Innovation and transformation.
Moving new technology from interesting to installed, with the governance to choose what to back and the discipline to stop what is not working.
The problem this solves.
Innovation is one of the few areas where a business can spend a great deal of money and still not know whether it got anything for it. It is almost never a shortage of technology. Vendors are plentiful, universities are willing, and every operation has a list of trials that showed promise.
What goes wrong sits between the trial and the plant. A pilot succeeds on one shift under favourable conditions and is never scaled. An ideas platform is purchased, fills with submissions, and becomes a graveyard because nobody defined who reviews them or on what basis. A technology roadmap is presented to the board and then overtaken by the operational calendar. Meanwhile the organisation learns that raising an idea leads nowhere, and stops.
So the work here is building the mechanism that decides, funds, progresses and kills technology work, then running it long enough that people start to trust it.
Portfolio, not projects.
Individual innovation projects are a poor unit of management because most of them should fail. Manage them as a portfolio with stage gates and a known attrition rate at each gate, and failure becomes information instead of embarrassment. That shift changes the politics of the work more than any tool does.
A workable portfolio needs three things. Clear entry criteria, so ideas get assessed instead of championed. Defined gates with evidence requirements, so progression is a decision and not momentum. And a stopping rule you will actually use, because a project that absorbs budget for three years does more damage than one that fails in three months.
I ran a portfolio of roughly four hundred improvement and innovation ideas a year. The lesson was that review discipline matters far more than sourcing. Nobody has ever run short of ideas.
Open innovation and external sourcing.
Some problems are better solved outside the organisation than inside it. I have designed and run open innovation programmes for several of Australia’s largest miners and energy companies: crowdsourced technical challenges, hackathons, data science competitions using machine learning for process optimisation, and structured partnerships with early stage technology companies.
More than thirty complex operational problems were solved this way. The mechanism works, but two things have to be true. The problem has to be defined tightly enough that someone who has never seen your plant can solve it. And there has to be a named person inside the business ready to receive the answer. It is nearly always the second one that is missing.
What the work delivers.
- Innovation portfolio and governance model. Entry criteria, stage gates, evidence requirements, funding and stopping rules.
- Technology roadmap. Sequenced against operational readiness and capital plans, in a form that survives a board discussion.
- Idea pipeline design. How ideas are raised, reviewed, prioritised and closed out, including platform selection where a system is warranted.
- Open innovation programmes. Problem definition, external sourcing, and the internal landing path for whatever comes back.
- Partnership structures. Working arrangements with start-ups, vendors and research bodies at varying levels of maturity.
- Executive and board reporting. Portfolio reporting that shows attrition as well as progression, instead of presenting only the successes.
Is this the right fit?
Usually yes, if
- Trials succeed but rarely reach full deployment
- Technology spend is difficult to justify because outcomes are unclear
- An ideas platform or innovation programme has lost credibility internally
- You need a technology roadmap that will withstand board scrutiny
- A specific operational problem may be solvable outside the organisation
Probably not, if
- You want a single technology procured and installed, which is a project management task
- Innovation is expected to substitute for fixing known operational basics
- There is no appetite to stop projects once started
- The intent is to signal innovation externally rather than change anything
Start a conversation.
The first conversation costs nothing and usually takes half an hour. Tell me what is not working and I will tell you honestly whether it is something I can help with.