Andrew, I like your post. Strategy and Innovation are the most missunderstanding words I know of.

One of your statements I would stretch a little further. Because I think it isn’t just about innovation is informing strategy or matching innovations to strategy. It’s more about giving tasks to your innovation management team that will fit your strategic needs.

For example: If your strategy says you want to offer the worlds most comfortable building tools for professionals. Then you should give a bunch of tasks to your innovation management team. Like something of the following:
* What can we do to make working with our tools most comfortable?
* What are the most inconvenient task with building tools for a construction crew? How can we make it more comfortbale?
* What new and more comfortable building tools could we invent (or buy)?

Now your employees have a chance to understand where the company wants to go to. If they hear what the problems of the customers are then they can come up with some good ideas. Maybe that would have triggered the idea not only to sell building tools but to rent them – like Hilti. Hilti does rent building tools. The customers of Hilti don’t need to maintain their tools – more time for the core competences.

I can rarely observe such strategic behaviour in innovation management processes. The things that matter most for the innovation management is to earn a lot of money with the outcome (the higher the promised profit the better nonetheless all of the other relevant criterias!). Many good and high potential ideas where killed by that behaviour.

10-3-1, Google’s 20% and labs require lots and lots of time, something most organizations will not invest in.

While Apple and Google allow people to discover *unknown* solutions to known and unknown problems, most organizations only focus on *known* solutions to known or unknown problems.

Lots of start-up culture treats strategy as something that will emerge as the business or product develops.

The initial strategy is to develop the product or customer base and then discover your business model. The emergent business model allows a new strategy to emerge. Twitter and YouTube are good examples: scale till heaven weeps, then monetize.

Andrew, do you find that the providers of strategy and innovation tend to fall within certain roles within an organization? From the context of your first point, it could be argued that strategy largely comes from managers/stakeholders and innovation comes from the grass roots. I know that’s not what you specifically meant (and I’m not saying that’s the case), but in practice does it tend to work out that way?

We were broken into teams with topics and were tasked to come up with product-based solutions, even though, for the most part, all of us had only worked on the UI aspects of the products.

It was interesting, but often it was, well, a chore.

To be frank, probably 10% of the people involved should have been involved and I wonder if part of the strategy of “Innovation Fridays” should have been to sort of lift that 10% out and let them continue in a different setting–and possibly in a full time capacity.

It was, however, a step toward trying to find the innovation. Unfortunately, it was not at all fluid–it was a straight path with an end.

Kind of boring, for innovation, eh?

That all said, “innovation strategy” shouldn’t be carved in stone. It should be as malleable as it can be and should be ready to change.

I keep thinking about how something like “5 Minute Madness” could be very innovative in the right setting, so long as people don’t feel like they’re putting forth something that makes them look bad–and isn’t that a part of it? No one wants to be the person with the failed idea (for the record, I’d be happy with the failed idea), in general.