely, very few companies have metrics for innovation. A balanced scorecard for innovation would need to include inputs, processes, output, as well as the overall outcome of a company’s innovation management.
For me, Robert Shelton’s talk was one of the highlights of the conference. Covering all basic elements of an innovation strategy in an excellect didactical style he presented his points. This triggered my curiosity for more. I have to read his book.

by Ulrich Spalthoff

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