Institute For The Future

Lightweight Innovation: Guidelines for Reinvention (Part 1)

Lightweight innovation processes are emerging on the web, aided by new ideas about how to organize innovation and technologies that reduce the cost and complexity of incremental innovation. But which of these tools might enable a shift to lightweight models in other industries? This section highlights a few generalized tools discovered in our research that are likely to deliver specific capabilities to organizations that seek to experiment with lightweight models. We organize these tools into four broad domains: knowledge, people, money and places.

Knowledge | Invert the Incubator

Traditional incubators support start-up companies by providing office space and basic business services. For everything else, incubator tenants must go to the market for what they need to build their business – talent, web hosting, software components, etc. However, a new incubator model is emerging. Instead of providing commodity resources like office space that can be easily obtained on the market (or bootstrapped), “inverted” incubators like Betaworks in New York City focus on mentoring and sharing of mission-critical infrastructure and intellectual property across a portfolio of incubated, acquired and funded projects and companies. 

What does it mean? Inverted incubators seek to accelerate innovation by constantly developing a common platform of intellectual property that builds value on top of open data, knowledge commons and other shared resources. This shortens the time needed to develop new products and services that leverage this pool of incremental innovations. 

How to get started: Create a fund for developing small ideas around big data sets or other commons. Target projects at the sub-$100,000 level, require 1 or 2 people to develop over a maximum of 3-4 months. Provide basic infrastructure common to all, but leave the entrepreneurs to secure only what they need from vendors. Pursue 5-6 parallel projects that have the potential for synergistic cross-fertilization.

People | Re-Engineer Innovation Networks

Open innovation strategies have helped many R&D organizations expand the range of partners they engage in creating and developing new ideas. Lightweight innovation networks push this even further by amplifying the agility, modularity and scalability of such efforts. Crowdsourcing allows organizations to quickly convene ad hoc groups around problems, and will provide new organization structures for moving those ideas from implementation. Platforms like BrightIdea’s Switchboard and Pipeline (http://www/brightidea.com) not only provide a place for people within a firm’s innovation network to submit ideas, but tools for managers to filter and sort a potentially overwhelming stream of possibilities, and then assign them for followup and exploration to partners in production networks.

What does it mean? In their book, The Only Sustainable Edge, Hegel and Brown described the “vibrant local business ecosystem focused on incremental innovation in motorcycle design and manufacturing” in Chongqing, China. The cluster’s success derived from large networks of agile small-scale manufacturers working in close cooperation and competition. The use of social idea and innovation management platforms could replicate some of the advantages of these clusters, tapping many suppliers of incremental innovations. Idea management might allow firms to keep some aspects of R&D integration centralized, while decentralizing others.

How to get started: Deploy an idea management platform to crowdsource a couple of the most vexing and complex research problems you face. Try to break the problem up into smaller pieces and get the questions out to as big an audience as possible, especially outside the organization. As ideas emerge, aggressively filter and select candidates for micro-grants: short, small R&D efforts that engage end-users at the earliest feasible stage.