Institute For The Future

Innovating the Process of Innovation

 

 

 

 

 

This is the second in a series of monthly articles presenting the Institute for the Future's forecast on the future of lightweight innovation. In the first post, we explored the how lightweight models for building the web are changing the way companies innovate. This month, we look at some of the key strategic challenges this shift poses for existing institutions.

 

 

 

 

Lightweight innovation systems won’t emerge in a vacuum. Existing “heavy” R&D efforts won’t entirely go away, but will be transformed through their relationship with new lightweight R&D campaigns. While lightweight innovation is working for the web, porting it to other sectors will require rethinking and tweaking some of its underlying assumptions. In industries as diverse as pharmaceuticals and automobiles, scale matters in bringing new ideas to market. And scaling is just as sticky a problem on the Web as anywhere, perhaps even more so because success often comes in the blink of an eye and without warning. For instance, during 2009 Twitter.com experienced multiple extended service outages as it struggled to provision sufficient server capacity to deal with a barrage of applications that utilized its open Application Program Interface (API). Yet in an indication of the kinds of synergy possible when lightweight and heavy innovation converge, Twitter quickly turned to the enormous infrastructure and talent resources at Google for assistance in scaling and managing capacity.

 

 

 

 

However, lightweight innovation does propose a central strategic challenge to large organizations over the next decade. How can they leverage the agility and austerity of lightweight innovation models, while simultaneously re-tooling traditional R&D organizations to create the supporting platforms needed for lightweight ecosystems to flourish?  

 

 

 

 

While large collections of lightweight efforts can add up to significant breakthroughs, there are important pieces of innovation systems that are growing in scale. Biomedical innovation often entails massive clinical trials involving thousands of patients, a hurdle that isn’t likely to disappear in the foreseeable future. Advanced scientific instruments are growing in scale and complexity, and the massive volumes of data they generate often require entirely new infrastructures for distributed analysis.  Many future R&D problems are so large and complex they can’t be solved inside an organization, and lend themselves to collective efforts that may be best undertaken through consortia or universities. The challenge will be to find ways to pair these very large-scale, long-term collaborative platform-building projects with lightweight innovation programs operating on a completely different pace and scale.

 

 

 

 

Another important challenge for R&D managers revolves around the scalability of lightweight innovation, itself. While it will increasingly be possible to develop new innovations on a smaller and smaller scale, transaction costs will still exist around the management of large collections of lightweight research efforts. The question is whether the economies of scale of large R&D organizations are well-suited to manage these costs profitably, or whether some other organizational structure will emerge to drive these transaction costs down and disrupt the large-organization advantage. 

 

 

 

 

In the coming months, we will explore guidelines for thinking about these challenges and insights on how to develop and engage new lightweight capabilities while simultaneously re-inventing the research organization. While “heavy” innovation platforms will not go away overnight, their position in the infrastructure of innovation will shift markedly. This blog is a guide to anticipating and managing that shift.