Innovation Governance

Director Intensive:

Governance of Innovation to create Shareholder Value

This Intensive is for Board Member Directors of companies engaged, or desiring to be engaged in creating shareholder value through utilizing innovation. Directors need to take the longest view in order to see beyond the forest as well as beyond the trees. CXO's are necessarily biased and may not be very objective in their evaluation of the companies they lead. It can be very difficult for them to tell what constitutes real innovation. They tend to believe what they are doing is very innovative, and it may be, but the directors have to perform the due diligence and reality testing. Directors can do this by asking hard questions and by applying their own experience of the world as they know it and as their associates and value network know it. The directors should establish the veracity of the business model in order to determine if the business plan is meaningful. If the board attempts to hold the CXO's to operate to a plan and the plan is wrong than the enterprise does not make sense. If the board can not determine this there is no one else to do it except the market and then it may be too late. The board had better be calibrated to the realities facing the executives or their advice will be meaningless and perhaps even dangerous.

The basic three activities are calibrate (and update often, the world is moving pretty quickly), then based upon this up to date understanding either develop or evolve with the execs a means to maximize the innovation yield, then every time there is a board meeting check in on the progress in the area of making innovation sustainable or generating and maintaining an innovation culture.

1 Global Innovation Value Calibration (Module 1)

Global Value Chains and Networks and the determining if this is truly an innovation which can be monetized. There is a large set of issues a director should be aware of ,to maximize his or her value and ability to contribute to the overall performance and value of the enterprise. The set of relationships of the members of a community comprise a network. To varying degrees this can be a value network or not. Within this value network lives a value chain, each link of which adds some degree of value to the overall offering. Sometimes this is an incremental value and at other times a particular link dominates the value chain as an operating system or CPU can.