What to Document In An Innovation Factory

Your innovation team cannot email and talk its way to success. You must know what to document (it’s never meeting minutes). You must enforce collaboration on that documentation. These documents are valuable for a long time. Together, it’s fair to call them an Asset Portfolio. The Elegance methodology recommends you maintain these sixty assets.

The diagram above partitions the Asset Portfolio into three parts: project-independent, project-specific, and technology. Project professionals are highly familiar with project-specifics and technology assets - it’s more common that organizations neglect the project-independent assets. Many of these assets are described in other blog posts. Of course they are detailed in my upcoming book.

Sixty assets - a high number, but not infinite and not impossible. Building and maintaining these documents is not easy, but it is ruthlessly straightforward. Due to skillset and bandwidth, every ensemble member contributes to only a fraction of the assets. Seeing the whole portfolio, it is valuable and reassuring for every individual to know where they fit into the bigger picture.

Culture often feels elusive, intangible, and squishy. Completing documentation via the Five Verbs (Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute) combats ambiguity surrounding culture. This Asset Portfolio is “culture disguised as templates.” These assets form an Agreement Factory. With this rigorous simplicity and transparency, your success rate will be high. Instead of the commonly reported innovation failure rate of 70%, your new success rate will be 70%, and even higher. These are the tools to make success - for every stakeholder - inevitable.