What seems like a very long time ago I wrote a series of posts on Innovation Drivers. There was a lot of discussion around the idea. So my colleague Gwen Ishmael and I decided to conduct a research project on the subject. We thought we would interview executives with innovation responsibilities about some of their successful as well as unsuccessful innovations, and then we could analyze these interviews and catalog a whole set of drivers for innovation.

Well, the process of qualitative research often turns the best-thought-out hypotheses on their heads! Once we had done a number of interviews, it became clear that there was something more important to talk about than the classification of drivers. We presented the results at ESOMAR's Global Innovation conference in early May, and now we have just revisited the research and written a new version of the paper, which is now called What Drives Innovation? A Heuristic Framework for Corporate Innovation. So called because that is what we created out of these varied case studies of successful and unsuccessful innovation initiatives -- a framework of six high-level questions that, when asked at the very beginning stages of an innovation effort, help guide you toward identifying the very important one or two lynchpin drivers -- the conditions that will make or break your innovation.

Here's the paper's introduction:

If you ask, “what drives successful innovation?” you are likely to get these answers:

“Desire for growth.”

“Demand for increased profitability.”

“People.”

While clearly true, these are superficial answers. There’s no clear way to link these answers to the factors that would lead to success in innovation – or the factors that lead to failure. Innovation is still regarded as somewhat uncontrollable and mysterious, though this perception is beginning to change. The idea that there are factors that, singly and in combination, drive innovation (successful innovation in particular) has just begun to be discussed. An effort to understand innovation drivers – those factors that motivate and shape innovation efforts, and in no small way determine their success or failure – seemed to us to be a promising way to discover what factors make for uccess and failure in innovation.

We interviewed a number of executives from across a wide range of industries, who either were or had been responsible for innovation efforts throughout their careers. Our goal was to find common innovation drivers that could be linked to successes and failures.

During the course of collecting nearly twenty highly diverse innovation stories, we realized these executives were telling us about something much more actionable than drivers. They told us about:

• Questions that were asked and were not asked.

• Issues that were addressed and not addressed.

• Decisions that were and were not made.

• Information that strongly impacted the innovation effort, but was discovered too late to alter the effort.

Ultimately, their stories pointed out that it was these things, rather than the initial driver behind the innovation, that led either to a successful or to a failed innovation. We refer to these critical things as “lynchpin drivers.”