Copyright 2019 Hubbard Radio Washington DC, LLC. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
Copyright 2019 Hubbard Radio Washington DC, LLC. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
Creating a place to turn ideas into innovations
Agencies are standing up centers as hubs of innovation activity. Some focus on research and development, others on acquisition. What an innovation center is and does are business decisions each organization makes about how the center best closes a mission-critical capability gap.
But what is an innovation center? What’s it do? What’s the best way to organize and run one? This is the first blog in a five-part series that answers these questions.
What is an innovation center?
Regardless of what it’s called or how it’s organized and run, an innovation center fulfills basic functions:
If you think in terms of space, an innovation center is a physical or virtual place where people work together to do these things. If you think in terms of people, an innovation center is the people who do them. One can also describe centers in terms of processes and tools, but you get the idea.
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Essentially, an innovation center is where people work together to turn ideas into innovations. The notion of a center implies an organizational operation with the requisite roles, responsibilities, authorities and resources to systematically do something different to add value for customers on a sustained basis.
What’s the best way to organize and run an innovation center?
Innovation is a business proposition unique to each agency. The best way to organize and run a center depends on the business use to which it will be put.
Many potential uses exist. The difference between innovating acquisition and innovating R&D, for example, would require different definitions of value, customers, participants, stakeholders, pipeline management and more.
Even the difference between innovating veterans’ health care and innovating rural veterans’ health care can lead to surprising differences. The broader objective might include veterans’ benefit programs, for example, while the narrower objective might not.
To further complicate matters, there are many business objective frameworks to consider. Classic business objectives are effectiveness, efficiency, quality, timeliness and productivity. Operations management objectives are quality, speed, dependability, flexibility and cost. Improving customers’ digital experience is becoming broadly recognized as a priority government business objective. Then there are shared services, data analytics, security, cloud computing. Does it end?
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Amid this complexity and confusion, keep two principles in mind:
What next?
Selecting a business objective and getting oriented to it is the first step to standing up an innovation center. The second blog in this five-part series, Getting oriented, explains those steps.
Lou Kerestesy is the founder and CEO of GovInnovators. Look for all Lou’s innovation blogs, including his complete paper on “Standing Up An Innovation Center.” There you’ll also find papers on “What Is Innovation and Creating an Innovation Strategy.” Questions? Email him.
Copyright © 2019 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
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