Along the lines of Michael Porter’s value chain in strategy analysis, it is possible to conceptualize an innovation value chain. Often companies get stuck in a rut by confusing innovation with ideation and not moving beyond idea generation.

Recently, researchers at INSEAD have pointed out that “The [innovation value] chain starts with idea generation, but then moves to prioritising and funding ideas, to converting those ideas to products and finally to diffusing those products and business practices across the company.”

It is interesting how this maps into the ISmarts framework.

The problem with an innovation value chain is that it can mislead us into visualizing the innovation process as linear, proceeding in sequential stages, whereas in reality, the stages spill over into each other. The innovation value chain reminds me of the waterfall model in software development. Further, such stepwise conceptions of innovation make it easy to compartmentalize the organization into hermetic silos by assigning ideation to one department, budgeting to another, and so on. In the ISmarts framework, a focus on the abilities needed for innovation rather than on processes and stages, allows us to break free of sequential mindsets and compartmentalized organizations. But by providing a organized framework, ISmarts helps to structure chaos, or as Tom Peters puts it, ISmarts helps to provide the “disciplined disorganization” necessary for innovation.