How to Be a Pro at Innovation Project Management

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Ten Types of Innovation" by Larry Keeley, Helen Walters, Ryan Pikkel, and Brian Quinn. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Have you incorporated innovation project management at your company? What is a disciplined approach to innovation?

The authors of Ten Types of Innovation assert that many companies don’t know how to practice innovation as a formal discipline. They treat it as something almost magical that can’t be predicted, and it undermines their ability to execute innovation projects successfully. However, anyone can turn a mediocre project into an innovative masterpiece.

Continue reading to learn how to manage innovation projects that will turn heads.

Develop Your Capacity for Innovation

If you want to succeed at innovation project management, the authors say you need to get past the idea that innovation is somehow special and simply develop a capacity for it, just like you have a capacity for record-keeping, internal communications, and other business activities.

The authors recommend developing a standard set of generalized innovation strategies. For example, turning a product into a service through a combination of organizational, relational, revenue stream, distribution, and support innovations might be a standard innovation strategy. Base your standard strategies on successful innovations of the past and refine them with lessons learned from your own projects—both successes and failures.

Then you can use these strategies like a sports team uses a playbook: You practice thinking through how you would apply them until they become rote. Then, in a given situation, you can quickly run through them in your mind and pick out which ones might be most effective.

(Shortform note: In The 33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene notes that successful strategists—both in war and in business—have prepared for the unexpected by creating detailed plans for many different possible scenarios. The authors’ suggestion to create a “playbook” of generalized strategies for innovation projects is basically an application of this general strategic principle to the practice of innovation. As Greene explains, the main advantage of this strategy is that it enables you to respond quickly and thoroughly to situations since you already have detailed plans in place to deal with them. In the case of innovation, the ability to work quickly but thoroughly might help to ensure you use enough types of innovation.)

The authors observe that sometimes managing an innovation project is more a matter of managing emotions than anything else. People are naturally risk averse and afraid of the unknown. Innovation projects tend to make them nervous because they have to do new things or explore unproven options. Some of them will object to the project just because it pushes them out of their comfort zone. So if your employees raise objections, listen to their concerns empathetically, then reiterate your vision and encourage them to move forward. And make sure your company’s reward system and metrics align with your emphasis on innovation so that everyone has an incentive to practice innovation.

Managing Innovation Projects

Vijay Kumar agrees with the authors that innovation projects sometimes fail because they don’t take a sufficiently disciplined approach to project management. In fact, he argues that this is the primary reason innovation projects fail. In 101 Design Methods, he describes his solution to the problem, which consists of breaking down innovation into seven general tasks you can plan and manage. Breaking down innovation projects into these manageable tasks helps you develop your company’s capacity for innovation as the authors suggest.

Especially in conjunction with a system tracking and rewarding innovation like the authors suggest, Kumar’s approach to managing innovation projects can also help you manage emotions because transforming a potentially intimidating innovation project into a series of familiar tasks can help quell your employees’ fear of the unknown and make the project less daunting.

Kumar’s seven tasks of innovation are:

Get a clear view of the big picture. Establish the general direction and goals of the project.
Research your operating environment. Identify your unknowns and plan out how to get the information you need.
Research your stakeholders. Make sure you understand their motivations and pain points.
Distill the information you gathered in tasks 2 and 3 into broadly-applicable principles that can guide your decision-making.
Brainstorm ideas that could make up parts of the solution. Relating this to the authors’ ten types of innovation, each idea would probably be a way to implement one of the ten types.
Determine the combination of ideas from task 5 that gives you the best complete solution. This is where you would combine several types of innovation as the authors recommend.
Create a detailed plan for implementing the final solution, including things like budgets, timelines, and marketing tactics.

How to Be a Pro at Innovation Project Management