Making Radical Innovation Happen

I have had the pleasure of working with Novozymes which is a world leader within bioinnovations on several projects. I really like their mix of high ambitions, great people and top management support in order to make innovation happen. 

A few years back, they captured the below feedback as they asked the organization how to deal with innovation. 
 
• Give time and room for skunk work
• Set up place to evaluate and incubate new ideas
• Make it easier to get seed funding
• Initiate more risky and experimental projects
• Set up support group for innovators
• Ideas and project need a team to go to for evaluation
• Get idea management in shape

This kind of feedback is fairly normal in most organizations being serious about innovation. As one of many responses, Novozymes developed the Radical Innovation Catalyst (RIC) program.

RIC is a vehicle to evaluate and mature new radical ideas and transition them into projects. This can be new ideas in completely new businesses, new ideas adjacent to established businesses or new technology ideas. One of the main purpose with RIC is to accelerate the decision process on whether to invest further in these projects.

The core team consists of people working full-time with innovation and they can draw upon resources from different functions within Novozymes. As I write this, the core team has interviewed and selected 46 people all eager about getting a chance to work with such early stage projects.

Now imagine that these 46 people all have full-time jobs, but that the RIC unit has been given the mandate to pull these people out of their day jobs and have them work on RIC projects – if deemed necessary. This is a very strong signal that innovation is just as important as the daily operations.

Marianne Thellersen, the head of the program, explains that they usually have 4 on-going projects and that a project normally involves 3-5 people spending 25-100% of their time on the project. A project usually runs for 3-4 months.

I asked Marianne Thellersen a couple of questions:

How do managers of the daily operations react when you pull out their people for your projects?

“Most line managers are very supportive towards RIC and the involvement of their people. Of course we sometimes compete with existing business projects, and in such cases RIC will often have to find another person for the project. It should however be added, that not only official RIC members take part in the projects, often there are 2-3 Novozymes experts loosely connected to the projects thereby ensuring the necessary expert input and experimental work required.”

How effective is the RIC program at turning ideas into real projects that get further attention and funding?

“Until now the focus of the RIC program has been Radical Innovation ideas, and as expected not very many of these have turned into real projects. On the other hand, we now know when to enter the areas of interest, since the RIC projects have mapped the requirements within market, technology, organization and resources, which have to be fulfilled for Novozymes to initiate a project.”

Can you share any key learnings on the program?

“In an entrepreneurial company culture like Novozymes’ it has been relatively easy to recruit members for the RIC society, and it has been a great way to engage the whole global organization in working with new ideas. We have however also learned that it may be necessary to get truly allocated resources in order to get things more efficiently through. And in addition we may have to focus more on Adjacent Innovation instead of Radical Innovation in the coming years in order to get more ideas turned into pipeline projects.”
 
Radical innovation is hard work. This is just one approach. It would be great to hear about other approaches….