"Don't tell me what your priorities are!  Show me where you spend your money and I'll tell you what they are." - James W. Frick

Innovation management can be overwhelming.  I'll concede that point.  But its only overwhelming when you approach it as an all or nothing initiative.  Like any management discipline, you likely didn't start with an efficient, mature set of operational processes.  No...you likely learned via trial and error what worked and what didn't work, what provided value and what didn't, what made the customer experience better and what didn't.  Innovation management is no different.

Sure...there's a non-exhaustive laundry list of things that make an innovation/idea management system successful:

• Solid leadership engagement and support
• Idea-seeking, innovation-rewarding culture backed up through action, not lip service
• Tolerance (and in some cases celebration) of risk taking, fast failure and learning via experimentation
• Establishment (and protection) of human resources, financial resources and protected time dedicated to ideas, innovation and other growth models
• Linkages between innovation and other business processes
• Training on innovation, idea generation, personal creativity and mind-expanding diversions

But the point of this blog entry is that you shouldn't feel as though you need to create each success factor at the exact same time, or with the exact same vigor.  On the contrary, some of the success factors (or innovation maturity attributes) will need to take place in a waterfall-like pattern with dependencies on other factors.  You are also going to need to expend different levels of energy via marketing, salesmanship and political maneuvering depending on what you are seeking to get accomplished, and from who.

Let's face it...in today's economically challenged climate, we are not going to be able to do it all at once anyway.  But the key is to start something.  Or improve something that already exists.  Or replace something that isn't working quite as well as it once did.  Or create something completely new and different.  Just DO SOMETHING!  TODAY!

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