Innovation Governance to Remain Competitive | Sopheon

Important aspects of an innovation governance framework

The most successful companies view innovation as a repeatable series of actions with specific guidelines for every step of the product development process. Innovation governance creates the management structure necessary to enable lean and agile innovation through clear sets of rules, mandates, and responsibilities. A successful Innovation Governance Framework should include:

Ensuring efficiency and quality in innovation programs

One of the goals of a good Innovation Framework is to avoid and manage Delays. Delays can happen somewhere in the network of teams working on specific aspects of a system or a product. So it is very important that teams are aware of the network commitments and how their components have an impact on other components and the entire system. To get to this maturity the Governance Framework sets rules for transparency and proactive alerting of the network in case of a failure or an upcoming delay. Let’s assume that a team is not working under a solid innovation governance framework to put this statement into perspective. They miss a small but critical detail, and the product moves on to the next stage of development and then the next without anyone realizing it. When the mistake is identified, the entire process comes to an immediate halt. Now, teams have to fix the problem and re-do all of the processes before the oversight. As a result, deadlines will now have to be readjusted, which can delay the launch. And this is not even the worst-case scenario.

Now, let’s adjust this scenario and assume that this missed detail is not recognized until after the launch. Now you have a product on the market that falls well short of the company’s strict quality standards. And if this issue poses a safety hazard, companies could face costly recalls, litigation, and reputational damage.

With the proper innovation governance processes in place, such an impact would have been avoided, along with the negative repercussions.

An innovation governance framework is like a playbook and is conditional on being flexible, agile, lean and quickly responding to new trends and competitive threats. Without this structure, a large company cannot have direction and short lines between strategy and execution.

If you’re interested in learning more about the importance of governance in innovation, listen to this episode of Innovation+Talks and read Stories About Innovation Governance by Huub Rutten, Sopheon co-founder and Vice President of Product Research and Design.