Away with innovation labs, innovation must be in the heads of all employees!

The pressure for innovation is increasing

Many larger companies now have a so-called Innovation Lab, internally or externally. In these, employees or external people deal with finding new ideas and/or implementing new ideas. In the meantime, it is no longer only large companies that have their own Inno Labs, but SMEs are also starting to set up their own innovation workshops. The approach is plausible and positive, provided you position an Innovation Lab correctly. After all, creativity and innovation should be able to develop in the minds of all employees and be encouraged.

Global competition and digitalisation are forcing companies to constantly adapt, develop new business models and quickly discover new things. Inno Labs are supposed to generate new ideas and produce the next big innovations. However, it can often be observed that they are very distant from the company and are deliberately kept outside. This is certainly advantageous for creativity and efficient work, but it can become an enormous obstacle to successful innovations. Because of the distance, the connection to the core of the company, the knowledge about existing business models and the common vision is often missing. If new ideas are generated with design thinking or other agile methods, the company itself, current business models, customers, services, the customer journey, etc. must not be ignored. Focusing mainly on new ideas in the Inno Lab would not be sustainably profitable in the medium/long term and would lead to disappointment at the latest during implementation, integration into the company and marketing.

• If there is too much focus on the Inno Lab being responsible for innovation and the other large totality is left out, this can lead to employees who are not involved in the Inno Lab becoming demotivated and valuable innovation potential being lost and unused.
• If the search is primarily for "new things" and existing products, processes, services and problems are not taken into account, this can lead to many new ideas being generated, but these do not "help", do not "fit", cannot be implemented or are too far removed from the company.

All in all, it is easy to run the risk of missing the very ideas that could be the next successful innovation. Creativity and idea generation should not be outsourced purely to an innovation lab, because this affects the entire organisation and every single employee in the company.

Innovation Labs for the implementation of ideas

In our opinion, an Innovation Lab makes sense and is used in a targeted way when it is located further back in the innovation process. As soon as ideas have been generated and evaluated and an idea can be worked out in detail - concept, design, PoC, business model, business case calculation, MVP and implementation. This requires "space", resources, an environment away from the day-to-day business and creative minds that can keep their heads free for new things. This is where the potential of an innovation lab can be used optimally and employees can work on the implementation of ideas in a focussed manner. It is more promising and sustainable to start and generate ideas directly in the company and to outsource the development and implementation to an innovation lab.