Enterprise innovation is a management problem

Enterprise innovation is a management problem wearing a hoodie. The hoodie is optional. The management is not.

Most large organisations do not fail at ideas. They fail at stopping. Nobody is allowed to kill a project that has a sponsor with a title. So the portfolio fills with zombies. Enterprise innovation management is the practice of running bets with owners, timeboxes and an actual no.

I do not care what you call the team. Lab, garage, digital hub, foundry. If they cannot get a customer or a licence to stop work, they are a tour for graduates. Theatre is cheaper than a decision. That is why it survives.

How to run the portfolio

A decent portfolio has fewer than you think. Five bets with kill dates beat fifty with status. Each bet names the assumption, the test, the owner and what you will stop if you are wrong. That last part is the one people skip. Skipping it is how you get a lab that is always "in discovery."

Regulated businesses can do this. They prototype the constraint. Compliance in the room from day one. Lean startup inside a regulated business is not a metaphor. AGL ran experiments inside a listed energy company. The method did not care that the parent had a board. The board cared that the test was honest.

Hackathons are not a portfolio. They are a weekend. If you want ideas, go talk to the people who do the work. If you want a decision, run a sprint with someone who can say no.

Metrics: decisions shipped, processes retired, hours returned. Ideas generated is how innovation theatre keeps the lights on. Sticky notes used is a joke that became a KPI. Politeness will not make it a serious measure.

Labs, partners and the parent company

The lab stalls when the parent never gave it a customer. You cannot innovate in a vacuum and then "hand over" to the business. The business will treat your demo like a student project, because that is what it was.

Corporate-startup partnerships fail the same way when they are a press release. They work when there is a problem owner inside the enterprise and a build that can die. Collective Campus still trains the methods and still works the partnership motion when that is the actual bet. Use them if the constraint matches. Do not use them as décor.

Corporate innovation is the story and the DON'Ts. This page is the operating system. Agile is the cadence once a bet is allowed to live in a value stream. Digital transformation is the programme that should be making room for the bets instead of smothering them with status.

Geos stay specific. We cover companies in AU, NZ, HK, SG, the US, the UK and Canada. Enterprise innovation in a Singapore bank is not a Silicon Valley essay with the names filed off.

What we publish here

The DON'Ts. The hackathon post-mortem. Lean startup in a regulated business. AGL. Inkeros. The field guide. Steal the pattern. Do not steal the vocabulary.

If your lab cannot name the last thing it killed, you do not have an innovation function. You have a communications function with whiteboards.

A practical operating cadence: monthly portfolio review, 30 minutes, three columns (test, scale, stop). No extra slides. If a bet cannot fit in the three columns it is not a bet. It is a project pretending to be innovative so it can skip the ordinary governance. Ordinary governance is not the enemy. Hidden projects are.

I would put a finance partner in that review. Not to say no to everything. To make the kill cheaper. The moment a zombie is named, the sunk-cost story starts. Finance can end the story in a sentence if they were in the room from the start. Leave them out and you will get a heroic narrative about perseverance. Perseverance is for the bets that still have a test. It is not for the ones you already know are dead.