NEXT Corporate Innovation #23- Why Does Your Innovation Lab Exist?

Innovation is a discipline and a craft. Ideas are raw material, but often the biggest value potential exists in finding the right problem to solve, or combining several ideas in new ways and cocreating solution concepts with customers that can be prototyped, tested, and validated before funding for development.

The success of corporate innovation labs has been mixed and this has led to questions of whether they are a good idea. This is a hard question to answer in a vacuum. We need to reframe the question by asking leaders: Why does your innovation lab exist? What problems are you trying to solve?

In “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, Joseph Cambell described a narrative pattern for the archetypical hero’s journey. Here is Ash Maurya’s take on the journey of an Entrepreneur and the needs in different stages.