Innovation Project - A Case Study

Let us look at how an innovation project happens today with an example case study.

Imagine for the sake of the case study that you are the Head of R&D in your firm.

10 a.m, Monday morning

Your boss calls you for an urgent meeting. He talks about an important and high profile R&D innovation project which needs to be completed on a war footing by your company. This project is very important to the future strategic plans of the company and so it is very important that this project is done well. With this introduction, your boss hands this project over to you. He gives you 1 month’s time to complete it and is happy to commit all the resources that you need to complete it successfully.

11 a.m Monday morning

After the whirlwind events of the morning, you settle down and start reading the high level project brief to understand the details of the project and mentally start putting together the resources that you need to complete it. You classify the project needs in different categories:

• Areas that you have worked on.
• Areas that are new and so need to be researched to get more information
• Areas that you think somebody in the company should have worked on but you are not sure. So may need more digging.

And so on................

12 noon Monday

Having completed reading through the high level project brief, you decide to call for an urgent meeting of the team members who you believe can help you with this project. You discuss your plans on how to approach this project and assign some immediate tasks for the different categories you made earlier. For the areas you have worked on, you give names of people who have worked earlier on this and try to contact them to help in this project. For the areas that are new, you ask your research associates to “google around” and collect as much information as possible. For the areas that you think somebody should have worked on but are not sure, you start digging up your contacts list who may be able to help you while also searching through the company intranet and knowledge base for more information.

1 Week Later (3 weeks from the deadline)

You call for a meeting to review the work done by your staff. Here is a list of some of the challenges identified by the team.

• Experts in certain areas are distributed all across the company in different locations/time zones making collaborative efforts a nightmare.


• Lots of information available in the internet through googling but major challenge is to classify and pick up the most useful information (especially when you are working against the clock)


• You get lots of leads while working through internal contacts but it takes time and lots of refinements before we can get to the relevant person with information.

And so on......

You continue working your way through these challenges and try to get priority levels for your project raised through your boss. Hopefully this should help getting people within the company to respond to your project needs but you do realise that things will not change overnight!!!

3 Weeks later (1 week from the deadline)

The heat is on!!! You can see that your team is scrambling around and doing their best. But you keep wondering – is this the best way to do this? Surely this model is not sustainable. You make notes to discuss with your boss after this project is completed on this issue. But for now – the short term deadline makes you try to help your team in the best possible way through their challenges.

D – Day

The project is well received and your boss is very happy with the project work and the deliverables from your team. You heave a sigh of relief and are quick to pass on all the credit to your team who have been literally slogging from Day One and have worked through and surmounted most of the challenges faced.

After the heat has settled down and things are a little better settled at work, you start thinking – How can we improve the current process to handle such critical projects? Can we approach this in a different way?

Sounds familiar???

So in summary these are the typical characteristics of a innovation project:

• Requires a wide range of experts who can be brought together to collaborate to achieve a goal at very short notice.
• Requires access to cutting edge research or areas that may not have been worked on before.
• Time critical nature of project where the difference between failure and successful launch can be very small and can dictate whether you are a market leader or follower.

Some of the challenges you could face in these scenarios:

• You need the best minds to work together and compromising on this is not even an option. So to give you a realistic chance of success, you need to ensure this.
• You need the best possible tools to collaborate and help your team focus on the task at hand. At the minimum, you should be able to collaborate across different time zones and regions.
• Since time is of the essence and experts are always in demand, some mechanism should be in place to reward and motivate the team and prioritise this project request.

What are your experiences? What are your thoughts on how this can be improved further?

Stay tuned for a different approach to solve this situation.