Innovation, or is it actually Product development?

When I was working as the CTO for Betsson Group 2013-2018, there was one well known truth:

”If you get promoted to Head of Innovation, you better start looking for a new job!”

And it turned out that the few attempts of having an "innovation team" never really worked out, not during my years at least.

This raised my interest in the concept of innovation - what is innovation in a product driven, agile, modern tech company or a company where technology is fundamental to run the business?

Simplified, in companies like this, the product department is responsible for the ”what”. What to build, in what order, based hopefully on proper research and a good understanding of what is needed for the company, short term and long term.

• Is there room for a standalone innovation team, some dedicated tech resources working together with some kind of innovative brains?
• Is innovation something that should be part of the Product organisation?
• Or is innovation something completely different?

A few questions arise immediately:

How do you create a development roadmap (in lack of better word, but you get the picture!) owned by Product, when you have a parallell track of ideas and initiatives coming from an innovation team?

Do these tracks work together, do they cancel each other out, what are the dependencies etc?

I think that modern, agile product development is perfectly set up for innovation - any idea can be assessed, implemented, tested and if successful, be brought to customers, and then evolve over time, as long as the continued work is prioritised.

If it is not prioritised, it should be because there is something else that is thought to return better value to the company. We can’t just invest in innovation for the sake of innovation if it doesn’t return any value.

I see this related to the concept of MVP (minimal viable product). Developing an MVP but not building upon it is NOT a failure - that’s the whole idea. If the next step after the initial MVP is not prioritised because of other initiatives, then there is simply no, or at least less, value currently to this specific MVP path of work.

Would it have been better to continue to build upon the MVP when the business is better off with other pieces of development? Usually the answer is no. Committing to everything day one is waterfall and not modern, agile development.

Calling initiatives "innovations" should not change this way of working.

One more angle…

Separating innovation from product development, would that mean that product development isn’t innovative?

And there is one more very important aspect of innovation - you NEVER know when or where it will happen!

Great new ideas, call it innovations, can come from anyone at any time.

Giving a certain team the responsibility for innovation - how will that limit the ability for other colleagues to contribute with great ideas? They are ”not part of the innovation team”…

My view is that innovation must be part of the company culture - everyone should be able to bring great ideas to their colleagues, manager or even CEO.

These ideas can then be brought to the product department which must have low enough ego not to fall into the ”not invented here” disease. Assess the idea, prioritise and deliver, and why not let the colleague who came up with this idea spend some time working with other skilled colleagues to bring the idea to life.

In the end - let’s align everything in the product team and then let the development team build and release it. I think that the product organisation should be responsible for ensuring that the company works on the right things, whatever we call them, whoever came up with the idea.

Innovation is a little bit like art or music - you can not tell in advance who will paint the most beautiful painting or compose the most fantastic symphony - but you can create within your company an environment that will pick up great ideas and then drive value from them.

Betsson Group Jörg Malang Petra Zackrisson Jesper Svensson Fran Grant