Innovation is the process of systematically derisking ideas.

Like any other process, innovation itself can be made more efficient. Hardly anyone understands this basic principle, with misunderstanding of “innovation” leading to chronic failures of flashy, one-off “innovation” initiatives.

The start of the innovation process is gathering and generating lots of ideas. And this is the source of the tired tropes of creative, ego-driven wastefulness. People imagine “innovation” to be only the fluffy/buzzy aspects of the innovation process, with fun brainstorming sessions (with lots of post-it notes!) constituting an “innovation” process in their minds.

Professionals who have never been in any of the creative domains such as design, architecture or product development have little understanding of how much effort and time it takes to go from a raw idea to revenue.

Think of the beginning of an innovation process much like a sales funnel, but a funnel for ideas (product ideas, design ideas, marketing ideas, channel innovation, etc.). I doubt anyone would say it is wasteful to have a fully stocked funnel of sales opportunities at various probability levels, despite how many of those sales opportunities will not come to fruition. So neither should it be thought of as wasteful for an innovation process to have a fully stocked innovation funnel. For sure, it is critically important to invest in the fuzzy front end of innovation.

But a full and complete innovation process is about expanding upon, threshing and prioritizing that broad funnel of ideas, until a ruthless focus can be achieved. That’s the hard part of innovation that most managers want to ignore.

A healthy innovation process ruthlessly kills many merely good ideas to find and focus on only the truly great. That is what I mean by derisking: Finding the ideas with the best profit/risk ratios.

Sadly, very few leaders have any end-to-end understanding of the overall innovation process: It is not running ahead with random ideas that are flashy, or the idea that the customer demanded, or whatever your founder/CEO/hippo is suddenly obsessed with today.

Innovation is a process like any other, one that can be treated as a durable process spanning across an organization that can measured, improved and invested in. The core principles of innovation management can be instilled in the leadership and management throughout, much like lean or six sigma.

But that’s just smells like work, and is not nearly as much fun as having some “strategic innovation offsite” now is it?

ALSO make sure to check out my “What’s the value of innovation management?“