Four Enablers for Scale-Up of Organizational Innovation

To transition from experimentation to scale-up is a Herculean task for many organizations. Too often successful experiments end up with only local and temporary victory, failing to reach their full potential. They are stuck in the infamous stagnation chasm of the innovation process, which exists for four primary reasons: inadequate funding, talent gap, context gap, and capability gap. In correspondence to these four challenges, organizations can leverage four enablers to succeed in the endeavor to industrialize their innovative solutions.

Funding

The first enabler for fruitful scale-up is funding, which includes four key elements.

1. Time to market: Time to market is a central element of funding because any innovative solution has an expiry date — it may not be valid forever on the market and there is a window of opportunity that has to be captured in time.

2. Non-monetary benefits: Besides the typical monetary benefits such as ROI, there are equally valuable non-monetary benefits that can be reaped from innovative solutions, such as developing brand, attracting and retaining talents, setting a foothold in a new market, etc. When we have an innovative solution, we should never assess the business case only from accounting perspectives, or else many promising opportunities…