Many projects we work on involve bleeding edge innovation. The most common push-back to planning these projects is that, “Innovation can’t be managed.” The proponents of this notion believe that, “Ideas happen when they happen, and that it is impossible to program these out over time with any reasonable degree of confidence.” Therefor, it is a “waste of time” to plan.
The problem with this logic is that these projects have investors or shareholders that expect some degree of predictability about when they will see a return on their investment. Not planning is not an option in the real world. Further, we reject the view that innovation can’t be planned. We know this to be false because we have worked on many projects around the world where we did in fact program innovation and accelerated market entry of cutting edge technology. It can be done.
We have even achieved breakthrough cycle time on advanced semiconductor node development (i.e. <=20nm) where the manufacturing process was being developed while basic materials research was still being done. Simultaneously, tools (semiconductor manufacturing equipment) were being developed and a customer’s product was being designed using the new manufacturing process. A new manufacturing process, new tools, new product design, new design software (PDKs), and a new manufacturing facility was being started-up all at the same time. Even in this environment, we were able to plan (predict) and then manage the project to an accelerated pace.
Smith and Reinertsen discussed this idea in their book “Developing products in half the time.” They point out that 90% of “innovation” in projects is known and most of the time, less that 10% of the project involves real “new” innovation. The trick is to isolate this 10%, get it focused and properly resourced with the right skills, and to make sure it has a wide window of time; while you manage the remaining 90% using conventional methods. We also have observed teams becoming transfixed on the 10%, and wait for the solution; and when it comes, they end up behind schedule because they failed to get the easy part (i.e. the other 90%) done on time.
Learning Cycles
Innovation can be planning using the Learning Cycle concept. I critical component to innovation is learning from failure; the faster the failure, the faster the learning. You have heard people say, “Fail fast,” and this is the idea in rapid innovation projects. So how does one plan what they don’t know?
We can break a learning cycle down into some generic steps; plan, do, check, act (above). How do we know how long each of these steps will take if we don’t know the results of the experiments we have yet to perform?
