Innovation governance provides a level of guidance to advocate, steer, and sustain innovation for enhancing accountability and improving performance.
Innovation is about taking alternative ways to do things. Statistically, innovation management has a considerably low percentage of success rate. There are both learning curves and barriers on the way.
Innovation governance is neither linear nor overly rigid rules: Innovation is a management process and business competency. Innovation is about breaking down the old boxes; while governance is about framing and guiding. Thus, the governance aspect and innovation don’t immediately come together depending on the context in which innovation is used. It’s important to apply an interdisciplinary governance approach, providing a common language, setting proper standards, appropriate business and use cases, etc, encouraging cross-functional communication and collaboration, developing the best and next practice to enforce innovation governance disciplines.
Sound Governance is part of eliminating risk and doing the right thing: Innovation governance is the best part of an innovation strategy that eliminates bureaucracy and minimizes risks. There is a myriad of information, conflicting, disrupting; the management needs to be considered. It’s important to set the right dose of risk appetite, and build governance as an effective tool to facilitate innovation. Strong innovation governance helps to deal with uncertainty, predict or manage risks, and improve innovation effectiveness. Technically, integrates risk management into the enterprise’s core decision-making processes, and integrates GRC practices to improve business agility to enforce governance effectiveness.
Innovation governance should focus on the oversight of a balanced innovation portfolio with the right mix of incremental and breakthrough innovation: With good innovation governance practices, the organization can set a healthy innovation appetite and attitude, take a systematic approach to build a balanced innovation portfolio, build an effective ‘innovation system’ which is capable of supporting both widespread incremental innovations and radical innovations, dedicate sufficient human and financial resources to its innovation programs and structures, use the best innovation tools and methods. The business governance bodies such as the board can help to set a good policy for encouraging innovation and developing a culture of creativity.
With abundant information, shortened knowledge management cycle, limited resources, and fierce competitions, innovation governance provides a level of guidance to advocate, steer, and sustain innovation for enhancing accountability and improving performance.
