Innovation and risk

Gary:
Many organizations I've worked with usually develop one of the below to identify both risk and opportunity. All of these document/deliverables or required documents would identify benefits, risks and opportunities about the innnovation. This usually provide the C-Suite, sponsor, external agency etc with enough information to 1) gauge the risk to move forward with a project for futher discovery, 2) inclusion into the portfolio or business strategy and/or 3) launch of a project to take advantage of a window to get out in front of the competition.

Business Case
Feasibility Study
Concept paper
White paper
Project Charter
Proposal

For any project, reviewing whether the project goals are still aligned with business goals and objectives is vital and this is one way all technology companies are adopting.

For any technological advances or path breaking innovation, I believe still the basic idea is same, just that over and above business objectives and strategic vision of the company there would be numerous risks which has to be considered by management like external factors like competition, currency fluctuation in many cases, regulations, primary markets to be served etc., for this may be one needs effective market research and close collaborations with technical partners like suppliers and customers.

For effectively validating these factors, we have some dedicated teams which does like a check on the scorecard and identifying where we are good and where we are not, like a SWOT. Basically an unbiased team looking at all factors which have been identified in the score card and scoring the project against it.

At my previous employer, we used a gated process. The first gate was the review by the innovation management team to see if an idea was worth pursuing.

Once deemed worthwhile, the idea was assigned to one of the team member to do a business case. It often involved touching base with the submitter to clarify the idea and its vision.

The business case would then be presented back to the whole team, using a business case template. The team would review the business case against the company's risk appetite and threshold. If the idea made it through the second gate, funds and ressources were allocated to develop and implement the idea.