How to use AI to increase your innovation budget

In business it is easy to fall into the trap of spending all of your time in “business as usual” mode. There are always things that are going to pull us in that direction. The problem with this approach is we are farming the land, but not planting any new seeds. Then in future the complaints will start that “the market is saturated” etc because lots of companies have all focused their efforts on the same patch and not innovated in any other areas.

One of the advantages of AI is it can help us free up some of our time by removing some of the more manual tasks. The trap here is that “business as usual” is a never ending list of todos. If we are not careful the time we get back from AI will simply be filled with more BAU and we will continue to fight for the same patch of land, only now we are fighting at a much faster pace.

Another trap is the “120% time”. Google offered its staff 20% of working hours to work on side projects, which sounds great on paper but lead to staff working 100% on their regular work, then an expectation of an extra 20% on side projects.

Setting an innovation budget

As with all new processes change is difficult. Start by setting a small amount of time 5% for example, and ask the team to use AI to try to free up that much time - but not to fill it with anything else. There needs to be a clear division between BAU time and innovation time.

What gets measured gets done. Setting performance metrics for teams is tricky to get right as you can very easily inadvertently cause teams to behave in ways you did not intend. The purpose of the innovation budget is to find tomorrow’s winning product so you can move away from competing head to head with your competitors over the same trodden path. If you set targets of the team they need to be vague enough not to cause the innovation ideas to be too narrow - but specific enough to cause action in the right direction. For example, this could be a multi-step process:

Team target: user research
Team target: 40 ideas (no matter how crazy) to be generated
Team target: select the one that has the highest change of success with the resources we have to contribute
etc

Summary

If you do not have an innovation budget you are going in direct competition over the same patch of land with no competitive advantage. Use AI to free up the teams time, and then search for innovations to create that competitive advantage.