No CEO or Managing Director would deny the relevance of quality for innovation processes. Few of them, however, feel the need to get directly involved in this topic. An attitude that bears the risk of costly failure.
Innovation is an entrepreneurial bet. The enterprise, or more precisely the top management of the enterprise, puts money in the pot, betting on successful innovation. Winning this bet will deliver innovative products, paving with any luck the way to future profit and competitive advantages. Losing the bet again and again kills the business and eventually the enterprise as well. Innovation is top management responsibility.
When deciding the next step of the entrepreneurial bet, folding the hand or raising the stakes, management walks on the ice of the innovation process results and those – no matter how solid they may look – need to be supported as well. Fluctuations in data quality, changes in the diligence of measurements, variations in experiment performance annihilate this support. Supposedly solid and promising results are not supported and break with the next step, the next decision.
This is a preview of the next PERMANENTs Newsletter. Full downloadable PDF will soon be available here:
https://www.dr-henrich.com/publications/permanents/