Facilitating innovation in the workplace: Microsoft ideas at Project Momentum

This session led by Simon Floyd, Industry Strategy Management at Microsoft was well appreciated. Simon started with a definition to get us thinking: “Innovation is the conversion of ideas into new or improved products, processes or services to gain a competitive advantage.”

And he provoked further thinking when explaining that we need to distinguish between New and Existing Business innovation as these two types of conversion of ideas into solutions hold different characteristics and may require different skills and processes. However, the key in innovation is the ability of the organization bridge the “innovation gap”, the difference between being committed to innovation and having the ability to execute innovation. And the reason for this gap is that innovation requires adopting a holistic approach.

By the way, commitment to innovation must be reflected in the rewards and recognition programmes of the company, even when “limited” to public recognition of your idea by a senior event at an enterprise event.

Simon’s experience is that “the best innovators are good at the right things and not at everything”. This is a key message. It implies that they are selective in their area of innovation. Therefore, being a successful innovator implies developing strengths in identifying the best ideas over a period of time, i.e. conducting some form of prioritization and filtering of ideas as they mature. And this sounds very much like the first phases of demand management and portfolio prioritization, doesn’t it?

He summarized the innovation process in the Enterprise to the “4Es”: