Pollen8

The state of innovation today

Barriers to entry across most industries are lower than ever. The pace of change is disorienting, and predictions about how a new entrant is just about to disrupt your business are becoming commonplace. At the same time, traditional approaches to innovation such as skunkworks projects, specialist agencies or ideas boxes are struggling to help you respond.

The people in large organisations provide the best and fastest route to developing the next set of profitable new ventures. But they won’t just give you the answers on a plate. Not unless:
- There is an engaging, fair and structured process to help them, and you, to articulate, evaluate and prioritise potential ventures.
- Everyone involved feels that they have skin in the game and internalises the process so innovation becomes second nature.

Our process in a nutshell

DISCOVER

• Identify the right problem and opportunity area
• Design programmes with a comms plan that gets your team excited about tackling it
• Train in house innovation champions with our tool kits to help your team identify and articulate their ideas

REFINE

• Apply technology to collect ideas in a consistent, structured and repeatable way
• Review the portfolio and select the most promising options from a prioritised backlog
• Select innovators to validate ideas before pitching for further investment from the business

SCALE

• Support ventures with advice around how best to resource, grow and maintain it while tracking progress
• Manage your portfolio of ventures to avoid duplication of effort and to keep tabs on your investments as a whole

REPEAT

• Learn from data to see what programmes and ideas are bringing the desired return on investment
• Make innovation systemic by enabling more teams, managers or departments to set up other innovation initiatives