Guidelines for Innovation Plan for an enterprise or new initiative You have been appointed the CIO (Chief Innovation Officer) of a major enterprise. This will be your own enterprise or can be chosen from existing global firms where adequate detail of internal operations is available. You have been given the task of ramping up the firm’s innovative capacity through the development of an innovation plan. This is a difficult task because few firms understand the comprehensive theory behind innovation. Hence, innovation plans are a new thing for most companies. This exercise gives you considerable scope. For this exercise, you have two options: • Either you can do a broad innovation plan for the whole organisation; • Or you can do an innovation plan for a new project (product or process innovation). Fortunately there are many sources in the popular literature and in journals like Harvard Business Review giving you insights into what initiatives you could explore. Firstly you need to undertake a diagnostic of some description (see Mazzarol’s Innovation Diamond Diagnostic – IDD - on pages 378 to 380 and 505 to 508). You are not limited to this diagnostic if you can find an alternative. It is about benchmarking the current capacity of the company or project team to move forward. This will be built upon perceptions but will be a great guide to establishing where to start. The outcomes of this diagnostic need to be discussed at the beginning of your report and the actual diagnostic tool results need to be added as an appendix. On a firm level, aspects like getting the balance right between radical, synthetic or incremental innovation, as opposed to fine tuning routines is a key. The innovation plan (whether project or company-wide based) needs to be written up as a report to management. Identifying what you are doing that is different is the first step. You are to use theory where appropriate to support your initiatives and to justify your program, strategy and tactics. There is no prescribed layout for an innovation plan, so you have considerable discretion in choosing what to and what not to include. Innovation is about coming up with something new, so flexibility in how you go about this exercise is appropriate.